normalization

Lately I just realized that I’m not so normal after all. The past years I’ve been trying to be what most people call ‘regular’. I’ve been trying to fit in the norm. I’m not indifferent to all the “we are all different” and “we are all special” crap. Indeed, I totally believe in those phrases. But there’s another thing i believe in that most people either won’t consider or flat out denies. We all want to be normal. We all want to be regular. Before we even strive to make ourselves different, to make ourselves standout, we have to know that first and foremost we are all the same. That is what I have come to accept through my 21 years, 10 months and 25 days of living.

In college I learned that one of the most efficient ways of analyzing a system of integrated processes is through about making entity-relationship diagrams (ERD). With an ERD I can see the various entities that interact with the system, and I can see the relationships of these entities with one another. But what is interesting is that after plotting out all the entities and the relationships, you have to ‘normalize’ the diagram. Remove the redundancies; make the entity as specific as possible. Through normalization you group all the data attributes together to form simple and non-redundant entities. Is that what this is?
Are we entities moving in a human system, building relationships with each other, all the while normalizing and grouping ourselves? And that isn’t even the saddest part. The saddest part is that even our relationships tend to be normalized, too.

This is what I choose to believe in. I choose to believe that we are all innately different, and we travel down life’s path trying to find our norm, our group, and eventually turn out to be the same as everyone else. But after all of that, after reaching a normalized state, after being normal, we find ourselves wanting more. More than just being normal or regular. Only then will we want to truthfully differentiate ourselves from everyone else.

Normalize. And then differentiate.