What is normal?

Merriam Webster defines normal  as conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern, also, free from mental illness : mentally sound, among a long list of other definitions.
By definition then, normal can be anything and everything a person or a group of people, or an institution or group of institutions determine to be.
If you adhere to those groups' accepted norms, you are then "normal", but if you do not fit their accepted patterns of behavior, beliefs or conduct, you are not "normal", which gives rise to the word misfit.  This places enormous pressure on people to fit in somewhere so they can be accepted as normal.
As a child, unable to rationalize it as above stated, I suffered terribly for being white, of Jewish descent, a part of a broken family,  in a Country where the majority was light brown skinned, catholic, and followed Father Knows Best family rules. All I knew was that I did not fit in. Anywhere.
When I emigrated to the U.S., I looked around and saw that, physically, everybody looked like me, but that was only on the surface. Now I didn't fit in because I spoke broken English, was a woman in a male corporate world, and was called weird by many men I dated because I just didn't fit into their expectations of an American woman.
In 1983, I took a Tarot reading class at the local College and started practicing doing readings for a friend. I did not know much about her life, but the cards were revealing things about her that I had no idea they could. Well, now I became different from everybody else because i could read the Tarot and know things nobody else could. I could also see the spirits of the Native American people that inhabited the land before the concrete and asphalt cities sprouted and forced them out. My friend thought this was cool, but everybody else didn't.
In 1986, I joined the Healing Light Center to "learn" (more like to learn the labels of everything I did naturally) about metaphysics, healing energy, clairvoyance , mediumship, etc, etc. I started reading books on different topics and came across a small paperback called The Way of the Shaman, by Michael Harner.  The book described my way of seeing, understanding and living. So I said, is that what I am called? A Shaman? Wow... I had no idea that there were names for everything I do/ know/ or that comes naturally to me.
So here I am, on one hand, discovering who I am has a label, but that this label is only accepted in remote locations on this planet.
Eventually, I found myself a little niche in the energy healing community, as it became more acceptable to people in large cities.
Until 2005, when I saw a huge triangular craft hovering above me and had a magnetic communication without words with whomever was inside. To most people, UFO's do not exist, or are part of some conspiracy theory, etc. I did not want to belong to that category, so after a day or so, I put it out of my memory. Until 2012, when the Mayan calendar craze and apocalyptic theories circulated like wild fire and everyone wanted to be a part of the galactic center alignment .
I had been a conduit for Light Transmissions since 2006 for a group of benevolent Beings and had a Meetup group going since 2009. When the 2012 hysteria started, unbeknownst to me,  the Beings doing the Transmissions stepped aside and six groups of  different star beings took over. The Transmissions intensified and people's feedback were mind boggling.
Where did I fit in then? Nobody else was doing what I was doing, so now I did not fit in anywhere.
In October 2013, a group of E.T.'s showed up in my life and for six months they transformed me into something I cannot describe. From October of 2013 on, I underwent intense transformation and rebirth. Not the E.T.'s original intention, as their intentions were self-serving, but I grew and transformed myself over and over again, every time a new group of Beings replaced the previous one.
Now my fear of not being normal was my daily focus. At 62 years old, I now feared I was not mentally sound anymore. After three years of struggle, researching mental illnesses and verifying I was not demented, I started to accept my own life as my normal.
It wasn't until a couple of years ago, when I found an online group catered to "experiencers" (another label to classify people like me as normal) and by answering 100's of questions in their survey, that I started to shed light in many of my life's unexplained episodes going as far back as the age of three.
I feel like I am on the other side of what started in 2012, I don't feel traumatized anymore, but my depth of understanding makes it possible to speak and write clearly about life, about fitting in, about being "normal" about labels that mean nothing and should mean nothing.
Life is simple if we want to live it simply.
All we have to do is step out of the normal.

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