I’ve been thinking about the statistics related to mental health as far as what we consider ‘normal’. There’s a bit of that in ‘Deviants‘ – there’s a range of what we consider normal, where we don’t consider people to have issues. It’s ambiguous and vague and makes the assumption that society is sane.
Having spent over half a century around humans, and having tried to make sense of society, I have to question that assumption. It’s all relative, yes, but relative to what?
This is not to say mental health professionals have no use. We all know they do, or should. Yet when life is crappy, we are supposed to feel a bit crappy. When life is good, we’re supposed to feel good. At least that’s the basic framework we work from.
It can all escalate quickly. A small tweak of a machine can have consequences, like the Butterfly Effect. We see it every day when something that we don’t know about is bothering someone and they react in big ways.
If they follow the path of a pendulum… if we react in that way… we oscillate, and we do that throughout our lives.
Who we connect with depends a lot on those oscillations, their frequency, and how fast we collide through others like us.
Reflection is this powerful thing where we can re-assess things that have happened and see them in a new light. Things in the moment almost always look different when we look back on them. 