"Normal" is a mirage
When you don’t even understand the problem, how could you possibly find a solution?
“We see people and things not as they are, but as we are. That is why when two people look at something or someone, you get two different reactions. We see things and people not as they are, but as we are.
- Fr. Anthony DeMello, Awareness
If I were to count up all the frustrations that have defined my relationships with people and things, “normal” is the link that would unite them all:
There are seven billion people on this planet! Why can’t I find one, normal relationship with one of them?
Why do I binge eat when others have such an easy time controlling their portions? Why can’t I have a normal relationship with food?
I’d really love to have an occasional drink without the temptation to drink more. Why can’t I have a normal relationship with alcohol?
My colleagues are great at not taking work home with them, but it’s all I ever think about. Why can’t I have a normal relationship with my work?
With some combination of these questions simmering in my head throughout my entire life, it’s no wonder that I’ve never felt normal, even as a taste of it floated, just out of reach, as my life’s greatest desire. After a year of intense work, it’s become exceptionally clear that normal was never the right benchmark. This is because:
What is normal? Normal is a tangled web of stories told throughout my life by the people, places, and things I’ve encountered, processed through a dizzying array of conflicting emotions. At best, normal is useful, a set of lessons socially evolved to make it easier to navigate the world and each other. Other times, normal is incomplete, a tidy snapshot of another person’s bigger and messier picture. Worse, normal is bad advice given from good intentions. At its absolute worst, normal is malicious, a product of a system designed to get me to drink more, eat more, work more, want more.
Why am I not normal? As complicated and ineffable as normal is, the belief that I am *not* normal carries no actionable solutions, nor any indication as to how I got that way to begin with. Instead, I carry a belief that, because I’m not normal now, and I have no idea why, I must just naturally be this way. This results in feeling defective, unworthy, and stuck. This is what results in 2,000 calories of Chinese food, drunk and high, at 3am: this is just who I am: I am not normal.
It is impossible to unwind what exactly we believe is normal or why we believe it, and it’s just as hard to try and do anything about it: as I’ve learned continuously in my training as a Product Manager, when you don’t even understand the problem, how could you possibly find a solution? Along my path, one key lesson has emerged: the first step in healing is changing vocabulary. Instead of aspiring to be normal, we should aspire to be healthy.
This oddly comes to mind in a literal sense as Coronavirus has caused me to cancel my scheduled surgery tomorrow to repair the deviated septum that has kept me from breathing correctly for my entire life. For thirty one years, I’ve framed the coughing, sniffing, frequent sinus infections, and overall discomfort in the same way I framed the relationships above: why can’t I breathe like a normal person? I guess I’m just not normal.
An Ayahuasca ceremony gave me the remarkable insight that breathing is… important, and within five minutes of stepping into an ENT’s office I learned that, not only do I have a deviated septum in my left nostril (meaning the wall of cartilage separating my nostrils is deviated to the left and blocking my air supply), but the turbinates (the small structures that purify the air I breathe) in my right nostril are way larger than they should be, meaning that I literally have no room to breathe. These are both things that are addressable through a minor surgery from which most people recover within a week. This is what I was planning on doing tomorrow, but will now likely do sometime later this year.
Reading through Reddit threads written by alumni of this surgery is enlightening; people say their first breaths after having the gauze removed from their nose are comparable to the first sips of oxygen after a deep dive underwater. It’s completely life changing for many, and it was always there, waiting for me, but I never sought it out. Why? This is the difference between aspiring to be normal and aspiring to be healthy.
Definitions are important, and the word health is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as the state of being free from illness and injury. This, by itself, is much more actionable than normal: want to become healthy? Free yourself from illness and injury. Rather than an emotionally attached this is the way I am, ask dispassionately instead: what illness or injury is impeding me?
This is important not only because it’s actionable, but also because it attacks the gnarliest part of chasing normal: allowing ourselves to attribute our challenges to addressable root causes, rather than accepting them as a immutable part of our defective selves. I can’t breathe because there’s no room in my nose. That’s fixable! Next problem, please.
Three weeks ago, I started the challenging task of pausing drinking and healing my unhealthy relationship with alcohol, and switching my aspiration from normal to healthy has finally given me the space to confront its root causes in earnest. Most specifically, I’ve realized that finding relief from a lonely, sober, freshman year of college by finally drinking catalyzed a correlation in my mind between drinking and not being alone. More profoundly, I’ve come to understand that being alone is my greatest fear, and have been working with my therapist to better understand and heal my relationship with myself.
The answers go deep, and while surfacing them has been painful, it has given me great peace that there are, indeed, answers. Like my breathing problems, there are root causes! And, while not as simple as a minor surgery, it’s fixable, and the tools to fix it are the same ones that got me here. Like the surgery, they’ve always been there, waiting for me to discover.
Finishing this note with another passage from Awareness, a text whose central thesis is enlightenment through dispassionate observation:
Put this program into action, a thousand times: (a) identify the negative feelings in you; (b) understand that they are in you, not in the world, not in external reality; (c) do not see them as an essential part of “I”; these things come and go; (d) understand that when you change, everything changes.
TLDR: Our illnesses and injuries are not an essential part of “I” and can be fixed. The most important part is that we identify them, and we cannot do that through such nebulous frame as normal. Normal is a mirage which deflects focus from the prize. The prize is understanding the illnesses we carry and healing ourselves of them. Healing happens naturally with understanding.
In the midst of this insanity, I hope everyone is staying healthy, sane, and inside. Take care of each other!
JB