N is for Normal

"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for–in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it." –Ellen DeGeneres

Sometimes, always, we need to redefine normal.

Sometimes, always, our “normal” is killing us.

And sometimes, always, what we believe is "normal" is simply "common" instead.

Our "normal" implies a judgment that has no real merit, but great consequence. If I place myself at “normal” on the continuum, then you—by definition—are deviant—and the farther you are from my “normal,” the more deviant I believe you to be. Isn’t that how it works? And yet, as Emma once asked me, "who gets to decide what normal is?"

Who, indeed?

We wander the earth with a definition of “normal” in our heads—mainly unconsciously. That is, I don’t really know my “normal” until I meet up with “not normal.” And when, for example, someone steps that one step too close to me in the grocery checkout line, my first thought is not “what an interesting and happy cultural norm! I really must find out more about it!”

No.

My first thought sits in the place of judgment: “How pushy! How rude!”  Our internal monologue goes to judgment so quickly when our “normal” is violated: slacker, arrogant, immoral, dangerous.

In that grand dictionary we consult from time to time, the one of our lives, let’s turn the big pages to “N” for normal. The lovely woodcut illustration beside that entry would look, I’m quite sure, shockingly like us, like our tribe. Wouldn’t it?

Coerced conformity has costs. It reduces me and it reduces others.

Instead, what if I place myself off center on that continuum, and place others in the center of that definition of “normal?” What if, instead of my own image, my dictionary illustration is of the transgender woman at Whole Foods who gets stared at as she shops for cantaloupe and kiwi? Let’s grant that she is as “normal” as nontransgender people are.

The young man with dramatic dreadlocks and tattoos and big holes in his earlobes at Emma’s favorite “goth” store at the Mall? The same one who with great kindness gently answers all my old uncool parent questions (“how do you get your earlobes to do that?” “What does “vote for Pedro” mean? “How do you eat with that big metal thing in your tongue?” “How do dreadlocks work?”). He’s the same one who can’t wait to tell me about all the different kinds of lettuce in his garden when we go in his store now. We’ve moved from difference to similarity, not by ignoring the differences, but by walking straight toward them and talking about them. Let me place my wonderful cultural informant at “normal,” just a different normal from me. Or maybe not so different after all.

As Kenji Yoshino tells us in his book, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, we have stopped asking people to “convert” to our way of life, we have stopped asking people to “pass,” but now we are asking them to “cover,” a more insidious form of subordination, a term used for the coerced hiding of crucial aspects of one’s self. The New Yorker wrote: "Yoshino describes a phenomenon that he calls ‘covering’: the pressure exerted on racial minorities to ‘act white,’ the social acceptance offered to gays as long as they don’t ‘flaunt’ their identities, the ways women in the workplace are expected to camouflage their lives as mothers." 

Yoshino himself writes: “Covering demands are the modern form of subordination: racial minorities must ‘act white’ because of white supremacy, women must hide parenting responsibilities at work because of patriarchy, gays must hide displays of same-sex affection because of heteronormativity, religious minorities must downplay their faith because of religious intolerance, and the disabled must mute their disabilities because of a culture that fetishizes the able-bodied.”

We ask too much of people we perceive as different from ourselves. In asking, we minimize ourselves, too. And, don’t forget, we are all someone else’s “deviant.”

All because we’ve confused common with normal. Let’s redefine normal, shall we?

[About the photo: this bracelet I had made for Emma is the first of a series of 37days jewelry. Every essay title is available in several different styles. If there is a 37days challenge that resonates for you, perhaps this is a way to remind yourself of that challenge, daily. If you’d like to receive more info when the series is available, send a sign]