To be normal in an abnormal society?

By Nicoleta Gradinaru. Nicoleta, 30, is a manager for Sharps UK and an international freelancer sports journalist. Please read her article and leave your comments and thoughts below.

“Nobody realises that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal”. Camus

 We don’t need any definition for ‘normal’, but we are ruled by the structure of this label in society. Every single soul is so different; we have different characters, but we are moved around like on a chessboard.  Life is like the road of society, that put us in a race to be what is “required”. A society created over time with pillars of moral, culture, education and principles… Rules. We all need to “obey”. Even if we are democratic, if we have rights, if we think we are free to choose what we want: really we are prisoners of the ideas of normal life. We all obey the system and our soul is our body prisoner.

To be normal? What does that means?  It means to stay straight, to keep the rules and to try to go up and up on the steps of the pyramid of life. Like Dante’s Inferno, like God’s rules, we are creations that need to do this and that. Childhood, school, homework to be done, to be somebody in future, to go to university to modulate your profession and your career, your job, a step to be integrated, work, to have a family. So we go round and round in a circle called life, commercial life pre-fabricated by the society. Some people are different and they don’t like to obey to these robotic rules. We have special periods to go to school, university, job, family. You need before 35 to have a family, babies, and if you break the rules you are ‘different’. People are talking …

Being different, is so, so easy for me… to talk about. When I was young, a girl/a becoming lady with a high-level society background, I had such a different passion. Crazy or not, I love sports and I really love football matches. So, yes, I was at my first football game in a VIP lounge with my dad, but my heart, my eyes were on the fans’ zone. And from then I started to ask my neighbours, the boys, if I can come with them. So, so, down level passion in the eyes of my father, of my grandparents, of my teachers. They fought with that, and with the questions: “Why do you like football, you are a girl, it is a man’s passion?!”

So I had to work up, explain, and then block all the mean words, because you cannot explain your passions. Why should you?! So I started from homes games to go away, and I loved it so much and started to go away international. Nobody could stop my true passion. When football changed into a money sport, and when the owner of my favourite team, Steaua, began to show us that our team is a fake one (I don’t want to go there with my story)… I decided to stop going to games. I couldn’t, really it is like if you want to divorce but you have kids – this is how I felt.

I started to be a freelancer, to write small shows to explain what really happens in football, then the derbies of Europe. Now I’m 30 and I steel go to derbies, to UCL games and other sports too. I think I will do this all my life. I know for a lady it is very different, and in the past, I was fighting to take out the label: “oooo she is alcoholic, she like drugs…” All of this just because I was going to football games like an ultra fan?!

Society have labels for everything, if you are not in the normal balance, if you are 30 with no ring on your finger, no baby…That is out of society order, outrageous!! And to explain why and to try to be there is absorbing all your energy, your ideas and principle to live your life as you wish. You need to be like others and with the new instrument of social media, the power of pressure to be back to normal is increasing. Trying to fix that is eating your insides, your real wishes.

2017 lifestyle looks for me like a robotic time, when I said earlier on, you have steps, period, routine life, like eating, working, TV watching, weekend escapes and then back to routine. Who is not feeling like this?

I think Camus picked the perfect words to unveil life, maybe then and for sure now, when if you are different in the modern society, you struggle to become normal, and that is consuming your flames, your inside ideas. If you are not a fighter, society is killing you, your fire ball from your deepest inside soul…

My father teaches me to do everything from my heart, so if I don’t like something I will not do it….

Everything you do, do it from heart!!

2 comments on “To be normal in an abnormal society?

  1. George Gradinaru on

    Yes, yes, yes, dear Nicoleta! Good point! Some people waste too much time to respect rules, some people to break the rules. You pointed out a very interesting benchmark: what is from your heart its good…..
    Also you are right….: the great fight we are confronted in our lives is not with the others, it is with our selves….
    So did Camus, so did “Master Manole” from a very nice Romanian Legend…. They never solved the dilemma, but they shown us that all the time will rest two options in our lives, defined by “ D” or “T” consonant, as a brick in a soli (-) aire wall.
    For sure you will “never be as a brick in the wall!”
    Because was not created yet such a special brick, as you are as girl.
    Best regards,
    GG

    Reply
  2. Malcolm Arbuthnott on

    It is life to a tee.very good and true .but what is normal.are we normal,are are the people we think arnt closer to reality.perfect reading.brilliant.

    Reply

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