essay about being normal

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How, Exactly, Did We Come Up with What Counts As ‘Normal’?

A brief history of the pseudoscience behind the myth of the "average".

Where did normal come from, and why does it have the power it does in our lives, in our institutions, in our world? How did it become like air—invisible, essential, all around us? As Ian Hacking was the first to point out, look up normal in any English dictionary and the first definition is “usual, regular, common, typical.” How did this become something to aspire? How did everyone being the same achieve the cultural force it has?

There is an entire field of people who study this kind of stuff, and have written books about it. Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault is a page-turner. The Normal and the Pathological by Georges Canguilhem is laugh-out-loud funny. Normality: A Critical Genealogy by Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens should be on your summer vacation reading list. Enforcing Normalcy by Lennard J. Davis is a total life changer. These books, and others, have knocked normal off the pedestal and into the dirt. Because normal is contingent—on history, on power, and, most of all, on flawed humans faking it until they make it.

As these scholars have noted, the word normal entered the English language in the mid-1840s, followed by normality in 1849, and normalcy in 1857. This is shocking for a word that masquerades as an ever-present universal truth. When normal was first used it had nothing to do with people, or society, or human behavior. Norm and normal were Latin words used by mathematicians. Normal comes from the Latin word norma which refers to a carpenter’s square, or T-square. Building off the Latin, normal first meant “perpendicular” or “at right angles.”

Normal , however, even as a distinct word in geometry, is more complicated than it seems. On the one hand, normal is describing a fact in the world—a line may be orthogonal, or normal, or it may not. Normal is an objective description of that line. But a right angle, in geometry, is also good, is desirable, is a universal mathematical truth that many mathematicians, then and now, describe as a type of beauty and perfection. Here we see two facets of normal that are familiar to us now and make it so powerful. Normal is both a fact in the world and a judgment of what is right. As Hacking wrote, “One can, than, use the word ‘normal’ to say how things are, but also to say how they ought to be.”

A bunch of other words out there were looking to rival normal : natural , common , ordinary , typical , straight , perfect , and ideal . The list goes on. But here’s the thing—in the survival of the fittest, normal had a key advantage because it could mean more than one thing. Its ambiguity was its strength.

It’s scary to think, but it’s true: We have normal today not because of some deliberate process, or even an organized conspiracy, but because it worked better than other words. People started using normal in many different contexts and in many different ways because it was there, because it helped them do something, because other people were using it, because it rolled of the tongue, because it gave them power.

So who used normal , and why, and how? Normal was first used outside a mathematical context in the mid-1800s by a group of men (gender pronoun alert—everyone in this history of normalcy is a man) in the academic disciplines of comparative anatomy and physiology. These two fields, by the 19th century, had professional dominion over the human body.

It was this crew that first used the word normal outside of a mathematical context, and eventually they used the term “normal state” to describe functioning organs and other systems inside the body. And why did they choose “normal state?” Who the hell knows? Maybe they found the conflation of the factual with the value-driven useful. Maybe there was a professional advantage in appropriating a term associated with mathematical rigor. (At the time, doctors weren’t hot shit the way they are now. A doctor’s cure for the common cold was leeches; headaches were alleviated by bleeding people, a treatment that killed many, which I guess is a kind of cure; and masturbation was “treated” with castration.) Or maybe they just liked the way it sounded. The historical record is unclear. But use it they did—with great abundance and little rigor—sort of like I do with all words in my ambitious pursuit of creative spelling.

For these guys, “normal state” was used to describe bodies and organs that were “perfect” or “ideal” and also to name certain states as “natural”; and of course, to judge an organ as healthy. I don’t blame them for using normal instead of perfect , ideal , natural , and all the other words they could have used. This wasn’t a grand conspiracy. So many words. So little time. I think they just got lazy, said screw it, normal will do. One word is better than five.

The anatomists and physiologists, however, never did find or define the normal state. Instead they studied and defined its opposite—the pathological state. They defined normal as what is not abnormal. But we absolutely have a proactive definition of normal today, don’t we?

Normal isn’t just not abnormal, but it is an upper-middle-class, suburban, straight, able-bodied, and mentally fit married white dude with 2.5 kids. Where did this statistic come from? Well, the 0.5 kid thing gives us an idea of where to start looking. You’ve never met 0.5 of a child because there is no such thing. The 0.5 children is an abstraction: take all the kids in the country, add them up, divide this by the number of families, and you have an average number of children per household. What is average, however, is often called normal—and what is called normal becomes the norm.

The idea of the average as normal goes way back to 1713 to a Swiss mathematician named Jakob Bernoulli, who many consider to be the founder of modern day calculus and statistics. He was obsessed with renaissance games of chance (i.e., gambling) and later became obsessed with developing a mathematical equation that would “tame chance” and calculate the odds of random events (i.e., winning or losing in dice). To figure this out, Bernoulli created an equation known as the calculus of probabilities, which became the foundation of all statistics. This was a big deal. The calculus of probabilities specifically, and statistics generally, made many seemly random events more predictable. With this new way of thinking, Bernoulli challenged and disrupted a deterministic view of the world. He even undermined the Church’s whole thing about divine creation and intervention, and perhaps, most important to him, gave people a way to win at craps.

Fast forward a hundred years and the calculus of probabilities gets taken up by Adolphe Quetelet and applied not to gambling but to human beings. Quetelet was the most important European statistical thinker of his time. He was, as were most of the normalists that came before and after him, ironically, an odd human. He was known to wax poetic about statistical laws and their beauty, and often described finding a mean in a data set in ecstatic terms.

Quetelet was a true believer that statistics should be applied to all aspects of society. He wasn’t content to predict which numbered ball would roll out of a slot or how many times heads or tails would come up in a coin toss. In 1835, he put forth the concept of the “average man.” His plan was to gather massive amounts of statistical data about any given population and calculate the mean, or most commonly occurring, of various sets of features—height, weight, eye color—and later, qualities such as intelligence and morality, and use this “average man” as a model for society.

Quetelet was fuzzy on whether he believed that the average man was a real person. On the one hand, he did make many statements about the average man as statistical abstraction. On the other, later in his career, he got more into the idea that there were “types” of humans as a result of a study on the features of Scottish soldiers (Racism alert: unsurprisingly, he found in this study that black people weren’t “normal.”) He did make claims that the ideal type could be found in an actual person (though he was thinking of someone like Ewan Macgregor). Regardless, Quetelet really believed that “the average man” was perfect and beautiful. The average man was no Homer Simpson—average, as in typical—but rather a model human being who should guide society.

If the average man were perfectly established, one could consider him as the type of beauty. . . . everything that was furthest from resembling his proportions or his manner of being would constitute deformities or illnesses; anything that was so different not only in its proportions but in its form, as to stand outside the limits observed, would constitute monstrosity.

I find it deeply ironic that even here, in the so-called objectivity of numbers and facts, there lingers the wish for something better than real life. Something greater than ourselves. There is always a dream of self-transcendence, and in that dream, a reality of self-negation. Somewhere, in all of us, we wish to be other than we are.

