It's been a long time since someone called me normal. In fact, I'm not sure that it's ever happened. Years ago I aspired to be normal or even close to normal. Today, "normal" is a word I only use when someone doesn't possess some interesting quality to elevate him into a more unique category. But, it's only been in the last couple of years that my mind has fully integrated this revolutionary idea of uniqueness and abandoned the antiquated notion of "normal." The majority of my life I struggled to twist myself into someone else's idea of how I should act so that I could be more like everyone else.

Back, almost before I can accurately remember, I actually passed for a regular kid. My first three years of schooling were in a small blue-collar town outside of Denver, Colorado. Outside of the fact that my babysitter's son and me were the only two kindergartners who were not crying on the first day of school, I actually passed as your average kid. I was always a bit bossy, but hey, someone has to be the leader and I'm no sheep.

First and second grades run together in my mind like vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup swirling into a thick chocolate shake. The only earth-shattering event was that I began wearing glasses late in the second grade. They had hideous, plastic tortoise shell frames splattered with muted tones of brown, aqua and orange and were small like a grandmother's reading glasses. Despite my best efforts to hide the embarrassing spectacles, the other kids eventually found out and I endured some "four-eyes" comments, but nothing too awful. Little did I know that this was the beginning of the end.

I started third grade smack dab in the center of a suburban, white-collar, middle class hell - alone. We moved the weekend before school started and I didn't know a single soul. I looked like a boy with my pixie haircut plus Terry with a 'y' is the masculine spelling of the name so I was often mistaken for a boy. Thanks Mom! So I was the new kid, the outcast, the one the others snickered about, pointed at and taunted.

The crowning touch was that I talked - constantly. Every report card had some version of "Terry is an excellent student, but visits too much with her neighbors." I couldn't help it that even at a young age I had a lot to say. At seven I had already formed strong opinions on a variety of topics. Unfortunately my opinions didn't (and still don't) always coincide with the popular opinion and I became officially labeled by my classmates as "weird." By my senior year of high school I earned the prestigious "most talkative girl" award. I just couldn't seem to shut the motor off that ran my tongue. To this day I am still searching for the off switch.

High school encompassed 4 years that were as rotten as 3-month-old leftovers, in a forgotten piece of Tupperware, pushed to the back of the fridge. The kind that, once discovered, you throw away container and all. Throughout high school I existed as an outsider. I was very serious in those days, having yet to stretch my humor muscles. The other students honed in on my weakness and took great pleasure in making me the butt of their jokes. I'm sure to them it was quite entertaining watching me twist in the wind as I tried, unsuccessfully, to redeem myself. I had no control over my emotions then and no coping skills to speak of. Every tear cried, every mean retort I made, every retreat back into my own world was a triumph to those pulling the marionette strings. It's a wonder that I didn't turn into a "Carrie" type character and start flinging pig blood around!

A remarkable paradox transformed my junior and senior years into a tolerable situation. My two best friends turned out to be people, who in earlier years damaged my fragile self-image the most. How's that for irony? By this time though, I was beginning to accept my differences as something more positive than negative. I became so confident I even dated a boy two years younger than me. Maybe it wasnt that I saw my traits as positive, I just stopped caring what others thought. It was the beginning of my transformation into the confident person I am today.

In early adulthood I was blessed to become friends with a woman who taught me that differences in people are to be admired and cherished instead of shunned. She introduced me to the author Leo Buscaglia who drove that idea home. All I did was read, read, read and read some more. Of course, it would still be a number of years before I would fully accept the ideas I read. My bipolar kept me in bound in old paradigms that I wouldn't escape until I was aided by a terrific psychiatrist and the right medicine recipe. I was finally able to shake those absurd thoughts out of my head along with many other ideas that made no sense. I'm now glad that I'm not normal. In my book, "normal" is highly over rated. I'd rather be me!