We could agree that we all have been asking ourselves this question one day: am I normal? Is what I feel normal? Do I have a problem?
These questions usually don't get any answer, and we remain frustrated and lost.
We burry ourselves under a pile of doubts and interrogations about our feelings and emotions, about our behaviors that we would like to compare to a hypothetical norm.
Let's take an example:
Imagine you face a deep, painful emotion... and it becomes regular. stronger. and people around you don't seem to understand what's going on. they don't seem to feel the same... and it turns your pain into something almost unbearable.
This is because, during all these years, you have been building your own scale of emotions. Going from what you describe as pretty dark and negative, to glowing and positive. This scale is entirely yours. It got constructed based on your feelings and emotions during key moments of your life, in order for you to compare them with each other.
For example "I feel better than yesterday".
However, one day, you can't really say where you are at. How were you yesterday? the day before? a month ago? You look at that scale of emotions and it seems that you don't really know how to use it anymore. Whatever you feel, don't fit in.
It's been there for while, latent, sometimes it faded away, but deeply it feels as it was always there.
There is no shape to this feeling and it doesn't evolve in a way that you are used to cope with.
So you start wondering... you start questioning your own scale of emotions. For the first time, you ask: are my emotions normal? Is the scale that I built normal? Where does this feeling fit in? How does it go away? What's the beginning of it? What's the end?
Am I supposed to feel this or not?
This is when you might discover there is a word, a diagnostic for what you feel. Depression? Melancholy? Sadness? And because there is no precise, scientific way to know. You may have an internal debate about wanting to put a name on it or not. Accepting something you don't understand, or hustling out of the stigma.
Here comes the medicine. It can help. Maybe? Maybe not? How do I know if I need it?
My experience showed me that it is sometimes more difficult to question myself about the normality of my emotions rather than just going through it and observing it. So I'd like to ask.... is it important to know if we're normal or not?