Quetelet’s idea of the average man became the normal man. He used regular , average , and normal interchangeably. In 1870, in a series of essays on “deformities” in children, he juxtaposed children with disabilities to the normal proportions of other human bodies, which he calculated using averages. The normal and the average had merged, as explained in Normality: A Critical Genealogy : “The task of statistics was principally to establish just what those normal proportions were, and the job of a therapeutic medical science was to do all that it could to reduce the gap between the actual and the normal/ideal.”

But not everyone was feeling what Quetelet was throwing down. He was booed off the stage at many medical symposiums and shunned by the emerging public safety apparatus in France. Often Quetelet’s averages weren’t representative averages at all. For example, when he calculated the average age of a population, he took out all the kids. When studying what was “natural” for women, he used data from men. It’s as if he found that cats are the average pet by only averaging people who had cats. The most damming critique was pretty simple: the average man doesn’t exist, by his admission. It is a statistical fiction, so how is the concept of the average man helpful to being a doctor, running a government or school, or living a good life? How is it helpful for anything, really? Because, even according to Quetelet, the average man is the impossible man.

For all Quetelet’s talk of the importance of means and averages, and his conflation of the two with normal, he never argued that the average man was a real person. He got close with his Scottish “type” thing. And who can blame him? Those accents are rad. But he backed off and argued that the average man was only a useful statistical construct for understanding the world for people in government and other professionals. It wasn’t something to actually be .

While Quetelet laid the groundwork, no one is more responsible for the modern usage of normal than a man named Francis Galton. Galton was Charles Darwin’s cousin, began his career as a doctor, and then left medicine for the emerging field of statistics. As Lennard Davis described in his book Enforcing Normalcy, Galton made significant changes in statistical theory that created the concept of the norm, as we know it.

While these changes are mathematically complex, here is the CliffsNotes summary: Galton was into the idea of improving the human race and believed that statistics could help. He loved Quetelet’s whole “average man” thing but had one minor problem. In the center of Quetelet’s bell curve were the most commonly occurring traits, not the ideal bodies and minds Galton believed everyone should have. To solve this problem, Galton, through a complicated and convoluted mathematical process (the technical definition of statistics), took the bell curve idea, where the most common traits clustered in the middle and the extremes, and created what he called an “ogive” (he had a habit of making up words) which, as Davis explains “is arranged in quartiles with an ascending curve that features the desired trait as “higher” than the undesirable deviation.” He called this the “normal distribution curve,” and it made the most commonly occurring differences that Galton did not value into deficiencies, and the uncommon ideal bodies and minds that he did value… normal .

This was a big deal. According to Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens, authors of Normality: a Critical Genealogy , “Galton was not only the first person to develop a properly statistical theory of the normal . . . . but also the first to suggest that it be applied as a practice of social and biological normalization.” By the early twentieth century, the concept of a normal man took hold. The emerging field of public health loved it. Schools, with rows of desks and a one-size-fits-all approach to learning, were designed for the mythical middle. The industrial economy needed standardization, which was brought about by the application of averages, standards, and norms to industrial production. Eugenics, an offshoot of genetics created by Galton, was committed to ridding the world of “defectives” (more on this later) and was founded on the concept of the normal distribution curve.

The conflation of the “average” man as normal was a significant step in the history of normality. Statistics did not discover the normal, but invented the normal as that which should occur most often. According to Cryle and Stephens, this was the exact time in history when “a brand of social knowledge grounded in mathematics was asserting that the average mattered more than the exceptions.” This was a big deal, especially to those who would later find themselves on the wrong side of normal. As Alain Desrosières, a renowned historian of statistics wrote, with this power play by statistical thought the diversity inherent in living creatures was reduced to an inessential spread of “errors” and the average was held up as the normal—as a literal, moral, and intellectual ideal.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

From  Normal Sucks: How to Love, Learn, and Thrive Outside the Lines . Used with the permission of the publisher, Henry Holt. Copyright © 2019 by Jonathan Mooney.  

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What is Normal?

Table of Contents

The concepts of ‘normal’, and ‘normality’, and the question of what counts as ‘normal behaviour’ has long been of interest to sociologists. Sociologists from different perspectives have very different approaches to answering the basic, but fundamental question, ‘what is normal’?

For the early positivists such as August Comte and Emile Durkheim, uncovering the existence of social norms (or typical patterns of behaviour) was central to their early positivist sociology. However, contemporary sociologists are more likely to question whether or not there is such a thing as ‘normal’ in our postmodern society.

Interest in the word ‘normal’ started to grow in line with early Positivist sociology, peaked during the ‘heyday’ of structuralist sociology in the 1940s-70s and has been in decline since the (contested) shift to postmodern society from the 1980s… 

‘Normal’can be defined as any behavior or condition which is usual, expected, typical, or conforms to a pre-existing standard.

‘Normal behaviour’ may be defined as any behaviour which conforms to social norms, which are the expected or typical patterns of human behaviour in any given society.

It follows that in order to establish what ‘normal’ behaviour is, sociologists firstly need to establish what social norms are present in any given society.

Some social norms exist at the level of society as a whole, known as ‘societal level norms’ , which tend to be very general norms, such as ‘obeying the law most of the time’ or ‘children being expected to not talk to strangers’.

Given all of the above problems with establishing the existence of social norms, postmodern sociologists have suggested that we need to abandon the concept of normality all together, and just accept the fact that we live in a society of individuals, each of whom is unique.

How might sociologists ‘determine’ what is ‘normal’?

As far as I see it, there are a number of places sociologists can look, for example:

Below I discuss the first three of these…

Normal behaviour in daily life….?

Wearing clothes most of the time.

[poll id=”2″]

Brushing your teeth at least once a day

Ignoring other people on public transport…., the limitations of establishing ‘normality’ from such ordinary, everyday behaviours….

While most of us engage in such behaviours, is this actually significant? Do these ‘manifestations of similarity’ actually mean anything? Most of us brush our teeth, most of us ignore each other on public transport, most of us wear clothes, but so what?

Life Course Norms…?

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=” https://www.youtube.com/embed/W9ZNKGrpnKM&#8221 ; frameborder=”0″ allow=”autoplay; encrypted-media” allowfullscreen></iframe>

Most children in the United Kingdom will go to school….

Most people in the u.k. will engage in paid work or live with someone who has engaged in paid work at some point in their lives.

Only 0.8% of 16-64 year olds live in households where all members have never worked. These figures don’t actually tell us how many people have never worked, but we can say that 99.2% of the adult population has either worked, or is currently living with someone who has, at some point in their lives, worked.

Most people will live until they are over 50

Limitations of establishing ‘normal’ behaviour from these trends , social norms based on statistical averages .

A third method of determining what is ‘normal’ is to look at the ‘median’ value of a distribution, that is the value which lies at the midpoint.

Median disposable household income in the UK in 2017 was £27,300

Source:  Household disposable income and inequality in the UK: financial year ending 2017 . 

Average household size in the UK in 2016 was 2.4 

Limitations of establishing ‘normal behaviour’ from medians or means

Is the median the ‘best’ way of establishing ‘what is normal’? Even though it’s the figure around which most people cluster, there can still be enormous differences in those at both ends of the distribution.

So… is there such a thing as normal?

Share this:, one thought on “what is normal”, leave a reply cancel reply, discover more from revisesociology.

What Do We Mean by "Normal"?

