Most of us learn what is normal long before we think to question who decided it.
We learn how sociable we should be. What a successful life should look like. Whether being quiet is thoughtful or strange, whether being ambitious is admirable or excessive, whether being different makes you interesting or simply difficult.
The strange thing is that the answer changes depending on where you are, when you were born and who happens to be doing the judging.
I didn’t understand that for a long time.
I thought normal was an objective fact.
And I was getting it wrong.
There is a right way to be a child
I think I first learned this when I was six.
When I started primary school in Vietnam, my teacher quickly decided that there was something unusual about me. I was quiet. I didn’t smile enough. I didn’t play freely with the other children. Sometimes I didn’t respond to her in the way she expected.
She called me a weirdo in front of the class.
I was the only child who needed to take home a note every day for both my teacher and my parents to sign. Not because I was violent or disruptive. As far as I can remember, I was simply quiet and detached in a way the adults around me didn’t understand.
I don’t remember feeling particularly angry or even sad. I think I was too young to fully understand what was happening. I just became numb to it.
If everyone says there is something wrong with me, perhaps there is.
One day, I rebelled in the small way a child could. I hid the teacher’s note from my mum.
When she found out, she shouted at me and cried. She said she wished I could be more normal. Maybe she had failed as a mother.
I understand how she felt. She had worked so hard to give me a better life than she had ever had, having grown up poor and without the educational opportunities she wanted. I was her first child, her big hope, and yet she kept receiving messages that something was wrong with me.
It must have hurt.
Perhaps my teacher believed she was helping too.
I think that is partly why ideas about normality can be so powerful. I don’t believe they always come from a bad place, but rather from people who genuinely believe there is a right way to be - and that helping you means teaching you to become it.
As a child, I didn’t have the language to question any of that.
I simply learned to trust other people’s interpretation of me more than my own.
Then someone looked at the same child and saw something different
A few years later, a chemistry teacher noticed how oddly interested I was in her class. I wanted to understand everything. I asked questions. I became completely absorbed in it.
She encouraged me to enter a chemistry competition. She said she will help me get ready for it.
The intensity that had once made me strange seemed to mean something different to her.
I went for it. I didn’t tell my parents.
I can’t remember exactly why, but I think some part of me assumed the whole thing was slightly ridiculous. I was never considered a good student, and I was putting myself up against students from elite classes who had been well prepared for this kind of thing.
Somewhere in my head, there was a voice saying:
You don’t belong here. Give it a go. Don’t tell anyone. You’ll probably fail anyway.
Then I got through the school round, then the district round, and then the city round.
I kept surprising myself, and eventually my parents when they found out.
They never expected anything like this. In their minds, they had only ever wanted their “weird” kid to be normal enough to fit into the world. They had never imagined she might accomplish something quite extraordinary in it.
Chemistry quietly changed the course of my life. But what mattered most, looking back, was that for the first time, someone had looked at me closely and hadn’t asked me to become different.
She saw something in the person I already was.
And she liked it.
The same intensity that had once been interpreted as evidence that something was wrong with me was now curiosity. The child who had seemed detached could become deeply absorbed. The girl who didn’t fit could be good at something precisely because she cared enough to go deeper.
I think that was the first time I experienced something I had wanted for a long time without knowing how to name it.
Acceptance.
Perhaps there was never one right way to be
At 18, I moved from Vietnam to the UK.
If childhood had taught me that there was a correct way to be, moving countries made it increasingly difficult to work out what that correct way actually was.
The young Vietnamese women around me seemed to understand a social language I had never mastered. There is a Vietnamese word, khéo léo, that I still struggle to translate properly. It means something like being socially deft: knowing what to say, how to speak to parents and senior people and friends, how to navigate all of it gracefully.
One of my friends seemed particularly good at it. My mum told me I should learn from her.
I envied her deeply.
Meanwhile, many of my British peers seemed to be following an entirely different set of instructions. Young womanhood looked more liberated. Parties, dating, drinking, dressing up - a kind of social confidence I didn’t possess either.
One world seemed to ask me to become more polished and socially graceful.
The other seemed to ask me to loosen up.
I didn’t feel entirely at home in either.
The more of the world I saw, the less objective “normal” began to look.
And the people I thought had mastered the rules were often more complicated than they appeared.
The friend I had envied eventually became one of my closest friends. As I got to know her closely, I realised that the social fluency I had read as certainty had its own pressures underneath it. She too worried about being liked. She too was working out how much of herself to adapt.
She hadn’t secretly possessed the instructions after all.
I had been comparing my internal uncertainty with other people’s outward confidence.
I thought I could practise my way into becoming normal
Understanding that normality was subjective didn’t stop me from chasing it.
One New Year’s Eve, I went to a small club in East London with some friends who I saw as the sociable, cool version of the twenty-something I aspired to be.
They were drinking, talking loudly, dancing and laughing. I tried to join in, followed what I thought were the social codes. I pushed myself into conversations I didn’t connect with. I put on the most “fun” version of myself I could manage.
I told myself that perhaps this was how people changed.
Do something enough times and eventually you become the person who naturally enjoys it.
But the harder I tried that night, the more separate I felt.
At midnight, everyone around me was cheering and dancing.
Meanwhile, I was trying to find a quiet corner where I could be alone. Eventually, I quietly left the party without saying goodbye to anyone.
I was embarrassed.
I had never felt lonelier.
For a while, I took experiences like that as further evidence that I was the problem.
Now I think the lesson was more complicated.
