I remember, when I was very young, telling people that my biggest wish was to be “normal”. I used to watch able-bodied children like my brothers doing all kinds of wonderful things which I physically couldn’t do, and feel left out. How wonderful it must be, I reasoned, to be a normal boy. The people I told this to, of course, replied that there was no such thing as normal, and that everyone is normal in their own way.

They were perfectly right of course, and I have taken the notion as a personal standard ever since. Having a physical disability does not mean I am any more or less abnormal than anyone else. The odd thing is, I have recently noticed a surge in people, especially online, referring to other people as “normal”, “neurotypicals” or “normies”, as if they saw themselves as something else. It is no longer cool to be normal, apparently. As far as I could tell, though, all of these people would have been what I would call normal: straight, able bodied and economically privileged enough to make YouTube videos. Yet they seem absolutely desperate to other themselves; to not be perceived as a member of the privileged majority. They obviously think that such a majority exists, but are desperate not to be seen as part of it.

Needless to say, this trend does not sit well with me, or at least strikes me as very strange. It may only be a turn of phrase, but it seems as if the otherness I have felt all my life is now being craved by people who, as far as I can tell, will know nothing of the social ostracisation that members of minorities face. They only claim to be abnormal because they want to be seen as abnormal, usually claiming to have neurological conditions that I doubt they really have, or have very tenuous links to having diagnosed themselves based on a set of fairly vague criteria (please see my reflections on this issue here). Thus they gleefully refer to everyone else as “normies”, jumping onto this or that social bandwagon, urgently emphasising what they think makes them distinct or different. Yet in doing so they mock and insult those of us who have actually lived on the fringes of society, feeling the sting of otherness in every kid’s jeer all our lives.