It is time to rethink "normal" and "abnormal.".

Posted November 15, 2011 | Reviewed by Matt Huston

It is past time that we rethink what we mean by the words "normal" and "abnormal" as those words apply to the mental and emotional states and behaviors of human beings. Indeed, it is a real question as to whether those words can be sensibly used at all, given their tremendous baggage and built-in biases and the general confusion they create.

This is not an idle question without real-world consequences. The "treatment" of every single "mental disorder" that mental health professionals "diagnose," from " depression " and " attention deficit disorder " on through "schizophrenia," flows from how society construes "normal" and "abnormal." This matter affects tens of millions of people annually; and affects everyone, really, since a person's mental model of "what is normal?" is tremendously influenced by how society and its institutions define "normal."

The matter of what is "normal" in the sense that so many people use the word must not be a mere statistical nicety. It can't be and must not be "normal" to be a Christian just because 95% of your community is Christian. It can't be and must not be "normal" to be attracted to someone of the opposite sex just because 90% of the general population is heterosexual. It can't be and must not be "normal" to own slaves just because all the landowners in your state own slaves.

Nor can it mean "free of discomfort," as if "normal" were the equivalent of oblivious.

In this view "abnormal" is feeling or acting significantly distressed. Normal, in this view, is destroying a village in wartime and not experiencing anything afterward; abnormal is experiencing something, and for a long time thereafter. The consequences of conscience , reason, and awareness are labeled abnormal and robotic allegiance to wearing a pasted-on smiley face is designated normal. Is that what we really mean? Is that what we really want? Sadness, guilt , rage , disappointment, confusion, doubt, anxiety and other similar experiences and states are all expected and normal, given the nature and demands of life.

If "normal" mustn't be "what we see the most of" or "the absence of significant distress," how else might it be conceptualized or construed? Is there perhaps a way that the words "healthy" and "unhealthy" capture what we might like "normal" and "abnormal" to mean? Perhaps "normal" could equal "healthy" and "abnormal" could equal "unhealthy"? Unfortunately, that emperor is also naked.

Growing sad because you caught your mate cheating on you doesn't make you "unhealthy." Growing anxious because you can't pay your bills doesn't make you "unhealthy." Growing bored and restless because your job underutilizes you doesn't make you "unhealthy." If you leap from "I am distressed" to "I am unhealthy" you are leaping into the arms of the medical model, a place you do not want to plunge for no good reason.

Whole industries grossing billions of dollars are built on the words "normal" and "abnormal" and on the ideas of "well" and "disordered." It is therefore inconceivable that the right thing can be done and that the situation can change. Even right-minded and high-minded mental health professionals can't really conceive of doing away with the current idea of "mental disorder." If they did away with it, what would they have and where would they be? Given that even the best and the brightest in the field are attached to an illegitimate naming game, there is probably no hope for change.

But those changes are needed and I have some proposals to make. Please stay tuned!

Eric Maisel, Ph.D. , is the author of more than 50 books, among them Redesign Your Mind.

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In her short story “Five Signs of Disturbance,” Lydia Davis writes of a woman who is “frightened”:

She cannot always decide whether what seems to her a sign of disturbance should be counted as such, since it is fairly normal for her, such as talking aloud to herself or eating too much, or whether it should be counted because to someone else it might seem at least somewhat abnormal, and so, after thinking of ten or eleven signs, she wavers between counting five and seven signs as real signs of disturbance and finally settles on five, partly because she cannot accept the idea that there could be as many as seven.

I would have thought it’s normal to be weird about a few things, but being confronted with such a perspective always makes me doubt myself. I, too, wonder constantly if the things I do and experience are normal. But I have many more signs of disturbance than ten or eleven. I think.

I could say I’m sleeping badly, but it’s worse than that—I’m sleeping incorrectly. When I lie down, I don’t actually rest my head on the pillow; instead, I hold it slightly aloft, so that it touches the pillow but, instead of sinking into the soft material, remains hovering above it. To an observer I would seem to be lying down normally. I tell myself to relax—among other issues, I’m worried I’ll develop a thick neck. When I do, I’m shocked at how much I had just moments before been not relaxing. This is sleep , I think. This is what going to sleep actually feels like . But soon I find my head has risen above the pillow again, and I must admit to myself that I don’t know what going to sleep actually feels like.

From this you’d think I have trouble falling asleep; not so. I’m usually exhausted. But I almost always wake up too soon. Sometimes for no reason; sometimes by a tingling in my ring and pinky fingers, which I experience because I hold my arms tense in sleep, often with my hands in fists so tight that they leave marks from my nails on my palm. I learned the tingling is caused by the ulnar nerve, from a masseuse who observed my posture; she also intuited that I had been born via C-section and was thus likely dealing with an original sense of having been forcibly removed from a place of safety. The clenching, broadly, leads me to grind my teeth, which I have done for at least ten years, and the grinding, probably, leads to the tinnitus, which is relatively new. One of these things might also be at fault for what’s known as exploding head syndrome: at night, I sometimes see flashes of light behind my closed eyes, as if there are fireworks outside my window, and hear mechanical sounds that aren’t there. Despite its spectacular name, the condition is “prognostically benign,” accompanied by no pain or immediate threat to health. The fear I experience along with these hallucinations inspires a series of logical justifications: it’s all in my head, which is, of course, exactly the problem.

Trouble sleeping is certainly normal, but it doesn’t help the project of being awake. While socializing, I am cheerful, gossipy, and quite fun until I’m sleepy, but sometimes I catch myself doing artistic things with my hands and posture—fidgeting, wringing, clenching—even as I engage charmingly (I hope) with my interlocutors. Other times, I will look down from a conversation and notice, Oh, the fist again; because I can laugh at myself, I hold it up to show my friend, as if it contains a surprise. I do not pick or bite my nails, but in groups or alone, at home or out, I cannot keep my shoulders down. (Large deltoids—almost as bad as a thick neck.) Twice now, at parties, men have come up behind me and attempted to physically correct my posture, followed by a little lecture. Never mind the cell-phone addiction, the laptop that sits on the table so that I must look down on it, the ambient tension of contemporary life, when I must be on guard against men who randomly correct my posture. The slouch, they say, is the result of my failure to accept myself as a tall woman.

I honestly don’t think that’s it, but should you really take my word for it? I sometimes feel strange pains in various parts of my body, just fleeting ones, which I then waste a lot of time thinking about. I have occasionally fainted for no reason, and more than once broken out in hives. I get sweaty, feel anxious about being sweaty—about the sweat becoming visible to others, disgusting them—and get sweatier. After I go in the sun, I experience what I call a sunburn neurosis, my skin burning and tingling, though I remain, owing to anxious sunscreen application, as white as a Victorian ghost; I haven’t had a sunburn since I was a teen-ager. Acid reflux can last for weeks. I often find it difficult to eat because I am nauseated due to stress.

