The Invisible Ones
Life without normal.
A young woman's family says they'll wear masks and use air purifiers so she can attend their holiday party. There's just one catch. She has to pay them to do it. Everyone loves the idea of being different. They love Wednesday Addams on the screen. They don't love her so much in person. In reality, being different means having to pay people to treat you like a human being. They're always making us pay them to treat us like human beings.
It's just not always so literal.
Some of us have our own version of normal. But that version doesn't count. We don't get to live it. We have to contend with an alien normal that's forced on us. Some of us have been doing it our entire lives.
It never feels normal to us.
Something strange happened after I finally stumbled into an autism diagnosis. After 30 years of constantly hearing about how strange and different I was, I suddenly became normal. My friends and coworkers didn't believe me. "I mean, you don't seem autistic."
That's how life works for…