Hello and welcome to my blog “Living Outside the Normative”. This blog is a series of postings about the experience of being different, of living within our world, or our Western Canadian society, when one’s ways of thinking, perceiving, reacting, and experiencing are different than those of the masses of people existing underneath that large bump in the human population curve. It is not an easy place to be, outside of that normative bump, but it can be an interesting one. I have been permitted to a certain extent to see what happens out there, on the edges, through the blessing of my son. The official terminology for my son’s on the edge living is a diagnosis of Asperger’s from when he was 7 and which now, in North America, has been grandfathered in to a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. My son is now 18, at the time of me starting on this blog. His differences, of course, did not start with his official diagnosis, they started at his birth.
I have been considering starting a blog such as this for quite some time, with the purpose of trying to share what life really is like when one is having to live outside of the norm. There is so much to share. It can be a truly amazing world, but, it is also a bit more challenging than existing underneath that large bump in the normative curve.
There is so much, unfortunately, that our society, and the people under that bump, I think unwittingly, do that makes existence outside of that bump more difficult, and that, really, deprives not only those existing outside of that bump of true participation and a sense of value but also the rest of our community of the benefits that can come with having little bits of differences sprinkled about. I truly believe that for the most part people do not go around trying to think of ways to make life more difficult, or to disadvantage others, that this just perhaps happens somewhat accidentally, and is perpetuated through ignorance, but it still happens. Perhaps it wouldn’t so much if people realized what it’s like on the other side, how life is made more difficult when it doesn’t have to be. And perhaps if some of the different amazing perspectives, those blessings I mentioned above, were shared, then people wouldn’t fear so much the differences, would be able to come to value them instead, and then, maybe, true inclusiveness, or even better yet, celebration, of all of our members of community, would grow, and that would become the norm.
The purpose of this blog, therefore, is to share, the joys and the challenges of living outside of the normative, in the hopes that this sharing might lead, little by little, to a more tolerant, more equitable, world, where we, referring to humanity as a whole, can take advantage of the skills of all of our population, not just those who are easiest to understand by the greatest number of the population. There will be blogs which will frustrate the reader, and which may be somewhat discouraging. There will also be blogs which are incredibly uplifting. And there will be blogs which open up a whole new wonderful perspective on the world, allowing the reader to also get a glimpse of the world from a different place, a glimpse that is encouraging and uplifting, for this positive, uplifting, view of the world, presented fresh and new like what one gets from a child who is first experiencing their world, is also one of the greatest benefits from being with someone outside of the normative. So read on, enjoy, cry, comment please, for this is a conversation, a conversation about life, challenges, and possibilities, and I welcome your involvement.