I don’t have any phobias, but I do feel afraid. When I’m particularly stressed, I sense movement out of the corner of my eye and jump, like an animal preparing to fend off attack; there’s nothing there. I hold my breath, make little noises, sing little songs, shake. Sometimes I perform feats of what might look from the outside like symptoms of very mild obsessive-compulsive disorder: checking more than twice that the front door is locked; changing the combination on a locker at the gym or a museum multiple times, because I am afraid someone saw me set it. I am hesitant to even mention this one, knowing, because of my years-long Internet addiction—which I would attribute to, among other things, an attempt to escape my anxious, spiralling thoughts, or maybe to externalize them—that if someone claims they “are O.C.D.” about facts of life, such as cleaning the kitchen, people get mad: perfectionism, neuroticism, and thoroughness are not O.C.D. In my defense, I never clean the kitchen.

My work suffers, of course. How could it not? I’m sadly not a perfectionist but, rather, an avoider and a regretter. There are periods when I will respond to e-mails at a reasonable pace, and then there’s the e-mail about a potentially lucrative project that I ignored for months. I haven’t even opened it; I don’t know what it says. Since childhood, I’ve had versions of “the packing dream,” in which I am surrounded by clothes strewn chaotically around the room, and I cannot choose what to bring on a trip. I may have enough time to finish packing, or I may already be too late. Whatever the scenario, it’s never one of those dreams about physical impediments, in which you try to move but can’t; the obstacle is always only my own mind, my own incapability, and that is the torment—that I’ve done this to myself. (I have never actually missed a flight.) As for work, I always manage to “get it done,” though I don’t know how. It’s probably a reasonable enough fear of failure—or fear of failing to achieve the impossibly ambitious vision in my mind—that is my obstacle. Even worse is the possibility, floated by sanguine meditators and accepters of things-as-they-are, that I may need the anxiety, and the promise of eventual relief from it, to do anything at all.

What about panic attacks? I’ve never had the kind of panic attack that people mistake for a medical emergency, but sometimes I become very still, sort of unable to move, for, I don’t know, ten to twenty minutes to an hour, and my muscles are sore the next day. There are the usual racing thoughts: love, squandered potential, unlikely vanities, loss of income. Injustices committed against me; chores. Will I get cancer? Knowing that everyone worries they have cancer helps only a little bit. My ultimate anxiety is not that a certain fear will come true. Rather, I experience panic as mostly meta: the horror of being trapped, in this mind-set, for the rest of my life.

Naturally, I am not merely anxious; I am also very sad. The two are, for me, inextricable: I get anxious that I’ll get sad and sad that I’m so anxious. It’s harder to describe the depression, and the fear of it, because fewer physical symptoms are involved. Weeping, that telltale sign of sadness, is usually cathartic, a response to a specific buildup of identifiable issues, and thus not involved in what I can’t help but think of as the true suffering, which recedes and returns, recedes and returns. People often talk about being unable to get out of bed in the morning. What if you can get out of bed—after about an hour and a half of lying awake in it, thinking about how you should get out of bed? What if you can get out of bed but find it beckons you back throughout the day? What if you are, owing to your difficulty sleeping, just tired? Which comes first, exhaustion or depression? Does it matter?

Even knowing that “normal” is a nefarious construct, used to shame and control, there’s something about these symptoms that makes me want to know how many people have them; they mean nothing to me alone because none of them is so unusual as to cause alarm, or even merit comment, and so they might mean anything. Is it really such a big deal? I don’t know where to put the emphasis, how to tell it, and this is particularly disturbing because knowing where to put the emphasis is my vocation, which is also bound up with, I’ll admit, my “sense of self.” “You don’t seem anxious,” friends will say, surprised at my competent narration. This is not the response I want. How competent could it be if no one believes what I’m telling them?

I can shift the blame. As with anything that matters, the language we use to describe “mental illness” is all wrong. Mental illness is “real,” as real as a tumor, but not the same kind of real as a tumor. Its effects are measurable, in blood pressure or hours slept, or noticeable, in weird hand gestures or an erratic mode of speaking, but mental illness has no shape or volume; its size cannot be conveyed through comparisons to fruits and vegetables. It becomes real in the description of its effects, in the naming of everything around it, rather than in attempts to define it, though we have many words and phrases that approach the task. “Disturbance” is funny, and accurate, because it refers both to the internal condition and what it produces: behavior that might unsettle oneself or others. I become “nervous” in small-stakes situations of short or predetermined time frames; “nervousness” no longer describes the anxious disposition, as it did in the past, but the feeling of being anxious about a specific thing that is usually imminent. I’m “neurotic” because I know the basics of psychoanalysis and am a fast-talking big-city professional; I’m “neurasthenic” because I know the word. My mother used to call herself, as well as me, a “worrywart”; to “worry” is to fidget with something in the mind. “Panic” is acute, “attack” is very acute, and a “fit” is a cute version of a “panic attack”; “throwing a fit” is what children do and what adults do when they are “freaking out” while simultaneously making childish demands. Like “freaking out,” “going insane” is applicable as a joke in retrospect, though it became too popular on the Internet and lost its edge, particularly because the sort of people who said it were just the sort who ought to be arguing that the usage stigmatizes people with mental illnesses. I still indulge in “crazy,” which is classic, and permitted, I think, because I am. “Distressed” is the joke version of nervous, though someone “in distress” is being euphemized, as is someone “behaving erratically.” A “crisis” is both intense and prolonged; a “spiral” is a crisis about one issue, characterized by repetitive and catastrophic thinking, and “spiralling” may feature prominently in crises, but in a slightly funny way. I fear having a true “breakdown,” which suggests, to me, among other things, a failure of speech, but I also fantasize about having a true breakdown for the same reason. I am rarely, if ever, “hysterical”; that’s sexist. “Mentally ill” is, of course, insufficient, though when I have seen other people “in crisis” I have thought I actually understand the term. The concept of “mental health,” did you know, comes from Plato, who said that it could be cultivated through the elimination of passion by reason. Today, good mental health means something like the elimination of both passion and reason.

Unless I’m about to appear onstage, in which case I am “nervous,” I describe myself as “anxious” so that people know I’m serious: this is not a passing worry but a constant state, and if I were to seek a medical diagnosis I would get one, handily. The question “Why don’t you?” naturally arises. The answer is that I do not feel it would help, and might even create more problems than it solves. In medicine, the problem of language is a problem of classification; I do not seek a diagnosis, probably, because I do not want to be trapped in a single term. (I hate being trapped, you might have noticed.) Like everyone else’s, my mind dabbles in an array of mental illnesses to create a bespoke product, and I find all the terms I know either ludicrously broad or ludicrously specific. I learned from Scott Stossel’s upsettingly thorough 2014 book, “ My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind ,” that the term “generalized anxiety disorder” was conceived at a dinner party, in the nineteen-seventies, held among members of a task force working on the DSM-III . According to David Sheehan, a psychiatrist who was there, they were all drunk, wondering how to classify a colleague who “didn’t suffer from panic attacks but who worried all the time . . . just sort of generally anxious.” “For the next thirty years,” Sheehan continues, “the world collected data” on the group’s drunken musing. The point of this anecdote, Stossel establishes, is not to say that generalized anxiety disorder isn’t real but to demonstrate how somewhat arbitrary decisions made by powerful people can shape how we see ourselves. I also don’t mean to suggest that the ideas that we have while drunk are bad—more that drunkenness can give us an admirable economy and frankness, and encourage us to just pick something and go with it, something that some of us, sober, really struggle to do.

