I have decided to rebrand myself. I am Unnormal. I like it. It's not a real word and having typed it out there is now a fire engine red squiggly line underneath. Thank you Spell Check. And now I have added unnormal to the dictionary. I will not think of myself as abnormal. There is too much weight of stigma in that word, as though it connotes disease and illness. It reminds me of my old friend Doreen, a very normal "dumb old bourgeois." Well that's her choice of words. One day while visiting her for a cup of tea I told her very frankly that I have always found her to be a bourgeois, though her preference was "upper middle class", always pronounced with understated pride. This was a little too close to home for Doreen, who was the same age as my father. She started crying and whined like a petulant four year old "You think I'm a dumb old bourgeois." I tried to assure her that this was part of her charm and it was nothing to be ashamed of. She was inconsolable.
She had proudly struggled to be a hip, with it and happenin' granny. She boasted, to prove that she was not a died in the beige middle class dinosaur, that she liked Monet, and that she even appreciated the art of Van Gogh. And she liked the Beatles. How hip can you get? One day she insisted to a friend and I that we would really like a guest speaker at her church given that like us he was a young man and he wore blue jeans.
Don't get me wrong. I liked her. She died in 2010 at the age of eighty-two. I only found out by accident on the internet. Five years earlier she ended our friendship. She didn't much like being called a dumb old bourgeois.
Doreen used to tell me that I was a misfit and that as far as the Anglican church was concerned I was a square peg in a round hole. I forgot to mention what an original wordsmith she was. I did not much care for her choice of words for me. Misfit was clearly over the top as far as I was concerned. The word implies pathology, as in, you do not fit, you are not like us, therefore you're sick because there isn't anything wrong with us.
But there is plenty that is wrong with the rest of you for which reason I take delight and pride in being unlike the rest of you. I am not strange or weird. I am no misfit, no square peg and I am certainly not abnormal. Perhaps unusual. But I have what is commonly called a life. I work full time at a meaningful job. I have friends. I enjoy healthy past times: painting and drawing, walking and hiking, listening to music, improving my Spanish skills, cooking and eating well and writing this blog. I also travel. I am happy, healthy and I hope I am also wise.
I also have a very prominent spiritual life or "an intense spirituality" as one wag put it some years ago. I have what I believe to be a walk with God, an invisible friend named Jesus. I believe strongly in living unselfishly and simply and generously towards others. True, I have recovered from a mental illness, post traumatic stress disorder, but anyone can get sick and I am as I said recovered.
I suppose what makes me a thorn in the bourgeois side is that in living simply I live also prophetically. I don't have a car. I don't live in a fancy house. I am poor and live in government subsidized housing. I am an artist and I love beautiful birds that I delight in painting. I sing a lot, often while walking in the forest. I talk to crows, dogs and cats, usually in Spanish.
I also have visions and feel at times a powerful bond with the dead. I sometimes have visions of dear ones who have died. Such as Doreen. For years I was troubled by the trajectory and unfortunate end of our difficult and often frustrating (to us both) friendship. Then I had two visions of her. The summer of last year, while I was taking a walk in the Quilchena Heights area of Kerrisdale, an upper income, or upper middle class, or, bourgeois part of town. I had a distinct feeling that I was not alone and then I knew that Doreen was walking with me. I didn't actually see her with my body's eyes but I knew it was her. She smiled and apologized for the trouble she had caused me in the past, said that she was happy and rest and I felt marvellously and strangely filled with joy and peace. A few months later I had another vision of Doreen while at home in my apartment. She was seated in my armchair and wearing what appeared to be a simple white shift or tunic, just down to her knees and unbelted. There was some kind of brightly coloured embroidery near the hem. She was barefoot and wearing what looked like an iron crown on her head. She looked younger, perhaps fifty. Then I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that we were reconciled, that she was well and that for me too, when I die, I will see that in the famous words of Medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich that "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."
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