I ask my therapist if normal people feel the same way I do. She replies with the same thing she always says. There is no such thing as normal and everyone experiences things differently. I pause, holding in my slight frustrated and confused fill remarks. I reply with what I always say when people say this. “You know what I mean”, normal as in healthy, as in not depressed, as in not anxiety stricken, as in not this. What is the correct way for me to function? The healthy way for me to function? The normal way for me to function? What is it like to not be full of medically diagnosed mental illness and damaging habits? To not feel like you're constantly in a state of fear. To not feel like the weight of being alive physically hurts, enough for you to want to die. What does it feel like to not be like this, to be normal? If no one is normal then why is it the way I think is wrong? Why is it that I need to be fixed? Why is it I’m the only one who needs to be healed? Why am I wrong? Why am I here? Why am I talking to a therapist about trying not to hide in bathrooms and hyperventilating if there is no such thing as normal? Not to say I don’t want to change but how can I when I have nothing to strive for. How can I know the right path to follow if there is no path? I see my goal but no way to get there, and when asked all I’m told is that no one knows the way. I’m told that every person somehow struggled to get to this magical place I want to get to, yet no one can tell me exactly how they got there. What it's like there. If it even exists. Why is that? Why is it that I must struggle to find my way to a happiness that no one can define. That not two people share. That doesn’t exist. How come I’m always told that there is no such thing as a happy life? As being normal? With no norm, I am just one in a million who are on an endless rollercoaster of trying to be happy. Of trying to find meaning. Of trying to survive. I don’t tell those who give me this reply that those words only make me feel more lost. More pained. More confused. I don’t tell them that by saying my grasp on reality is a fantasy that they're taking away the only grasp of reality I have. I don’t tell them that this unrealistic dream of becoming normal is the only thing keeping me here, keeping me sane. Having an unrealistic goal is better than having no goal, is better than having no hope, is better than having nothing. I don’t tell those who give me this reply that by saying this, they are leaving me with nothing. No goal, no path, no idea of how I’m going to get through this. I don’t tell them this. Instead, I pause, take a deep breath, and try to explain in the simplest way why it is I need to believe that there is a normal out there. I try to explain that without there being a normal, I have nothing else to wait for, nothing else to keep me holding on. No more “it will get better” or “just hold on a little longer”. I try to explain that my only hope of getting through this, of holding on is by trying to be normal.