An essay like this is supposed to have a narrative. Where does my anxiety come from? Famously, it’s overdetermined. First, my parents: they passed down bad genes, and then they might not have raised me right. To go further I’d have to discuss the ways that they might not have been raised right, and then discuss the ways that they might not have raised me right. Although, like everyone, I have a list of these in the Notes app on my phone, and I update it every few days when a new injustice committed against my past innocence reveals itself, I am hesitant to go down this path, which narrows to a tunnel, which is eventually pitch-dark. The packing dream, a desire to escape my humble origins; the sunburn neurosis, from my mother’s warnings. I am the way I am because my father did this, or my mother didn’t do that. Not a very satisfying conclusion.

What about society? That’s what’s fucked up. In the early two-thousands, a group of academics in Chicago formed a collective called the Feel Tank—an alternative to the think tank, though of course they also opposed “the facile splitting of thinking and feeling.” According to their manifesto, they sought “to understand the economic and the nervous system of contemporary life” by being “interested in the potential for ‘bad feelings’ like hopelessness, apathy, anxiety, fear, numbness, despair and ambivalence to constitute and be constituted as forms of resistance.” One of their early slogans was “Depressed? . . . It might be political.”

Here the concept of normality truly collapses: what is normal—financial precarity, an inability to plan for the future, war—is not good at all. Feel Tank Chicago was established as part of the “affective turn” in the academic humanities, which began in the nineties; this approach to understanding emotions as shaped by power structures has become wildly influential, though it’s not new. For example: the concept of Americanitis, popularized by William James at the end of the nineteenth century, described “the high-strung, nervous, active temperament of the American people,” according to an 1898 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association . The causes—advances in technology and accompanying pressures of capitalism—were much the same as they are today. Wherever the contemporary occurs, anxiety and depression are seen as natural reactions to it, and performances of profound mental discord in response to the news will be familiar to anyone on social media.

If conventional understandings of mental illness tend to make it about you—the chemicals in your brain or the particular contours of your childhood—this conception wonders if you can harness its power to make things better for everyone. Nice. But there’s something a little simplistic about the way one can attribute all feelings of negativity, disconnection, or anxiety to what amounts to a higher power, as anyone who’s read those social-media laments will know. Doesn’t this encourage more bad feelings: solipsism, nihilism, futility? Looking for something to blame may feel better than beating oneself up, but it doesn’t feel good . In her 2012 book, “ Depression: A Public Feeling ,” Ann Cvetkovich describes the Public Feelings Project—Feel Tank Chicago described themselves as a “cell” of this larger group—as an attempt to “depathologize negative feelings so that they can be seen as a possible resource for political action,” but without suggesting “that depression is thereby converted into a positive experience.”

Indeed, the encouragement to understand our suffering as determined by external conditions does not seem to ease it. The comfort of believing you are normal is that you have company in misery and that your condition seems less likely to become worse. But if “normal” is, by definition, something that is getting worse all the time, then your condition is a form of solidarity—not necessarily a source of solace. (And if you derive solace from the solidarity, do you really want to sacrifice the quality that grants you access to it?) For my purposes—which are, I suppose, to understand whether and how I am abnormal without annoying the reader—stories that foreground their protagonists’ participation in public feeling tend to be unsatisfying. If my suffering has nothing do with me, if it’s the expression of social and political conditions, why should the reader, or well-meaning friend, care? This is why narratives that compete directly with the idea of collective feeling and collective resistance, conservative tales of bootstrapping and hard work, are so compelling: they make a lot more sense.

Until the revolution that would be our relief comes, we must “do the work” to get better ourselves. “Have you tried talking to someone?” people ask, when I mention my various issues. Are you that somebody? No: they mean that, in addition to the natural sleep aids, the regular exercise, the healthy diet, the cultivation of hobbies, the having of friends, the practicing of meditation, and the occasional massage, I should go to therapy.

I have tried talking to someone; it’s fine. The responses I get when I utter the magic words “my therapist” are more thought-provoking than any of the personal revelations I’ve uncovered with him so far, though the idea is that you need to do it for years for the benefits to accrue. “I’m proud of you,” friends say. As if it is so difficult to think seriously about myself for hours a day—as if that weren’t what I was doing with my anxiety anyway. These friends will talk about my problems with me endlessly, as long as I am “in therapy.” If I am not, or if I express my doubts about the possibility of transcending the workings of my own mind by paying someone to guide me through the process, the response is unanimous: I must find a new therapist, someone who is “right” for me. They wonder, gently, gently: Is it possible that I, so high-achieving, am unconsciously telling the therapist what I think he wants to hear—deceiving him by being adequately emotional, apparently reflective, in order to give true self-knowledge the slip? Should I not find someone meaner, nicer, female, more intellectual, less intellectual, someone who will not fall for my tricks?

Or: I must try a different therapeutic approach. A bit of research quickly reveals an expanse of options: somatic-experiencing therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, integrative therapy, gestalt therapy, humanistic therapy, psychodynamic therapy, exposure therapy, shock therapy, biofeedback, counselling, coaching, one of the innumerable schools of psychoanalysis. At a wedding, I was strongly recommended E.M.D.R., or “eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing” therapy, in which eye movement is stimulated in an attempt to retrain the brain to respond to trauma. Some of these styles of therapy are more or less the same thing, just with different names, but, given the nature of the enterprise, you have to assume that the selection of one name or another, or a combination of names, indicates subtle differences in method that surely multiply to create different outcomes. Whether you’re supposed to think about outcomes is a key differentiating factor in therapeutic approaches.

A psychiatrist might prescribe medication, a fraught topic. It’s hard to write about medication without having taken it oneself, which I have so far resisted. I’ve tried a couple of popular pharmaceuticals recreationally and find I am more afraid of them than I am of illegal club drugs; they really work. While I have no idea what it’s like to be on psychiatric medication long term, no one else can say what it’s like, either; the medications famously interact with each person differently, so there is no way to understand them as an experience except through trial and error. The possible side effects are sometimes just as bad as the symptoms they’re supposed to alleviate. The process of stopping these medications, which many patients want to do , is criminally under-studied and requires a painful period of weaning that comes with prohibitively bad side effects, too. (To start antidepressants is to sign up for some future moment when you won’t want to take them anymore, and to have to decide whether you want to experience “brain zaps” in order to stop.)

At the same time, they often help. Criticize what you believe to be the craven overprescription of psychiatric medication in the United States and someone on the Internet will take personal offense: Wellbutrin saved my life! At the end of Sheila Heti’s 2018 novel, “ Motherhood ,” the narrator begins taking antidepressants, and all her problems—primarily her vacillation about the question of whether to have a child, which constitutes the entire novel, along with a debilitating, weeping sadness around her period—are suddenly solved, with what the critic Willa Paskin called a “lexapro-ex-machina.” The abruptness of the ironic conclusion is itself a comment on the role that psychiatric medication plays in North American life, but this plot point, one of the book’s very few, also demonstrates the way philosophical searching ceases when the anguish that propels it is no longer there. Medication allows Heti’s narrator to ignore the upsetting reality that she could go on trying to decide, or regretting, forever. There is no arc, nor character development, nor point, without anticlimactic intervention.

