A Bill of Rights for Normal Neurotics

A Bill of Rights for Normal Neurotics

© 2008 by Gerald Grow

For decades, I listened to people who insisted that human beings are defective and need to labor to improve themselves. This humorous manifesto stands up for the right to be imperfect.


We hold that all people are created cockeyed and are endowed with the inalienable right to be alienated, along with:

  1. The right to be sick
  2. The right to be uptight
  3. The right to be toxic
  4. The right to  live in the there and then
  5. The right to be un-clear
  6. To be somebody else
  7. To disown, project, introject, retroflect, genuflect, repress, and willfully to sublimate
  8. To eat meat, sugar, fats, carbohydrates, gluten, and food additives
  9. To turn off
  10. To hold on, to create and maintain clutter
  11. To be unresponsive and irresponsible
  12. To have sticky, conflicted, unresolved, normal relationships
  13. To be divided, disintegrated, untogether, and unwhole
  14. To willfully construct an ego and deliberately to inhabit therein
  15. To be closed
  16. To rationalize and over-intellectualize
  17. To be irrational
  18. To be ungrounded, spaced-out, off-center, and unaware
  19. To be low, to feel depressed, to worry, to not think positively, to complain
  20. To generate, cultivate, and hoard karma
  21. To open only two eyes
  22. Not to accept oneself
  23. Not to work it out; to maintain unresolved conflicts
  24. Not to think it through, to stereotype, to simplify
  25. To be armored, defensive, blocked, stuck, contactless, anxious, character-ridden, inauthentic, and paranoid
  26. To be out of touch
  27. To be dependent, co-dependent, overly independent, clinging, unattached, or all of these
  28. To be manipulative, selfish, self-absorbed, uncommunicative, or their opposites
  29. To be asleep, in the dark, unenlightened, imprisoned on the physical plane, limited, chakra-closed, and otherwise unspiritual
  30. To be an unbeliever, infidel, agnostic, atheist, or true believer; to change beliefs; not to have beliefs; not to know what one believes; not to care what others believe
  31. To be self-righteous, to have all the answers; to change those answers; to be consistently inconsistent
  32. To be incompetent, inarticulate, undecided, and overwhelmed
  33. To be embarrassed; to feel guilt and shame
  34. To be free from other people’s categories
  35. To fake it
  36. To be
  37. Or not to be
  38. And, in all general and particular ways, to muddle through.

Gerald Grow’s Home Page

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Articles and Creative Work