One really weird thing about spending time with my family after years abroad, is realizing that everyone else thinks I'm a bit crazy for doing things that, to me, seem perfectly normal.
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Basically anything can be normalized by a human being living inside that context until it seems totally normal, ordinary.
Outside that context, not so much!
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All I did was to decide, at 20, that I'd had enough of caring what was expected of me, and would just do what seemed right to me, and then do it.
It takes a lot of conscious empathy for me to remember that this is not considered normal. I can barely imagine living differently.
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The real regret is not having the courage to do this at 15.
That's when I really realized that meeting expectations in bigger picture life decisions is just internalized social control.
But not going with the flow was a lot more challenging than simply picking up that insight.
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Well, I had good teachers...
I mean, virtually everyone receives lots of bad advice as a kid.
But I have some, uh, personal and familial idiosyncrasies that meant advice offered to me was categorically awful, and offered very insistently, pretty much all the time.