I once attended a session of what I called jaw yoga, hoping to “manage” my bruxism. It was conducted by a Greek woman named Angela who described herself as a dancer, choreographer, and yoga coach; she was also, incredibly, an actual dentist. At the union of these disparate interests was a passionate belief that the jaw had been neglected in the world of dance and that the rest of the body had been neglected in the world of dentistry. “Once you are grinding and pressing the teeth, your cranium and shoulders, hips, knees and feet are reacting to this pressure,” her course description read, beneath a photo of her lying on her stomach, cupping her jaw in her hands. “Once the skeleton is affected, also the organs are reacting. A chain reaction of organs and emotions is put in motion.” She told us how to identify the various parts of the jaw and ended the class by singing along to a recording of “All You Need Is Love.” As we left, she passed out business cards that read “You are the point.”

It didn’t work, though maybe I should have attended more sessions. A resistance to helping oneself is often a simple denial of reality: I don’t want it to be true that I need help, not because I would like to imagine myself as strong and never in need—a common explanation—but because I do not want to have these problems that are notoriously difficult to solve, about which there is no professional agreement. I do not want to embark on a years-long project dedicated to my own mind. I have other things to think about.

A final worry: Am I being confessional? The great trick of declaring outsized anguish, of being publicly and clinically wrecked by one’s feelings, is that once you do it your feelings set the limits, and no one wants to hurt them. The confession is a simple form of writing. It does not contextualize, illuminate, or complicate. Its main purpose is not the creation of aesthetic beauty out of the materials at hand (life, pain) but selfishness: relieving the confessor’s desire to confess. The form travels in one direction, from me to you, offering no path to analysis, critique, or, God forbid, argument. If the feelings are unique, the confession is justified; if they’re normal, it is, too. One yearns for the breakthrough, the epiphany, the point, that will make sense of it all, and thus cure it. But catharsis for me is boring for you. ♦

This is drawn from “ No Judgment .”

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Understanding the Meaning of Normal Behavior

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According to the OED, the usual sense of `normal’ is:

2. a. Constituting or conforming to a type or standard; regular, usual, typical; ordinary, conventional.

But do these uses constitute a single sense? It seems that there is nothing very  normative  about being typical, regular, usual and ordinary; but conforming to a type or standard seems like something one  ought  to do. We set standards, live up to standards or fail to do so, and the like. The original use of the word `standard', was for battle flags and such, then for weights and measures; then for things more generally; there are standards of comparison, accepted standards; official standards. These generate at least conditional oughts; if you want to submit an article to  The Philosophical Review,  you should do your best to follow its standards. We can talk of standards for all sorts of things one doesn't aspire to be: the standard idiot. This seems ironic, though.

The word `norm' also seems to have this dual use. Things can return to the norm; this may be good or may be bad. But  norms  are supposed to be rules, things one ought to follow, at least in appropriate circumstances. Let's legislate a bit, and distinguish between the use of normal as typical, and the normative use.

Now is some cases, one ought to do what people typically do. If people in England typically drive on the left, one ought to drive on the left when in England, however intrinsically absurd that may seem. That's a pretty important ought. If people in England hold the fork in their left hand, perhaps one ought to do that too, although it's not so important. These are both matters of conventions, solutions to a coordination problem, according to David Lewis, although what the problem that holding a fork in one's left hand solves is not terribly apparent. I'm not sure what Lewis said about etiquette. You can look it up.

But in general there seems to be a slide from the typical or average to the normative and required where there is no particular rationale for it. Teenagers, as we know, like to dress like their peers, and so do adults, for that matter. Dressing differently than the people around you usually suggests that you are identifying with a different group as your peer, not ignoring peer-pressure altogether. It seems that what we regard and handsome and beautiful are not what is typical, strictly speaking, but sort of an averaging of the faces and bodies we encounter.

In the areas of physical and mental health, it is often a bit difficult to separate the average and typical side of being normal and the normative, meeting standards side. If my blood pressure is normal, that seems like a good thing; is it that normal means average, and people on the average have a healthy blood-pressure? Or is it that normal means the blood-pressure one has when everything is working the way it should? If a doctor said that virtually everyone has an abnormally high blood-pressure, we'd understand what she was getting at. One the other hand, if I am abnormally short or tall, is there any norm involved, or just what is typical and average? But then peer-pressure, or something along those lines, turns that into a standard, and the whole issue becomes medicalized, so you may be able get your kid treated if it appears he or she is going to be abnormally short or tall.

Abnormal psychology deal with the different, the aberrant, the dysfuctional, people who are different than most of us, so surely not normal in that sense. So is that roughly the same as mental health? An if someone is not mentally healthy, does than mean they have a disease? And how are the norms for mental health related to the norms for clear and logical thinking?

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What is 'normal', blog archive, comments (15).

Thursday, March 11, 2010 -- 4:00 PM

Normal is a misnomer. To be normal you need to have a consensus of people who agree on the ideal. That makes it completely subjective and therefore a wasted pursuit.

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Here in southern Maryland it's "normal" to call your pickup truck a "pickum-up truck" and to have an outsized replica of male body parts dangling from the rear bumper. I refuse to do that, so I'm not normal. And yes, your statement about clothing applies, too. I've never adopted the southern Maryland style of wearing six tee-shirts with progressively larger necklines and packs of cigarettes stuffed into your armpits.

Friday, March 12, 2010 -- 4:00 PM

Perhaps, the meaning of normal as typical contains the normative meaning because of the purely empirical fact that people generally behave as they ought to. So instead of saying "behave as you ought to" we can say "behave as most people do" (i.e. be normal) because most people do behave OK. If people didn't generally behave as they should, then normal simply wouldn't have a normative meaning.

What is normality? A normal person is whoever conforms to a paradigm that is accepted by most of people . But it is not true that most of people are normal, so the one who strives to be normal follows a wrong way, the way of the majority. It seems that they are like sheep and no one of them goes out of the flock. So I think the concept of normality has to be searched inside oneself, so that it is normal a person who follows its own way. The book I have recently written deepens many psychological issues. I want to draw it to your attention, as you may be interested in it. The title is ?Travels of the Mind? and it is available at http://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/TravelsOfTheMind.html If you have any questions, I am most willing to offer my views on this topic. Ettore Grillo

I knew I was going to enjoy this article just from the title. I get so tired of useless labels. I know that people do exist of a particular type but the minute I declare that I have something in common with the polka dot people, folks will extrapolate that I buy or endorse everything they stand for.

Saturday, March 13, 2010 -- 4:00 PM

Normal is simply the average mean. Be it good or bad right or wrong, judgement or measure is uncertain at best. = MJA

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 -- 5:00 PM

"In the areas of physical and mental health, it is often a bit difficult to separate the average and typical side of being normal and the normative, meeting standards side.... Abnormal psychology deal with the different, the aberrant, the dysfuctional, people who are different than most of us, so surely not normal in that sense. So is that roughly the same as mental health?" As your guest stated about the authority that surrounds definite normalcy, it is a dangerous route we would as a country to classify such disorders as normal psy-chosis, when in all fact it is totally circular. In this case, it is semantics, and as the one caller stat-ed, contextual, from which a new logical form must be applied to address this issue. If one was to apply the Transcendental Logical form, or schema. One would see normalcy as a synthetic because face it the word normal is useful, and constantly being used in daily conversations.

