spot the difference
To be able to call something odd or peculiar, would mean there exists an ordinary, something defined to be usual. But how would we know what is usual, how do things feel familiar? Perhaps the more uniform something is, the easier it is to feel usual. Plain, periodic, repeated, constant. There's nothing to predict, nothing to anticipate. Or maybe the more I encounter something or someone, the easier it is to feel ordinary. Predictable. Seen that before.
But how can something feel ordinary? Feel normal? Personally, as a sighted person, I've come to rely on that one sense for a lot of things. To see is really to feel. I've come to associate the sensations from other senses with visual representations. Say I've felt my hand tingle when I run over a surface, and I'm told this is rough. I'll recall this feeling of "roughness" by the hills and valleys of the non-uniform surface. Now a lot of the time, the surfaces of objects in our homes, at school, in the car, they all look uniform and smooth. So, when you come across unpaved roads, covered in gravel, things feel out of place, they feel odd. Why are there rocks of different shapes and sizes poking out of the ground? Why isn't it the uniformly charred road that we cruise over in our cars, surrounded by buildings towering over us?
Being reliant on my sight to define the ordinary, has also become the way I define the unusual. Perhaps all the time I spent on those “spot the difference” activity books also have played a hefty role in shaping my interpretation of things that are unusual. When thinking of the word peculiar and odd, visual cues, specifically physical traits, were the only thing that came to mind. Crooked teeth, asymmetrical faces, scars, and birthmarks. Isn’t it odd that even with five senses, I boiled down the definition of two words, usual and odd, merely into visual representations? And even most of them are only ones that exist on our bodies! Which begs the question: why couldn’t I think of what makes one peculiar beyond what is seen with my eyes?
To add, with social media profiles that are publicly accessible, it’s so easy to make assumptions about someone, it can even feel like we know them personally because they post so often and share a lot about themselves. Often, I, and perhaps all of us, forget that the captions were made to purposefully entice us. And that video I saw was pre recorded, edited, days before. Also that live stream was only 10 minutes of their lives.
So to refrain from the habit of reducing the complex world filled with such diversity of objects, landscapes, and living things, to a world full of humans that are defined merely by their physical features, maybe we should re-learn how to spot the differences, revisit and redefine our boundaries of peculiarity.
Here is an attempt recreating the activity books that I, and perhaps you, were so ecstatic from. But with a twist. You will find that there are no actual visual differences between the two pictures, because there doesn’t need to be a visual difference, to be different. As you can see from the answers of the activity, peculiarities also lie within our struggles, our victories, and our interests more than you think. Oddities lie within oneself, not merely on oneself. Are we odd, or do we look odd?
