I want to be “normal.” Ever since I can remember, I have wished for it — like a prayer, like a curse. The wish has never let me go.
But what is “normal”?
The moment I try to put the definition into words, it slips through my fingers like sand. Is it the family in a TV drama, smiling around the dinner table? Is it the words of gratitude toward a parent that someone posts on social media? Is it that groundless sense of safety — the kind that lets a person believe tomorrow will come, simply because it always has?
Honestly, I have no idea. One thing alone is certain. I am not “normal.”
Chapter 1 — The Invisible Wall of “Only I Am Different”
Sometimes, walking down a street, I find that my feet have stopped on their own. People crossing at the intersection. Students laughing together, parents and children holding hands, office workers tired but hurrying home. Every one of them looks alive — with that colorful blood we call “emotion” running through their veins.
But I am the only one who is different. We share the same space, we look at the same view, we breathe the same air. And yet I cannot shake the feeling that the air does not touch them the way it touches me — that they and I are not even seeing the same world. Between me and the world, there stands a thick, cold “invisible wall.”
Those internal devices everyone else seems to come equipped with — the one called “safety,” the one called “love” — were never installed in me. Somewhere on the assembly line, was a crucial part left out? Was I a factory defect? Something broken from the very beginning. That sensation has lodged itself in my spine, like a cold stake driven deep.
I have spent my life desperately hiding this. If anyone ever finds out, that is the end — that is the feeling that follows me everywhere.
So I put on an elaborate mask and pretend to be “normal,” so that no one will realize I am a “foreign object” who does not belong with the others. When the people around me laugh, my lips curl up half a second behind theirs. When everyone looks sad, I lower my eyebrows and act as though I share the sadness.
It may sound absurd. But it is a desperate camouflage — the kind needed to survive inside the herd that is society.
Hold the breath. Do not be seen. Make no waves. Want nothing. Wanting is not allowed. Once you have reached for something and felt your hand struck down, the pain is one you never want to feel again. So I lie to myself from the very start: I never wanted anything to begin with.
I do not need to feel anything. Emotion is only noise that gets in the way of survival. Sadness, anger — I lock them inside a lead box at the bottom of my heart and turn the key. Other people may not understand. But unless I keep telling myself this, I cannot make it through another day.
Chapter 2 — Your Pain Is Not a Defect
If, right now, something in this has begun to feel like your own story — please let me sit beside you.
Not face to face. Not reaching down from above. I just want to look in the same direction, keep a small distance, and sit beside you.
You know how terrifying it is to place hope in another person. You remember the sound of your trembling hand offering up your heart — believing that this time might be different — only to have it trampled without mercy. That despair when the ground crumbles beneath your feet, when the world drains of color. Of course people feel frightening to you. Of course it feels natural to think: “trusting is something to be afraid of.”
That is why the pain you carry is not strange at all.
The reason you could not become “normal” is not that you did not try hard enough, and it is not that you are some “defective person.” Choosing to “feel nothing” is not because you are “weak,” and it is not because you have a “bad personality.”
No one — truly, no one — can remain “normal” inside an environment that itself is not normal. The mask of “normal” was the price you had to pay to stay alive in a brutal place.
Long before we have words, we are already sensing one thing: whether the place we have been born into is safe, or not. In your case, the body simply made its judgment — “this is not a safe place.” That is all this is.
What you built was a survival strategy — desperate, brilliant, brave, and unbearably sad.
Chapter 3 — Surviving Through the “Storm”
The home — the one place that should have been the safest in the world — was, for you, the most dangerous minefield there is. As on a battlefield, a single moment of letting your guard down could prove fatal: to the body, to the mind.
For a small child, being raised in such a home is no different from being caught in a disaster of overwhelming scale. There is no way to step out of that disaster. Inside that battlefield, inside that catastrophe, you have done nothing but try to survive.
A wild animal that freezes at the faintest rustle in the brush — what you have been doing, in every ordinary moment of every day, is not far from that. You must be exhausted beyond words. The body and the mind both have to be carrying real damage by now. And still, in that small body, you wrung out every drop of wisdom you had, you read every shift in the air, you did everything within your reach — and have survived to this day.
The pushing-through. The anxiety. The numbness. The pain, the suffering, the grief — and the magma-like anger — all of which you swallowed in silence, because there was no one you could tell. None of it is evidence of a “defect.” Every one of them is the proof of a battle. Every one of them deserves to be held with care.
Chapter 4 — What Lies Beyond, Once the Burden Is Set Down
There is little I can truly do. But I cannot stop putting these words together.
Perhaps there were causes — and structures — that no one, not any adult, not any doctor, not any officer of the law, could have undone. I would like to trace them out together with you, and see what they really were.
Inside the raging storm, with no roof to shelter you and not even an umbrella to hold, you were left standing there alone. To go on blaming yourself for being soaked — “it must be because I did not try hard enough” — makes no sense at all.
I want to watch you set down, one by one, the “unjust burdens” that have been placed on your shoulders for all these years. Once you have laid them down, what will be running through your mind? What kind of view will be in front of you? That future is something I am deeply curious about.
I will not press you to “trust me.” I will not press you to “open your heart.” I only want to know what happened — what, in truth, you were feeling back then. The story you have endured all the way to this day — that is what I would like to know, quietly.
The past cannot be erased. And I have no intention of changing you. People heal, and are reborn, not because someone else changes them. It is only when the “capacity to recover” — the one you have carried inside you all along — finds a safe place to take root, that something inside the heart begins to move.
My hope is that Kokoro Note may become one quiet first step toward a place of stillness.
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