Self Awareness pt. 2

Some are just kind of strange. This also sounds bad, and I still don't care. There are some people that you simply cannot figure out. These are the people who are perhaps not socially gifted, the awkward ones, the creepy ones. These guys are the ones you people-watch at the Rennasciance Fair, or make fun of on Facebook. They aren't even positively stupid, as much as they are just missing something that makes a whole. They act strangely and yet they seem to be unable to understand the ways they don't fit into society's norm. In fact, they don't even know that they DON'T fit into society's norm. For someone like me, it's impossible to imagine that. It may be delusions of grandeur or it may actually be a total lack of self-consciousness and possessing the ability to be totally at ease with yourself. Either way, I bet they have better grades than me.

It may be chemical imbalance. This one is scary for me, because this can strike at anytime. I know I'm not stupid, and though I am certainly strange, I still know how to conform to the confines of the world when it fits me. I'm safe from these things. But you're never home free. Depression, schizophrenia. These things happen to people. I have a cousin who I have been fairly close to. He was a great guy. Popular, smart, athletic. Lives in Florida, every time I'd see him I'd think he was sort of a douche but I love him, obviously. Knew himself like a book. He developed schizophrenia, though. It's been like half a year now. He will never be the same. Here was a guy who knew the world so well, knew how to play the game, knew where he stood, knew himself... All that was gone. He was posting beyond bizarre things on his Facebook. That was all I saw of it, as it happened, since I'm halfway across the country. But reading those things were enough, they made me cry a hell of a lot. First, because I didn't want this to be happening to my cousin. It's horrible. But next, because this could happen to me. Could happen to anyone. It seems like the only thing I have in the world sometimes is the ability to get lost in my own mind, think about myself, think about the world logically. I don't know what I'd be able to do if I lost that.

But that's the thing. I wouldn't do anything, because I wouldn't know. I would have no idea I had ceased to be normal, because I would lose my perspective. And that's scary as hell. Way scarier than anything else I can imagine.