What is being normal looks like
A wake up call to my healing journey “Almond” by — Won Pyung Sohn
This book carries a story so warm that I truly believe I did not choose this book; it chose its own way to talk to me. Like a sip of hot chocolate on a freezing winter evening, it hugged me at the exact places needed to heal my own fears of “not being normal.” The limiting beliefs I carried around that phrase used to weigh me down.
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“Magic or tragic — How you confront life is all this story told me on”
The plot follows two teens trying to find friendship across different worlds, upbringings, and vulnerabilities. One struggles with Alexithymia — an inability to feel emotions caused by underdeveloped amygdalae. This story highlights how “normal” humans, with fully functioning brains, constantly carry self-blame and limiting thoughts. We live on the edge trying to fit in, love, excel, and progress through a materialistic, societal propaganda of what “normal” should be. If we fail, we shame ourselves, and society points its fingers at us. We squeeze ourselves into shapes we aren’t just to avoid embarrassing our parents, managers, or peers. It is completely absurd that we have normalized this survival tactic by saying, “That’s just how the world works. But who runs this totalitarian system anyway?”
Almond answers these questions by showing that we must embrace individuality. We must emphasize individual growth and accept that everyone starts from different places. We all need a community, a friend, and a person who sees our deepest parts — exactly how these two boys do. Despite their completely different brains, they choose to look for the best in each other rather than rejecting each other’s differences. Life unfolds its beauty when we embrace the good in someone, no matter how flawed they seem to the world.
Their lives entwine in a beautiful friendship where they learn the lessons life throws at them. To me, it is pure magic how the human brain adapts, changes, and protects us through different emotions. Under the right light of perception, everything is normal. Emotions are the blessings that bind meaning to our existence on this earth. There are no truly positive or negative experiences; humans must live through the entire dynamic spectrum to have “Lived”.
“How beautiful it is to be human and feel everything all at once. For most of my teens and adulthood, I wanted to be like Gon — putting on an armor of toughness and rigidity. But this book reminds us how we can rehumanize our emotions when someone like Yunjae looks into our eyes, straight through the shady armor we wear. True friendship speaks the language of love, helping us grow with no remorse or resentment, choosing us at any point in our battered lives.”
