The twenty-ninth president of the United States, Warren G. Harding, campaigned for the presidential election of 1920 with a promise of normalcy. Not one person in the entire country knew what he exactly meant by normalcy, but it sounded pleasant to their ears, for their ears had recently been beaten with the calamity caused by the First World War. In a campaign speech, President Harding questioned the Progressivism of the decades preceding the war: “America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration…” To Harding, normalcy meant a perfect situation; however, the question remains, what is normal? Harding believed that normal meant reactionary politics, but his predecessors believed that the ideals of Progressivism were normal. So, who was right: Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, or Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson, or perhaps none of them, or perhaps all of them?
Since I was in my second year of elementary school, I have wanted to be a writer. At the time, I did not realize what this would entail; if I had, I wonder if I still would have made this bold lifestyle choice. By becoming a fiction writer, I had taken on an archetype of oddness, nonsense, abnormality, and insanity. For millennia, writers have been perceived as the odd ones and the not normal ones, and frankly, most enjoy this perception; in fact, for many years, I enjoyed it. However, today, I am losing touch with this enjoyment. I am different, which is no surprise, because everybody is different, for everyone has their own quirks and tendencies; yet, I have always felt that I am a member of the club of people who are just a little bit weirder than the rest of the world. Perhaps this notion of me is slightly exaggerated, but even my friends will attest to the fact that I am slightly weirder than most people are. I had once accepted myself as the odd one – heck, I embraced it! Yet, I write to you now with a different tone. I am getting tired of being the odd one, or the eccentric yet introverted kid, the self-hating narcissist, the tortured writer. I am starting to want that normalcy – whatever it is – of which President Harding spoke.
I am tired, tired of the mocking, the sneers, the jeers, the laughs, and the tears that accompany being the odd one (now, not everyone mocks; some praise. I had a woman once tell me that all the girls love a poet, and she is somewhat correct, for I have had girlfriends who love my writing and love my weirdness, but I have also lost girlfriends because of it). Everybody’s different; yet, for some reason, some of us take the word different to new heights, and the world mocks us for it. When I write my poetry and my stories, I am happy, but when I am looked upon for it with a mocking eye, I am not happy. If I do not write and pretend to be this societal archetype of normality, then the mockery end, but I hate myself for giving in to society’s demands. It is quite the contradiction indeed! To write or not to write, that is the question. If I don’t write, I lose who I am, which is most important; therefore, I must take the hits, turn the other check, carry the cross, walk the walk, and talk the talk. I am who I am; I cannot change this. So, what is normal? I haven’t the slightest idea. All I know is that I am not, but some days I wish I could be whatever this normal is. Nevertheless, I soon remember that normal is probably boring, and eccentricity and nonsense and fantasy and extraordinariness is quite enjoyable, and it is who I am.
