Internally, I feel normal. I feel very, very normal. If my memories of everyone else were sucked out of my head, so that I had no frame of reference other than myself, I think on some fundamental level I would pretty much feel the same way about myself.
Perhaps we're all more or less predisposed to think of ourselves as normal, to condition on our own minds and bodies first and foremost. The differences between how we think of ourselves, I imagine, pale in comparison to how we think of each other. As one bit of supporting evidence, I think that my current self feels pretty much the same way about himself as Xan-2005 felt about himself, yet there is a large difference in how they think of each other.
On the one hand, I feel deeply normal. On the other hand, people would look at me strangely if I ever said that aloud. They would, I suspect, assume a certain degree of disingenuousness. But we are programmed, I think, to take ourselves for granted before we take the rest of the world for granted. By the time you arrive on the scene, you're too late to have anything to do with the way I already am. I am already normal, and external voices, even thousands of them, just don't have that much say in how I feel on a fundamental level.
Said another way, I think it's tempting to imagine that people in the tails of any distribution will have an innate sense that they are in the tails of a distribution, that they will feel abnormal. But my deepest point of reference is myself, not the whole distribution. I am the way I am, before any other data points enter the picture, before there is any distribution to speak of.
None of this means that I don't enjoy and suffer the consequences of my relative ability (or lack of it) in any given area. And I don't really know how alone (abnormal?) I am in my thinking above. But I want to get across my deep sense of arbitrarity in how things turned out: On the one hand people tend to feel that their abilities belong to them, as do I. If I also felt that the distribution of everyone else was fixed from the get-go, on some level I think I would feel entitled to my position in that distribution. But instead I feel like that distribution is totally arbitrary, and so my position in it feels arbitrary, even though I don't feel separable from my abilities.
I hope that makes sense. Maybe you're going, "Hey, me too!" Or for all I know, maybe lots of people feel weird inside...
None of this means that I don't enjoy and suffer the consequences of my relative ability (or lack of it) in any given area. And I don't really know how alone (abnormal?) I am in my thinking above. But I want to get across my deep sense of arbitrarity in how things turned out: On the one hand people tend to feel that their abilities belong to them, as do I. If I also felt that the distribution of everyone else was fixed from the get-go, on some level I think I would feel entitled to my position in that distribution. But instead I feel like that distribution is totally arbitrary, and so my position in it feels arbitrary, even though I don't feel separable from my abilities.
I hope that makes sense. Maybe you're going, "Hey, me too!" Or for all I know, maybe lots of people feel weird inside...
