The clock strikes one, it should strike thirteen in my mind. Never mind the CCTV cameras and ‘nanny state’ that England seems to be suffering from, 1984 is in people’s minds, not on the streets. Have you ever walked down the street and just looked at someone and considered if that person is normal. Chances are that you haven’t, or if you have, then most likely you aren’t normal yourself and your looking for clues of other ‘abnormal’ people. I would fall into the latter category. Call me deep minded, call me a weirdo, call me whatever you want, but the wonderment of the normality of others has always fascinated me, and I can’t help but walk past a man in a smart suit and wonder if that clean and crease-free outfit really reflects his life, and his mental state. Compare this to the teenage boy that swears and enjoys playing truant, chances are you would think one was the symbol of normality, with a perfect mind and no issues affecting him, and the other a deviant little bastard who needs counselling to control his ‘anger’ issues. I however tend to wonder if it’s the other way round. If you walked past a girl, reasonable short and skinny with blonde hair and a distant look in her eye, chances are you just walked past me. And just because I don’t go running through the high street with a straight jacket on crying out that I’m the fucking reincarnation of Jesus, doesn’t mean I’m necessarily completely normal.

  They say a reasonable amount of people have, or will eventually have, a mental disorder. This means that quite a few of those people that you walk past everyday has something wrong with them in the most personal sense. There is however a problem with making a statement like this. But I’ll get on to that later. Right now the man in the clean suit and the aggressive boy are still at the front of my mind, I can see them as clear as day. The man is sat on a bench now, chatting away into his hands-free kit whilst going through his briefcase trying to find some document that was meant to be in for next Monday. However, like a good businessman he’s done it already despite it meaning staying up half the night. And further along there’s the boy sat on some steps to a chip shop with his hood up and a cigarette in his mouth. People walking past giving a wide distance between themselves and the boy, ‘youths of today’ they’d say under their breath. The businessman however gets a certain amount of respect paid to him and people look at him as a sign of goodness and wealth. But what if the boy was merely mimicking the attitude and culture of his times and the businessman suffered from depression or schizophrenia. These being two examples of disorders that come to my mind first. However, would this detail make you view them both differently? The boy will grow up, and eventually grow out of his currently mentality and be able to look back and laugh, but the businessman won’t.  Even if he manages to overcome it once, it does not mean it is certain that it won’t come back again. This is how I view society, and the people that reside in it.

The clock strikes one, it should strike thirteen in my mind. I get out of bed and go to my glass of water by the window. The street light outside makes razor blade cuts of light across my face as I take a sip from the glass. Silence outside. Then again it is the middle of the night so what do you expect. Only the businessmen and women, the insomniacs and I are awake at this hour. Fucking god awful hour, I know I won’t be able to get back to sleep now, I never can. The moment I wake up, no matter what the hour, I’m awake. Just like that, eyes open, mind whirs. It’s a blessing and a curse in one. The curse is that it ruins the idea of have a lie in on a Sunday morning, but it’s a blessing because I’m never truly alone and bored, my mind always keeps me entertained no matter what the situation.  I suppose you could say that I must have something on my mind to wake me up at this hour. Some issues to attend to, some problems that I’m worried about. To that I say ‘you’ve just described every fucking person in the world’.  Of course I have issues, problems that haunt me from time to time, so does everybody else. If it’s not money troubles it’s the stress of work or education, relationships or deaths, personal or cultural problems. Welcome to the 21^st century, everybody is so stressed they feel the need to go on some form of medication to wake them up in the morning and another to help them sleep at night. Not to mention the pills to stop the headaches from a life of rushing around too fast, or the pills that help lower blood pressure. It’s a wonder people can associate normality with anybody when people feel the need to self-medicate every day. Yet nobody stops and thinks about the deeper meaning behind why they have to take these little pills in a box, and the implications it could be having for their health, mentally and physically. Still, as long as the people who couldn’t handle it anymore or have a deviant behaviour are locked away safe and sound from the normal people. Or have such a high dosage of some chemical in their brain that they can barely think, but at least it blocks the problem out, so they can join the rest of us. I’m ranting now, I’ll get back to my point.

We all talk to ourselves in our heads but never out loud. We all have certain ways of sorting our belongings out, but never have OCD. We all feel the need to ‘pull out our hair’ in frustration sometimes, but never have trichotillomania. The latter in each of these cases are obviously signs of mental instability, but yet the first are socially acceptable and never questioned for deviance. You can admit to them and people won’t look at you differently, be in the latter category however and you get treated as if you are unstable and are probably the sort of person that will eventually become a psychopath. And people are always surprised if you have a mental disorder, as if they really do expect you to have a straight jacket on and a manic look on your face. I have issues, I have behaviours, and some of them aren’t socially approvable. This lying awake at night thing maybe can’t be classed as one of them, but there are reasons behind me being kept awake at night, things that I have just come to accept or deal with have resulted show signs of mental abnormality. You can call me a freak, you can called me a mentalist, you call me what you want, but perhaps you should look a little deeper and ask yourself this; What is normal?

If I walked past you on a street the chances are that you wouldn’t blink an eye, just like you would walk past someone who had previously been suicidal, or suffers from schizophrenia. It doesn’t show physically and you will never know what it feels like to be that person and suffer in that way. Welcome to 1984, where it’s the idea of normality, not Big Brother, that rules the masses and Thought Crime is a secret kept by many people, but expressed by no one.