the thing about normality

So here's how it works. Some people are just resolutely normal. Vanilla, regular, decent, straight edged: however you want to put it they move in the same direction as the rest of society.

And I'm not saying that's a bad thing.

It's just that sometimes these people, these lovely ordinary folks don't quite understand what it's like to be, well, Odd.

My flatmates are two such people. I love them to death, I really truly do, they are the closest thing I have to family here in London and my life would be an utterly worse place without them - G makes me sandwiches every single morning, worries about me when I'm out late and makes sure I eat when I'm home in the evenings. B and I share bottles of wine and cheesecake while we watch stand up comedy and catch each other up on our lives (we live together but only spend time actually together once every month or so, out lives don't cross paths for more than half an hour at the time). They are my best friends, my caretakers and my confidantes.

And yet.

They don't understand what it is to be weird.

They are both incredibly good looking people, they wear clothes that are cool but not overly fashionable. They go to work during the week, at weekends they go out with friends and they visit family. They love sports and blockbuster movies. They spend sunny Sundays at the park, they go on holidays abroad twice a year. She reads popular fiction, he goes running, they watch TV if it's on and occasionally they buy a series on DVD. She straightens her hair before a night out, he lifts weights to keep in shape.

They are normal.

They don't understand what it is to be weird. 99% of the men that B meets in her day to day life will understand her interests, they understand that she likes to go shopping occasionally and loves romantic comedies and that sometimes she goes out with the girls for an evening. The same goes for G, girls will always understand that he wants to go to the park to play football, that he wants to go to the pub to watch rugby with the boys. These things are expected.

So they don't understand what it's like for me when I find someone else who has read the collected work of Tad Williams, or Girl Genius or Runaways. Who knows what it is for the self doubt to stop only when the words are flowing onto the screen. Who gets that sometimes it doesn't matter if it's sunny outside, all you want to do is hole up and play video games for nine hours straight. That spending all day in bed with a new book isn't a waste of a Sunday. That living in a made up universe might actually be healthy. That rush of connection when I meet a new person who is just like me.

They don't understand how I can feel close to people I've never met, purely because they love the same movies as me. How I can instantly fall in love with someone because they don't think my keeping a journal is weird and overindulgent. How I can know someone I've never even spoken to because I read their blog and it touches me.

They don't understand how it makes me feel when someone tells me how much they love my tattoos. They don't understand because they just have skin like everyone else, they may have hangups and insecurities but nothing about them inspires a visceral reaction in others, nothing about them has the power to repulse on sight.

For them it's easy. You find someone attractive, you get to know them and provided you match on the big things, raising kids, religion, politics, the details all just work themselves out.

They don't understand that for me it's the other way around. The details come first. I fall in love with the words, with the ideas, with the mutual acceptance. After that part, everything else is easy.