At a time when I am learning who my friends are … or rather who my friends aren’t … I am learning other lessons that I would rather not and more and more I am becoming disillusioned with life’s textbook. In the process of discovering the extent that social norms dictate the opinions of others towards what we choose to do, I can’t help but notice how much it scares people when you do something out of the ordinary … it shakes up their ideals and makes them wonder how fallible their own nucleus is.

When we are children we are told over and over how to behave, what not to do, that we are being naughty when we are just being children, what constitutes the overly-important word: polite … and we are smacked or punished when we don’t conform. We are, in a nutshell, controlled until our natural instinct for life is sapped and we become clones of this Borg-like social colony that obsesses over the size of their TV, their bank balance and the latest SUV.

Not surprising then how if you sit still for long enough and listen to your heart’s strongest desires – when you choose to follow a path that doesn’t fit the norm – you are not honoured or revered. It’s just not part of what we have been taught as children. People think you’re a problem; they accuse you of having a midlife crisis if you are remotely close to ‘that age’ … and sometimes your therapist even asks you to check your hormones. You become the person people tut about while they wonder if you’ll ever get a reality check.

But whose reality exactly?

I think about how my child, since he could string a coherent sentence together, spoke maturely about his ‘other family’; the one with the brother called SiscoFranco and the father from Spain and the mother from Paraguay … or was that the grandparents? He will be able to remind me because the story has always been the same, which makes me believe that, at his age when he can’t even remember what he had for breakfast immediately after taking his plate to the kitchen, there has been no embellishing. Children are so close to the spirit world that they need encouragement to find who they are now, while they still know why they came and why they chose you … although my child has always stuck to his story that he chose me because no one else was available!

It is a cruel society that shapes our children to fit a mould rather than encourage them to find their own unique fit.

Sure, I’ve been on the other side, blaming people for either taking too many drugs, being in lala-land or possibly just not getting enough sleep. But now I am here, I realise how profound it is to give up the norm and be quiet enough with myself to access what exactly it was all those years ago that brought me into this world in the first place.

Whether out of compassion or ignorance, people tell me they hope I find out who I am. But I have always known … of course I have. We all have an inner knowledge of who we are; it just isn’t necessarily the person people feel comfortable knowing.

It is not so much about change. It is about finding your way back. It is about ‘un’change.