Using dozens of recognisable vignettes, Luxmoore explores young people's anxieties about ordinariness and extraordinariness, anxieties that affect everything: their behaviour, choices, relationships, happiness.

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Again and again, young people return to the question, "Am I the same as other people or am I different?" It's a difficult question to answer. Everyone knows that they're the same as other people in lots of ways yet they suspect that they might also be different. Or they want to be different... Or they accuse other people of being different... Or they get beaten up for being different...

This book is about young people trying to find answers, or at least trying to live more comfortably with the question. Using dozens of recognisable vignettes, Luxmoore explores young people's anxieties about ordinariness and extraordinariness, anxieties that affect everything: their behaviour, choices, relationships, happiness. He describes ways of working supportively and imaginatively with young people so that they can begin to find a better balance, enjoying their lives and achieving all sorts of things without losing sight of the fact that - underneath everything and like everyone else - they're ordinary, and there's nothing wrong with that.

This original and thought-provoking book will enable professionals in counselling, teaching, youth work and youth justice to support young people struggling with these anxieties and the eternal question, "Am I normal?"

2010, 234mm x 156mm / 9.25in x 6in, 144pp

1. Introduction. 2. A Story about difference. 3. Otherness. 4. Trying to be interesting. 5. Ordinariness and extraordinariness. 6. Special. 7. A brittle belief. 8. Ordinary death and ordinary sex. 9. The road not taken. 10. What if and what is. 11. A promised land. 12. Disillusioning. 13. Back to the garden. 14. Ordinary parents, ordinary professionals. 15. Afterword.

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