As your guest stated about the authority that surrounds definite normalcy, it is a dangerous route we as a nation would travel in classifying, such disorders as "normal psychosis", etc., when in all fact it is totally circular. In this case, it is semantics, and as the one caller stated, contextual. So a new logical form must be applied to address this issue. If one was to apply the Transcendental Logical form, or schema, one would see normalcy as a synthetic because face it, the word 'normal' is useful, and constantly being used in daily conversations.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010 -- 5:00 PM

Very informative post, agree normal is any form that we think and see that is not normal to us.

Sunday, May 23, 2010 -- 5:00 PM

Wow loved reading all your ideas on normal! To me, I feel that screew everybody and in this case the "norm" and live your life the way you feel comfortable. Don't conform to the majority as we will all become puppets in a game of reulation, stand up and have your own voice, and dammit be pround!

Sunday, October 17, 2010 -- 5:00 PM

Normalcy is subjective. There are certain standards that society sets, and those who reside outside the standards are deemed "abnormal". Don't bother with what is normal or what isn't; be yourself. "Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."

Monday, October 18, 2010 -- 5:00 PM

YAWN. If you do not have a sense of normalcy, then what do you rely upon? Your own abjectivity? If you/we choose to be your/ourselve(s), to the exclusion of others, what do we become---let's see: anarchist comes to mind---lots of movies about that sorry state---all hopeless and pointless. Ending with, well: nothingness. Sure. Don't bother with what is normal. Be yourself. Kill people. Do all manner of nasty things. Mind over matter. Go right ahead. And the next time you walk out in front of my car, talking on your cellphone and not looking in either direction, you may be dead for your inattentiveness. I might go to jail. But you will be dead.Or, hurt badly because I chose to brake rather than run you down as you deserved. I am really tired of popular culture, and people on cellphones who believe they are somehow immune to criticism or harm. Who created this? Guess who. YAWN.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010 -- 5:00 PM

Cold, isn't he? But consider who created Heisenberg and his eyes. You did---you and your self-absorbed, me-ness. How blind can you be---don't you get it? The eighty's are over and you are still trying to keep up with who? The morons the marketeers keep foisting upon you. How's the Ferrari doing for you? Was it really worth it? Oh, sorry---you only have a BMW M5---my mistake

Monday, December 26, 2011 -- 4:00 PM

Physical and mental health is both same important.A normal person is whoever conforms to a paradigm that is accepted by most of people . But it is not true that most of people are normal, so the one who strives to be normal follows a wrong way, the way of the majority.I know some idea about normal and abnormal stage of your post.I appreciate this informative post.

Wednesday, July 29, 2020 -- 8:29 AM

This is addressed solely to its author. Its contents are usable, or quotable, of course! ___________________________________________

“TOMORROW CANNOT BE. TODAY CANNOT NOT BE.” [by Homomal]*

What I agree 'to be so', IS.

Nothing can ‘be’ without a perceiver. There can be no proof that any entity I perceive or can conceive of, exists of itself; (i.e., without ‘me’). Any assertion made to that effect could only be conjecture. I am the perceiver/acceptor/agreer to, and therefore the only ´proverˋ of, anything´s existence.

Happening is only conceivable if describable. My 'word-tool' is my means of identifying/defining/rationalizing what I perceive - including ´myself´.

Comprehending this, has released me from the ‘existentially hypocritical’ shackles of “Human Expectation”. I can aspire to being ‘a man', 'a fiend', ‘a god’, without reference to, or consideration of, anything beyond my own existential perspective.

I am able to fear death or to sense its imminence; I can declare another creature to be ‘dead’......but I cannot bear witness to the extinction of my consciousness. I cannot NOT be here.

Tomorrow is a baseless presumption. Should I not “wake up”, I could not know it. The ‘here-and-now’, (including memory of my yesterdays), lasts indefinitely.

The world about me is the most perfect of ‘gifts’: it is mine to enjoy in perpetuity.

*Animal With Voice. ___________________________

Reference: E=W A

[Existence is Word by Agreement, by Homomal] . Revision July 2020.

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At Risk in the Culture of ‘Normal’

Research shows that people with atypical brain s are at a higher risk of suicide and self-harm.

By Jonathan Mooney

Mr. Mooney is the author of “Normal Sucks.”

I was a weird kid. I was obsessed with checker-patterned clothing, and for a time I rode a checkered bike, wore checkered Vans, checkered shorts, a checkered shirt and to top it all off, a checkered hat. I loved the television series “Roots” and took to calling myself Kunta Kinte. I would shower only in my socks. I decided one year to pee only in the corner of the extra room in our house. No one noticed, which gives you a sense of the general level of cleanliness in our home. I memorized all the dialogue in “Trading Places” — the 1983 movie about class warfare starring Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy that was definitely not for children.

When I was in third grade, I couldn’t sit still, so I spent a lot of each day chilling out with the janitor in the hallway. I struggled with reading, especially reading out loud, so I often hid in the bathroom. Then there was writing. I asked my teacher what seemed like perfectly reasonable questions: Do we really need there, their and they’re? And can’t we just agree when I write “how” instead of “who,” or “who” instead of “how” that he could still get the gist of what I was trying to say?

Eventually I was found to have multiple learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, anxiety disorder and depression. It was helpful for me to be able to identify the challenges I faced, but the language used to describe me was, and still is, inherently negative. It was clear that in the eyes of society, I wasn’t just different, as my mom liked to say, but deficient. I wasn’t just not normal, I was abnormal . And to be labeled abnormal is to be told that you should be other than you are. Eventually the round peg, made to fit the square hole, breaks.

Sometime in October 1988, during my sixth-grade year, I felt as if I were in the corner of a room watching myself. I started to rub my eyebrow raw and became obsessed with my split ends and would pull out any irregular hairs. I thought I had cancer, and then AIDS, because I found some white spots on my tongue. That year, a teacher assigned us the task of writing a story. I figured this was my chance to prove them all wrong. I wanted to show them that I was more than my speech problem, my chicken-scratch handwriting and my fetus-level phonic awareness.

I went home that day, sat down and tried to write all of the images, sounds and feelings that were swirling around in my head. It didn’t work. But my mom told me to tell her the story and she would write it down. So I dictated a 10-page story about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table to my mom. It was my magnum opus. Mom and I were triumphant. A few weeks later, I was summoned to the principal’s office, where I found my mother waiting. The principal proceeded to accuse me of plagiarizing the story. My mom stood by me, defended me and, long after that demeaning incident, continued to support, teach and love me.

But I was devastated. I went home that afternoon and wrote my suicide note. I got a glass of water and a bottle of aspirin. I sat there, feeling nothing. I turned on the light and walked over to my bird Charlie’s cage to say goodbye. He was the size of a Granny Smith apple and had a green body, yellow-tipped wings and black around his eyes like a prizefighter. I found Charlie as a baby with a hurt wing on the sidewalk. He had fallen out of his nest and I saved him, took him home, fixed his wing and loved him. I taught him to talk, and he could say, “Hi, Jon” and “Charlie is a pretty bird.” I took him out of his cage and said I was sorry. He kissed my face and said, “Hi, Jon, hi, Jon, hi, Jon, hi, Jon, hi, Jon.” I put down the bottle of pills. I couldn’t do this to Charlie. He loved me just as I was, and that, for a moment, was enough.