Looking back, I don’t think it was about staying inside my comfort zone. Some of the best things in my life have happened because I pushed myself into uncomfortable rooms.
Discomfort itself isn’t the problem.
Perhaps the question is why we are willing to endure it.
There is a difference between stretching yourself because you are curious about who you might become and forcing yourself into a shape because you are desperate to prove that you belong.
One can expand you.
The other can slowly make you disappear.
What happens when you stop trying to win the wrong room?
During an internship early in my career, I once again found myself in a group where I didn’t quite fit.
I tried to connect with the other interns on the team. We had lunch together. But they were constantly talking about things I didn’t understand - British pop culture and lifestyles that I struggled to connect with.
Eventually, we all seemed to quietly accept that sitting together while I understood almost none of the conversation was slightly awkward.
Nobody was cruel.
It simply wasn’t my crowd.
So I often ate lunch at my desk.
I wouldn’t describe this as a great act of liberation.
The truth is that I was too distracted by something else.
I had become completely absorbed in the analytical and strategic questions I encountered around me as a finance intern. I volunteered to do more reports. I disappeared into numbers and questions. I started helping with strategy work simply because I found it fascinating.
I wasn’t thinking about finding my calling.
I was just interested.
And, for once, that was enough.
My managers noticed the work. I got involved in more exciting learning opportunities. They wanted me to come back after I graduated.
One of those managers was someone I deeply admired and is still a mentor I am close to today. Before I left, I told her how different I often felt and how difficult I found it to blend in. I hoped she would understand, as she had also come to the UK from another country.
In my leaving card, she wrote something I still remember years later. She said:
Never try to fit in. Stay who you are. Keep doing what you have been doing. Stay ambitious, curious, respectful, self-confident but also humble.
I cried when I read it.
Looking back, perhaps the most important thing that happened during that internship had nothing to do with becoming better at fitting in.
I stopped spending quite so much energy asking where I belonged and followed something that genuinely interested me instead.
That happened to be strategy.
For someone else, it might be art. Caring for people. Making things. Teaching. Building a family. Living quietly.
The outcome isn’t really the point.
The question is what we might discover when we stop spending so much of our energy trying to become the person we think we should be.
I didn’t suddenly learn to love myself
There was no dramatic transformation.
I didn’t wake up one morning, become unapologetically myself and never worry about fitting in again.
I simply accumulated evidence.
A teacher who saw curiosity where someone else had seen strangeness.
A manager who told me I didn’t need to become someone else.
A colleague who affectionately called me “Vumeister” because I was strangely good at building charts and working with numbers.
Friends who liked precisely the things I had once tried to hide.
Slowly, I became more comfortable saying that I had done absolutely nothing with my weekend. I became less embarrassed about not knowing the television show everyone was discussing.
I still wanted to be liked.
I just stopped needing every room to agree with me.
Not fitting somewhere isn’t always a problem that needs solving.
Sometimes it is simply information.
The difficult part is knowing what not to change
Recently, in my year-end review at work, I received feedback that I could be too intense, fast-paced and sometimes rude.
It threw me for days.
The old question came back immediately.
Am I too much?
Should I tone myself down?
Would I be better if I were less… me?
The uncomfortable answer is that the feedback was probably right.
My drive has helped me accomplish things I am deeply proud of. It can also overwhelm people.
My curiosity has taken me into worlds I would never otherwise have discovered. It can also become a relentless stream of questions when another person would quite like me to stop.
Perhaps the best parts of us are often tangled up with the parts we need to learn to handle most carefully.
I don’t think self-acceptance means deciding that everything about me is wonderful and everyone else simply has to deal with it.
But I also don’t want every piece of criticism to send me back to the question I learned to ask when I was six:
What is wrong with me?
I don’t have a perfect formula for knowing the difference between growth and self-erasure.
For now, I try to know the parts of myself I don’t want to trade away.
Curiosity. Drive. Care.
If my pace leaves people behind, I can learn to slow down. I don’t want to stop wanting to move things forward.
Maybe the work isn’t to eliminate the qualities that sometimes make us difficult.
Maybe it is to learn how to carry them better.
I still wonder if I am doing life wrong sometimes
I am in my mid-30s now, and “normal” looks different again.
Around me, adulthood increasingly means buying a house, having children and building a family life.
I want some of those things too.
But I also love the life I have now.
I live in a rented flat. I spend an unreasonable amount of time at a boxing gym. I fall down rabbit holes about psychology and AI. I build websites and content plans nobody asked me to build.
And sometimes I still wonder whether I should be spending less time doing all these things and more time getting on with being a proper adult.
So no, this isn’t a childhood story I have neatly resolved.
One piece of feedback can still make me question whether I am too much. A different life choice can still make me wonder whether I am falling behind. I still sometimes look around for reassurance that I am doing things correctly.
The difference is that I recognise the question now.
I spent a long time assuming that everyone else had been given the instructions for how to live and I had somehow missed them.
Now I am not sure the instructions ever existed.
There are expectations, of course. Cultural ones. Family ones. Professional ones.
Some are useful.
Some help us grow.
And some are simply other people’s preferences dressed up as universal truths.
I still want to belong. I still want to grow. I still want to be someone other people enjoy working with, loving and being around.
But I am trying to trust my own interpretation of myself a little more than I did when I was six.
To ask not only:
What should I change?
But also:
What should I protect?
I spent a long time wishing I were more normal.
I wish I had spent more of it finding out who I was.
···
Still asking.