Things I wish I'd realized sooner

Firstly, I really must get better at updating this thing... but then, don't I say that every few months when I resurface?

I've been thinking a lot lately about things that I wish I had known sooner in my life. I am going to assume that everyone has things like this - things that were so normal to you that you just never realized that they might not be normal to the rest of the world. Somehow, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize some of these things.

• I didn't know until I was thirty years old that it's not normal for people to think about killing themselves when they are in elementary school. I genuinely thought that all seven year olds wished they were dead, before they really understood what that meant.
• I didn't know that it wasn't normal to physically need to feel sensations in even amounts on your body. For example, if I stuck a foot into the tub to make sure that the temperature of the bath water was adequate, I'd have to then stick the other foot in to make sure both feet felt the sensation of being wet.
• I didn't know that my periods weren't normal until I was well into my twenties. Over a decade of periods that apparently mean there's something wrong with me, and I had no idea.
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