32 Things People Were Sure Were Normal Until Someone Said 'Wait, What?'

A few days ago, a thread appeared in the Casual Conversations community on Reddit, the author of which, the user u/CakeFortune2, asked people: "What's something about yourself that you thought was normal until someone told you it wasn't?" No, you can't say the thread went viral, but the stories told there were truly worth mentioning.

Strange behavioral quirks, the sheer strangeness of which people only realized years and decades later, some unexpected body features and personal traits... Please welcome to this informative, ironic, and sometimes even sad list of just over three dozen personal stories!

Many of the stories told here are connected to people who had long-standing family traditions that they later, even as adults, actually took for granted. Only later, faced, for example, with others' surprise at this tradition, did they realize that this wasn't actually the case.

Ultimately, there's no universal, unified view of what's right and what's wrong. So, if, for example, entire generations in your family have done something unconventionally, that doesn't mean they all did it wrong. It just means you did it the way that's not generally accepted, and nothing more.

For example, here's a story from personal experience. A friend of mine once told me that in her family, they always cooked sausages by cutting off both ends. Her mom and grandma did the same, as did everyone else in their extended family. She did the same thing herself, and only after moving in with her boyfriend, did her future husband wonder why she did it.

Neither of them could find any logical or, for example, religious reasons for doing so, and my friend discovered that no one else outside their family did it. The couple turned out to be inquisitive folks, so they conducted a thorough historical investigation until they traced her great-grandma, who was still alive at the time.

And so it turned out that the old lady, in her youth, just had one very small saucepan that couldn't fit regular-sized sausages, so she always had to cut off the ends. And then, over time, this simply became a habit, which grew into a family tradition over many decades.

With unique or simply rare body features, things are fairly simple - people still understand, one way or another, that they have something unusual. As for mental traits, things are much more interesting. How many people have lived their entire lives with the absolute conviction that they're doing everything the only right way?

However, literally everything in our lives can be questioned - it depends on the angle from which we view a given phenomenon. For example, the author of this dedicated post, the teacher Adam Mastroianni, offers this thought experiment regarding career choices for students.

Do you want to be a surgeon? = Do you want to perform the same procedure 15 times a week for the next 35 years? Do you want to be an actor? = Do you want your career to depend on having the right cheekbones? Do you want to be a wedding photographer? = Do you want to spend every Saturday night as the only sober person in a hotel ballroom?

Almost no one will answer "Yes" to the second of these pairs of questions, yet there are countless surgeons, actors, and wedding photographers around the world who proudly pursue their passions and have never questioned the wisdom of their choices. In other words, any oddity depends on the angle from which we look at it.

In any case, we're almost certain you've also had interesting moments where you or someone in your near or far circle realized they were unique in one context or another. So why not share these experiences in the comments here - but only after reading all the stories we've cited for you? After all, they're all interesting and worth your time reading.