The morning began like so many others in my life as a psychiatrist in Denmark—not with coffee (I don’t drink it), but with a long breath before stepping into another day of listening. Listening to stories. Listening to pain. Listening for the truths people have been too afraid to speak aloud.
Yet that day, something shifted. At 08:07, as I stood just outside my office door, I looked down and froze. Two boots. Same color. Almost the same texture. But absolutely not the same.
For a moment, heat crawled up my neck, and that sharp, familiar inner voice activated instantly: How could you not notice? What will your colleagues think? What about the patients? Should you go home? Should you hide your feet? What if someone laughs?
And there I was—an adult psychiatrist, trained, experienced, usually calm under pressure—having a full internal earthquake over two mismatched boots. I almost turned around. Almost… Instead, I inhaled, exhaled, and walked inside.
Not a single person noticed. Not during the morning meeting. Not during supervision. Not during the quick hallway conversations with colleagues. And certainly not during the sessions with patients who arrived carrying their own invisible weights—fear, shame, confusion, heartbreak, exhaustion, numbness, longing.
They trusted me with their rawness while I quietly worried that someone might look at my feet. But still, no one looked down. No one paused. No one blinked. A small part of me was almost disappointed. How can something feel so loud inside us and yet be completely invisible to others?
But that is the truth: the things we are most ashamed of usually live entirely inside our own minds. We judge ourselves with an intensity we would never apply to another human being.
As the morning unfolded, I kept thinking about how often people walk into my office believing that something is fundamentally wrong with them. Yet if you listen deeply—beyond symptoms, beyond diagnosis, beyond labels—you begin to hear something else entirely.
A child who grew up unseen learns to overachieve. A teenager who felt unsafe learns hypervigilance. An adult shaped by unpredictability learns emotional numbness. A person who feared abandonment learns to please, perfect, perform. These are not defects. These are survival strategies encoded in the body. And trauma research increasingly supports this understanding: many so-called “symptoms” are not malfunctions but adaptations—neural intelligence at work.
An extensive review from Translational Psychiatry shows how the brain reorganizes under threat, strengthening survival circuits and reducing those linked to safety and rest, illustrating just how profoundly the brain adjusts to protect us.The more we understand the human nervous system, the clearer it becomes that much of what we label “disorders” are in fact remnants of brilliant adaptations to earlier environments.
Psychotraumatology experts describe trauma reactions as survival-based responses, not brokenness. Their updated Body of Knowledge outlines how the nervous system learns patterns of protection long before we have language to describe what happened to us.
When you see humans this way—biologically clever, emotionally protective, neurologically adaptive—you realize how misguided and painful our obsession with being “normal” truly is.
This is the great unspoken truth: the people who feel “not normal” today are often reacting completely normally to an increasingly abnormal world.
We live surrounded by demands. Be productive. Be efficient. Be flawless. Be grateful. Be present. Be social. Be unbreakable. And then we wonder why the nervous system collapses under the weight of constant comparison and self-surveillance.
People don’t compare themselves to their own capacity anymore; they compare themselves to an illusion, a projected “normal” that does not exist in biological reality. Comparison is the new chronic stressor—slow, corrosive, invisible. Felt but not seen.
My final patient of the day, at 14:00, reminded me how universal this has become. He walked in quietly, shoulders heavy, eyes tired. “I don’t feel normal,” he whispered. “I don’t fit in. Something must be wrong with me… everyone else seems fine.” His voice trembled as if he feared the diagnosis before he even spoke the words.
I watched him. Watched his hands. Watched the way he held himself as if bracing for impact. And then something inside me nudged. I lifted my leg slightly and said, “Do you know what I did today?” He shook his head. “I came to work wearing two different boots. Meetings, supervision, colleagues, patients—an entire morning—and no one noticed. Not even you.”
He looked at my boots. Stared. Blinked. And then, slowly, a smile broke through his exhaustion. A real smile. Human, unguarded, honest. He began to laugh. I laughed too. And the laughter somehow dissolved the shame between us.
When we finally caught our breath, he looked at me with softened eyes and said: “So… maybe it’s okay not to be okay?” I nodded. Not as his psychiatrist, but as another person who sometimes stumbles through the world mismatched and imperfect.
There are taboos we need to speak out loud: that adaptation is not pathology; that shame distorts reality; that trauma is common, not exceptional; that people compare their insides to others’ outsides and always lose; and that the brain is brilliant, not broken. It is plastic, responsive, loyal—sometimes loyal to old wounds, yes, but always trying to protect.
So let me leave you with one question:
What if nothing is wrong with you—what if your brain is simply trying to protect you in the best way it learned how?
And maybe an even more important question: What would change in your life if you allowed yourself to be human, imperfect, and still entirely worthy of belonging… even with two different boots?
Warmly,
Florina
