Don't Aspire To Normal

This is the mantra I'm going to take with me into the new year. Much of my psychic pain thus far in life has been the result of self-flagellation, beating myself up relentlessly for this or that behavior, this or that perceived failure to satisfy the expectations of others. I can't possibly estimate how many times I've thought "I'm not normal" or "I wish I was normal," or called my mom in tears to ask despairingly over the phone, "why can't I just be normal?" But I came to the realization recently that none of the friends, mentors, or artists I truly admire can rightly be called normal in every aspect, so maybe normal isn't something I want to try to be after all.

The idea of normal has been bouncing around my ahead as I prepare a presentation on Larry Kramer's play The Normal Heart. This play premiered in 1985 in the midst of the AIDS crisis and constitutes a call to arms, a political statement aimed at the blind eye turned by the media and the public at large to a pandemic so many dismissed as a "gay plague." Beyond that, it rails beautifully against the pathologizing of queerness that still occurs in many communities around the world today. There is a scene in which the protagonist (a gay activist) is asking for his brother to sign on to support his cause. He explains how important it is, what it means to him, but when he asks whether his brother gets it, he's told: "No, I don't understand."

So, I've been thinking about the relationship between normality and intelligibility. Empathy often consists in demonstrating understanding of another's problems, and the more unique those problems seem, the more one is compelled to share a similar situation or say "I do that too," that is, to normalize the problem. However, such statements can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, these statements may make the distressed individual feel less alone, expressing a sort of solidarity born of common suffering (and that is usually the intention, in my experience). But on the other hand, telling someone with ADHD or ASD who experiences daily executive function struggles that you also lose your keys from time to time or that you also get affected by loud noises can be deeply invalidating, sort of like saying their disabilities don't exist or don't deserve meaningful accommodation.

Part of the reason this problem comes about, I think, is that we have so many words to describe behaviors that deviate from societal norms (weird, crazy, criminal, perverted, unpatriotic, slutty, and antisocial, to name a few) but almost all of our words used to describe normal behavior basically amount to synonyms for normal (common, typical, expected, understandable, acceptable, and so on). The naming of specific types of abnormality effectively reinforces and reiterates norms by referring to people who break them as deviants. Recognizing this, it is quite natural to try to comfort a troubled friend by telling them they need not be isolated by their troubles. But I'm wondering whether it might sometimes be just as useful to speak to someone in trouble as if they were heroic, capable of rising to the occasion of their circumstances and living through them to the other side.

Whatever the case, I think normal is overrated: that which is normal is never groundbreaking or outstanding, it is not striking or memorable, it is nearly not even worth noting. And while there are practical reasons for wanting to come across as normal in certain situations (at work, with extended family, in public places where it might be dangerous to be seen as behaving outside of particular norms), I've finally come to the conclusion that the limited range of behavior most people think of as normal is just not comfortable for me, and I'm rapidly losing interest in restricting and constraining myself to fit into various boxes I'd rather didn't exist in the first place.