Eagle, I appreciate your deeply personal post. I relate to your feelings about normal and belonging. When I was 4, I witnessed my father holding a kitchen knife over my mother. I knew that was not normal and I was not from a normal family, therefore I was not normal. Whatever the reason, I began comparing my family to others, and so wanted to belong to normal that as an adolescent I ran away often and I adopted any family other than my own in order to belong. I finally found normal within myself, as a child of God’s family, and no longer looked beyond my SELF to belong. It took me a long while to determine that I deserved to be a part of God’s family. I too experienced surrendering to my husband’s love and accepting that we belong. In the last couple of years, I’ve had external experiences that gave me a sense of belonging, where I could emphatically say, “God has sent me here to serve, and I belong here.” Therefore, I was served as well by being graced with the sense of belonging. I must say that when I started taking anti-depressants 10 + years ago I had a change in metabolism and brain chemistry that made me feel as though my body was normalized, and I started to feel like my body belonged to me. (That’s not a recommendation, it’s just personal experience.) Yes, it’s a lot less exhausting being an authentic misfit that keeping up the pretense of “normal.” I wonder if the ache is not so much about achieving normal as it is about longing and stretching to be authentic. The authentic self supercedes society’s expectations of what is perceived as “normal,” don’t you think?