I took it for granted that I was never alone — that there were spirits who orbited and shared this one fleshy body. It felt normal until I was told it wasn’t. That there should only ever be an “I” and never a “we” when talking about things the body experiences. That the only voice echoing inside the mind should be my own. (But even that voice wasn’t the same as the one that spoke words aloud with the body’s physical mouth.) It took over two decades to accept that this is my reality (our reality) and to see how important it is to remove the masks of imagined normalcy. To be human is to have varied experiences as diverse as the stars in our universe — normalcy is not monolithic.

I began wearing masks when I was seven years old — not literal masks, but the sort of masks you create to hide the truth of yourself. These masks grew in size and number as I became older. Each year new masks were added, ever increasing as I learned that more and more of myself was considered unacceptable, shameful, bizarre, and abnormal. My entire world provided me with feedback that what I am must be hidden — family, peers, teachers, doctors, therapists, and even strangers reinforced existing masks or demanded new ones. In this way I became someone trained and tailored by the world around me. My identity was lost to the external world — what remained was kept locked away deep inside the muscles and blood of the body where no one else could find it.

When you are told you are mad at the age of 13, your sense of reality becomes dislodged. You wonder what is real when the things you understood to be real are being read back to you by a doctor as signs of mental illness. If your whole life up to that point becomes distilled into a diagnosis, you become self-conscious about normalcy to a sickening degree. What is normal if the mental health professionals have informed you that you are expressly abnormal?