Brie Nicole Inked

How am I supposed to reach for normal when I don’t even know what it looks like? Normal is such a strange little word, dressed up as safety. It’s this thing society dangles in front of you, whispering who you should be, how you should move, what you should swallow just to keep the peace. But why does society get to script what normal is? Why do the masses, numbed and scrolling, get to decide how a single, breathing, breaking person should react, feel, and exist?

I don’t know how to be vanilla. I don’t know how to soften my edges or dilute my thoughts so they go down smooth for other people. How am I supposed to blend in and plaster on a pretty smile when it feels like my ribs are on fire? When my insides are screaming and I’m still expected to say, I’m fine? I keep trying to be brave, to hold myself together with shaking hands, but even then I feel the seams splitting. I’m crumbling in slow motion while everyone keeps telling me to be grateful, be positive, be normal.

Normal is a foreign country I was never given a map to. I wear my heart not just on my sleeve, but in my throat, behind my eyes, raw and exposed. I feel everything too much, too loudly, too deeply, until it’s exhausting just to exist in my own skin. And yet, beneath the exhaustion, there’s this quiet defiance. I’m learning to be me, unapologetically. To stop apologizing for the volume of my feelings, for the way I break open instead of staying neatly closed.

I want to feel everything. Every high, every hollow, every sting. Because I know the other side. I know numb. I know the suffocating quiet where nothing hurts because nothing reaches you. I know how dangerous that silence is, how it pushes you toward self-sabotage just to hear your own pulse again, to prove you’re still alive. It’s always one extreme or the other with me. Bleeding or frozen, never the soft middle ground.

And normal? Normal is the script I keep refusing to memorize. It’s not in my bones, not in my blood, not in the cards laid out in front of me. Maybe I was never meant to be normal. Maybe I was meant to be the raw edge, the open wound, the honest mess. And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough.