“I just want to be normal.” I've lost count of the number of times I've heard this phrase in my therapy room and, as a client in therapy, said it myself. In my previous career as a writer, I spent a number of years exploring my own perceived inability to be normal. In fiction, performance, and memoir, I looked to my audiences to reflect something, anything, back to me that would allow me to fit in. I took this question to professionals too, asking if they could help me feel the way I thought other people did. And now that I am a therapist myself, my clients ask the same of me.
Feeling indefinably different from others is often a sign of depression, which is why therapists encounter it so often. Some people live their entire lives never feeling what they perceive to be normal. The seeming ability of other people to live their lives without apparent effort feels like an impossibility. You walk through life as if pushing at thickened glass. Some people with depression use alcohol and drugs in response, some self-harm, some withdraw, and some overcompensate. Depression, similarly to anxiety, parks itself like an extra layer of awareness on top of ordinary consciousness. Every living moment is so heavy with unwanted importance that it takes on a symbolic quality. (...)
Believing that you are the wrong kind of different encompasses the contentious issue of introverts versus extraverts, a very contemporary binary. Online, many people self-identify as introverts, and introvert pride is a growing movement. An increasing number of people are outing themselves as introverts who struggle in an extravert world, existentially stressed by the enforced social and adversarial interactions of school and after, pressed into high-level human sociability, bracing themselves for the onslaught of convivial activities and enforced games, and seeing extraverts constantly rewarded over and above them. It is hard not to feel abnormal when you are on the wrong side of that binary. (...)
And here's the kicker. When I start unpacking what this normal is all about in a therapy session, very often a similar reply comes back. And I discover that normal isn't just about wishing to be happy, secure and an agent of one's own destiny. Being normal, I have been told a number of times, actually means being in a long-term romantic relationship and owning a house.
by Tania Glyde, The Lancet | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia
Feeling indefinably different from others is often a sign of depression, which is why therapists encounter it so often. Some people live their entire lives never feeling what they perceive to be normal. The seeming ability of other people to live their lives without apparent effort feels like an impossibility. You walk through life as if pushing at thickened glass. Some people with depression use alcohol and drugs in response, some self-harm, some withdraw, and some overcompensate. Depression, similarly to anxiety, parks itself like an extra layer of awareness on top of ordinary consciousness. Every living moment is so heavy with unwanted importance that it takes on a symbolic quality. (...)Believing that you are the wrong kind of different encompasses the contentious issue of introverts versus extraverts, a very contemporary binary. Online, many people self-identify as introverts, and introvert pride is a growing movement. An increasing number of people are outing themselves as introverts who struggle in an extravert world, existentially stressed by the enforced social and adversarial interactions of school and after, pressed into high-level human sociability, bracing themselves for the onslaught of convivial activities and enforced games, and seeing extraverts constantly rewarded over and above them. It is hard not to feel abnormal when you are on the wrong side of that binary. (...)
And yet, in view of the apparent desirability, and seeming near-impossibility, of attaining the elevated state of being normal, it is perhaps surprising there are not more public affirmations of it, such as statues or street names. There is no Jungian archetype of the normal person, nor does it appear in the tarot's major arcana. I stand to be corrected, but I'll hazard a guess that there isn't a Shakespeare play, classical drama, or opera that celebrates the protagonist attaining the state of normal as their climax or finale. And within alternative lifestyles, the word can be a euphemism for boring. Words containing norm (eg, heteronormative) are, at worst, spat out with derision. A gulf seems to exist between the meaning of normality as an outward state, and its desirability as an inward state.
And here's the kicker. When I start unpacking what this normal is all about in a therapy session, very often a similar reply comes back. And I discover that normal isn't just about wishing to be happy, secure and an agent of one's own destiny. Being normal, I have been told a number of times, actually means being in a long-term romantic relationship and owning a house.
by Tania Glyde, The Lancet | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia
