Victoria Nevedrova
Nov 13, 2025


“Am I truly strange?”
“Am I normal?”
These are few questions I heard people carry within for years — half-consciously, half in the dim light of awareness.
Most of those who’ve never encountered such thoughts in themselves tend to feel that life, in general, is understandable.. and worth living.
Life is bearable, and they experience themselves as, let’s say, sufficient — sufficient to handle life’s various troubles.
But there are others (and I was one of them) who doubt their very realness, their normality from the childhood..who feel and think something inexpressible. Sometimes it's called being ontologically unsure about being real. They may endure an excruciating range of experiences across different areas of life, where others see no problem at all.
And more often than not, this is lived through in solitude. Because when one dares to share inner world, the so-called “normal” majority tends to deny and devalue the weight of such experience — saying things like,
“Come on, it’s nothing to talk about,”
“Why are you so mad about it?”,
“Oh, that’s nonsense, nothing serious!”,
“Stop whining, that’s not even a real problem.”
And much, much more.. none of which is useful or truly supportive. It may even be not a way of gaslighting..but just the lack of time and attention.
Or sometimes in our culture “strange” questions or experiences carry the labels of being socially unacceptable, shameful, indecent, or immediately pathological. That creates a dead end. Because we don't want to name ourselves “ill”.
As I see it now — after years of personal therapeutic, medical and phylosophical experience — is that such experiences can be normalized, and they hold value. They can be overcome when a person begins to understand what, precisely, they are about for them. What personal sense they have. How they can use these weird thoughts or actions or whatever else in their life. How to name them, which place to give them.
I deliberately give no specific examples, because this sense of “being abnormal” is a profoundly subjective process. It usually stems from one’s personal history — and from the environment one has lived and still lives in.
Yes, it takes resources, time, and often money to have significant results in your research path. But in essence, the process of legitimizing any feeling, thought, or inner state is bearable.
Above all, it requires a different kind of relationship.
A relationship that is fundamentally asymmetrical.
A listener — the one who receives another’s “abnormality” — trusts (or at least allows for the possibility) that the phenomenology of the Other may be radically diverse. That the Other is more important than their way of being, their adaptation to being, or their perception of a particular context of being.
Such a listener is more generous in calling “normal” many of the phenomena they encounter, more open to exploring causal links within the psyche, and more willing to see value in ways of being that differ from their own.
Often, this capacity grows in someone who has once lived through their own inner chaos — in the presence of a generous person — and survived it.
And so now they, too, have acquired a skill: a deep respect for difference, for otherness, for particularities and limitations of other worlds. They can speak about them with grounded understanding — and sometimes, remain silent together about them.
For as long as it takes — until the one who is being described, for the first time, begins to feel truly and finally seen rather than judged.