We want to belong and worry about ways in which we don't quite no matter how much we praise individual ism and celebrate ourselves is unique.

We are in many areas just deeply concerned with fitting in.

It's therefore unfortunate that our picture of what is normal is in fact, very often way out of line with what is actually true and widespread.

Many things that we might assume to be uniquely odd or disconcertingly strange about us are in reality, completely average and ubiquitous, though simply rarely spoken off in the reserved and cautious public sphere, the idea of the normal currently in circulation is not an accurate map of what is actually customary for a human being.

We are each one of us farm or compulsive, anxious, sexual, high minded, mean, generous, playful, thoughtful, dazed and at sea.

Then we are ever encouraged to admit part of the reason for our misunderstanding of our normality comes down to a basic fact about our minds that we know through immediate experience what's going on inside us.

But we can only know about other people from what they choose to tell us, which will almost always be a very edited version of the truth.

We know what we've done it.

3 a.m. But imagine others sleeping peacefully, we know, are somewhat shocking desires from close up.

We're left to guess about other people's from what their faces tell us, which is not very much.

This asymmetry between self knowledge and knowledge of others is what lies behind loneliness.

We simply can't trust that are deep Selves, can have counterparts in those we meet, and so we stay silent and go melancholy.

The asymmetry encourages shyness, too, for we struggle to believe that the imposing, competent strangers we encounter could really have any of the vulnerabilities and idiocies were so intimately familiar with inside our own characters.

Ideally, the task of culture should be to compensate for the failings of our brains by assisting us to a more correct vision of what other people are normally like by taking us in a realistic but entertaining way into the lives of strangers.

This is what novels, films and songs should constantly be doing, defining and evoking states of mind.

We thought we were alone in experiencing, in order to alleviate our shyness on our loneliness.

We are particularly bad recognizing how normal it is to suffer and to be unhappy around relationships.

For example, we constantly operate with an image of the bliss of others, which mocks and undermines our own efforts to keep going.

With many floors but eminently good enough unions, we find it hard to bear in mind that, more or less everyone is beneath a cheery surface.

Intermittently, profoundly sad and rarely not anxious, We become embarrassed to buy our close up knowledge of our own sexuality, which appears necessarily more perverse than that of anyone we know.

It almost certainly isn't.

We simply haven't been told the full story.

Ideally, artworks would offer us a hugely consoling truth that are hidden worries.

The nagging anxieties we keep to our chests on our stranger thoughts and impulses don't actually make a strange.

On the contrary, they are precisely what makers normal.

One great goal of a love novel, for instance, should be to tell us what love and long term relationships are really like, so that our own tribulations wouldn't appear so readily assigns that everything had gone wrong.

Our culture often tries to project an idea of an organized and poised and polished self as the standard way that most people are.

We should discount this myth.

Other people are always far more likely to be, as we know we are than they are to be like the cardboard cut outs we meet in our social lives.

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