I find it amusing that the Facebook group, “I Tried Being Normal Once. Worst 5 Minutes of my Life” has nearly a million users. What’s more, it looks to be a relatively new group, with its only “recent activity” according to the wall is that it joined Facebook. And when I refreshed the page just a couple minutes later, the number of users grew by about several hundred at least.

However, as a social psychologist, one thing I’ve learned is that it’s actually probably quite normal for a person to think that they are different or in some way not normal. As a related tidbit, according to several psych classes that I took as an undergrad, teenagers (at least those in the U.S., I’m not sure if this has been replicated elsewhere) also commonly describe themselves as different from other teenagers because they believe themselves to be complicated or complex. Apparently, the notion that one’s behavior often (appropriately) changes according to one’s social settings constitutes “complexity,” lol.

In any case, it seems the actual behavior of defining oneself as different or not normal probably simply serves to classify that person as, in fact, normal. Please don’t be insulted though; “normal” is no more an insult than it is a compliment. It is merely a statistical term, after all.