If you missed last week's piece by guest writer (aka, my brother) Eddie Stern, you can read it here: How Humming Can Change Your Life, Balance Your Nervous System and Calm Your Mind.

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Growing up, I was focused, to the point of preoccupation, on being “normal.”

To me—hell, to everyone around me—normal meant average, and the average was my aim. Like most kids, I wanted to fit in, but how I didn’t fit in felt metaphysical; there was no natural way to fix the ways I didn’t match unless I was born a totally different person.

But that didn’t stop me from trying and hoping and wishing and fantasizing.

Why was I so fixated on being average?

At every turn, it seemed I was not meeting the invisible requirements of “rightness.” I never exceeded anything; I always fell far short. I never understood why the where and how of a person could be wrong.

I knew I was shorter than everyone my age. I knew I was shorter than a lot of kids younger than me. I knew I was so far off from the “right weight” for my age that mine didn’t even appear on the height-and-weight chart for my peer group.

I was on the lowest end of the chart for kids three years younger than me!

The approach I had to learn didn’t match how I was “supposed” to learn, but I knew there were no other options. I understood that the information they threw at us during class was coming at me too fast. My terror of being called on when my hand wasn’t raised made listening to anything practically impossible.

Because I was consumed with terror about most things and had (what we didn’t then know were) daily panic attacks, I missed out on absorbing vital information. I froze in the face of testing, which placed me at the bottom academically.

And then there was the panic I felt over leaving my mother: I was terrified that if I wasn’t with her, she’d die or disappear. Every other weekend I had to leave my mom to visit my dad, and during the summers, I went to camp, and it felt like I was being dragged to my death.

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