Débora #7 – Being Normal (Updated)

People, at least one day in their existence, will ask themselves if they are really normal and what normality is, because the concept is so subjective. What is normal for me can be abnormal for another person. Besides, it’s impossible to live according to other people’s expectations.
According to dictionaries, one of the concepts is that normality is to live according to the rules, which begs the question about what the dictionary refer to as “rules.”

Surfing on the Internet, I’ve found a lot of blogs, pages where people inquired about the concept of normality. After a lot of explanations and rambling, the consensus was that the best definition for normality is to live according to the rules of the society that the person lives in at the moment.

For example, it’s chilling for me to think of a man who is married to ten women. After all, it’s allowed and normal in Arabia, but in Brazil, where I live, in spite of it not being legal, it’s weird, freaky and hard to accomplish. Managing a relationship with only one person is already difficult. Only one person can monopolize all time, asking for attention, demanding time to be with, being jealous with friends. Besides it´s costly: presents for Valentine´s day, Birthday, Anniversary, Christmas and something else that commerce can contrives.

Let me clarify something, by society i don´t mean only different places, countries and cities, it also depends on people beliefs. Veja São Paulo Magazine, two weeks ago published an article about Jewish people in São Paulo, precisely in Higienopolis neighborhood. It has portrayed how they live, their habits inside and out their homes, their relationships. Practicing “Hassidicos” Jewish Orthodox follow word by word the Commandments of “Torá” and “Talmude” at the same time – both Jewish Sacred Book which it means a lot of rules, restrictions and above it all, respect to “Shabat”, a period prayers and rest that commence on Friday sunset until the beginning of following night. In this period of time, it’s totally forbidden to generate any kind of energy that’s why they can’t not even press the button of the elevator or use any kind of vehicle, that’s why we usually can see them walking down the streets going to the Temples. Men dressing dark clothes and hat, long beard and sideburns while women must use clothes that hide neck, knees, elbows and for the married one wigs. Dates or any kind of touch are totally prohibited before marriage. Hand shaking also. They start splitting sexes since the kindergarten, boys in one school and girls in another. Inside the Temples, when they grow up is not different, men close to the altar and women in a different room. They don’t eat pork, seafood and they also don’t mix at the same meal, meat with dairy. All variety of food must be prepared with rabbi supervision. This is a complete normal behavior for “Hassidicos” Orthodox Jewish but for people like me, this is a total parallel world which I must say that I respect, but I can´t say it´s normal at least for me.

Another example of normality involves an English teacher of mine, who used to work as a life guard in his college years. He told me that one day, instead of saving a drowning child, he preferred to save a dog who had jumped into the ocean to save the kid. People on the beach that day probably wanted to kill him, labeling him as rebellious and heartless. If this behavior is normal, who am I to judge? After all my teacher is a dog’s lover. Let me say in different words, if everyone worried only about kids, who would take care of dogs? Is the life of a human being more important than the life of a dog?

Therefore, living with and according to so many rules is really irksome. In other words, it is better to be yourself as long as you don’t hurt anyone. Maybe people will look at you as a rebel, but then again, who cares?