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Becoming ‘(Ab-)Normal’: Normality, Deviance, and Doing Life Course Transitions

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• First Online: 15 September 2022

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• Tobias Boll 9  

Part of the book series: Life Course Research and Social Policies ((LCRS,volume 16))

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This chapter examines how a particular kind of life course transitions, those between affiliations to categories of “human distinctions” like gender, ethnicity, or age, are culturally observed in terms of their normality or deviance. It asks how framings and doings of such transitions as (not) ‘normal’ are related to those of individuals in transition. To this end, it introduces the analytical framework of “un/doing differences” as a way of understanding categorizations of humans as the product of drawing distinctions and connects it to the concept of “doing transitions”. It argues that doing transitions can be understood as one mode of un/doing differences. To illustrate this point, the chapter presents reflections on how affiliations to human categories, combinations of affiliations, and of doing transitions between them are linked to cultural definitions of normality and deviance.

I thank Anna Wanka, Julia Prescher, and Kerstin Rinnert for inspiring me to write this essay, as well as Barbara Stauber, Rick Settersten and Andreas Walther for helpful comments.

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What does it mean to live a ‘normal’ life? In everyday life, it might mean that you go about whatever you do in a perfectly unremarkable way: you get up, eat, work, eat, sleep, and get up again. Overall, you don’t do anything exceptional (except maybe occasionally), you do not make choices beyond what is commonly considered ‘everyday’ (a normal life as ordinary ). A ‘normal’ life may also be described in numbers: your income and spending, number of kids or sex partners, or weight or calorie intake may be within typical statistical parameters (a normal life as average ). Or, finally, living a normal life may mean you do explicitly not engage in dubious activities like randomly shouting at strangers in public (a normal life as conventional ).

Another way to look at a ‘normal life’ is to consider the life course. When assessing if we or others live a “normal, expectable life” (Neugarten, 1969 ), we may not only look at what they do on an everyday basis, but at what they have done at and during certain times in their lives or at a particular age and in which order, and compare it to some standard version like the “institutionalized life course” (of the global north-west) analyzed by Kohli ( 1985 ), or even to models of psychosocial development stages. Levy ( 1977 ) introduced the term “normal biography” ( Normalbiografie ) to describe a standardized, ideal-typical life course shared by a social group that is ‘normal’ in the sense that it applies to most of its members but also fits normative expectations concerning that group. This normal biography is essentially a “status biography”: the individual, it is assumed, is moving through a social structure of status-role-configurations (p. 31). Such conceptions of normality provide patterns of orientation for individuals and societies, with the flip side of being potentially restricting and coercive.

Broadening the focus of Levy’s concept, living a life can be seen as a constant process of moving not only through status positions and social roles but through cultural categories in a wider sense. With Hirschauer ( 2017b , 2021 ) and colleagues (Dizdar et al., 2021 ), a social life can be understood as a constant process of “un/doing differences”: of drawing, re-drawing, and suspending or revoking distinctions between kinds of people. Such “human distinctions”, like gender, ethnicity, or age, are seen as results of practices of “human categorization”. Distinctions comprise a specific set of categories into which individuals are sorted in the course of their life.

The concept of “doing transitions” is closely linked to this, since life course transitions can mark not only passages between phases or stages in life but also between human categories. In the course of their lives, individuals move in and out of categories, move through some, but never leave others. Some transitions are one-way, some go both ways. Some are considered progress, some a setback. With such passages between categories, and along with their categorial affiliations, individuals change who and what they are, in an ongoing process of becoming.

This chapter examines how life course transitions between human categories are culturally observed in terms of their ‘normality’ or ‘deviance’. Particularly, it asks how framings and doings of such transitions as (not) ‘normal’ are related to those of individuals in transition. After a brief introduction of the concept of human categorization in relation to doing transitions (1.), and some remarks on ‘normality’ and deviance (2.), the chapter attempts to understand ascriptions of ‘normality’ as results of affiliations to human categories, their combinations and of doing transitions between them (3.) before concluding by briefly addressing the question: How – and why – does one become ‘(ab-)normal’ (4.)?

A Life in (and Between) Categories: Un/Doing Differences and Doing Life Course Transitions

Human life is a life in categories. Even before we are born, we are observed through categories and sorted into them. When we enter the world as embodied individuals, this process continues and takes our bodily appearance, abilities, or behavior as grounds for further categorizations. We enter institutions that subject us to processes that categorize us by measures like performance, intelligence, etc. Gradually, we progress from being mere objects of such categorizations to becoming classifiers ourselves, not only of others but also of ourselves.

Commonly, affiliations to human categories are seen as qualities or traits of individuals or their bodies. Another way of looking at these traits is to see them as results of an ongoing process of drawing distinctions, constructing categories, and sorting people into them – of doing and undoing differences (Hirschauer, 2021 ): we do differences by creating and reproducing categories, and by sorting ourselves and others into them. Thus, we become kinds of people – who we are. Conversely, such categories and differences between (kinds of) humans can be suspended or revoked and be temporarily or permanently undone .

The crucial point about living is, obviously, that we move around in and between categories. This is where transitions come in: moving through categories implies transitions between them. Un/doing differences and doing transitions are closely linked: Doing implies that both differences and transitions do not merely exist, but are produced, enacted, and processed in and through social practice. This “doing” transitions (or a transition) between human categories is both the practical work of crossing a boundary between them, and of marking this as a “transition” and qualifying it in some way. Hence, doing transitions, like un/doing differences, is nothing people do individually or alone; both involve discursive representations, institutional regulations of affiliation, practices of individual identification, and their interrelations (Settersten et al., Chap. 15 , in this volume). As much as we move through categories, categorial boundaries can move through us. Doing transition(s), then, can be one way of un/doing differences, as marking something as a transition can imply human categories as points of origin and destination, and thereby (re-)produce them. Part of doing differences, in turn, is determining the categories they comprise and the logic of their relations, which may include a trajectory of moving through them.

In the course of our lives, what and who we are changes over time because our categorial affiliations do. At the risk of sounding a bit new age, life can be seen as a constant becoming . This is not meant in a directional, teleological sense, but in the sense that we hardly ever stay the same as we progress in life, be it in micro or macro time (i. e. a situation vs. a life span). This is also not to suggest that humans are in a constant state of flux. Indeed, our everyday experience is different, and the concept of ‘identity’ claims just the opposite. From an everyday-viewpoint, we stay the same, our self, over time – but what that means changes. The notion of ‘becoming’ employed in the title of this chapter is not meant to imply actual constant change, but the theoretical assumption that any current state is in principle contingent. Footnote 1

In this process of becoming, of shifting categories and affiliations, not all categories and distinctions are equal. Human distinctions come with different sets of categories, in number (gender: two or more, age: potentially countless, etc.), size (gender: 50/50-ish, class: many poor, few rich, etc.), etc. Also, not all transitions between categories are equal. We move differently through different kinds of categories. Some are sticky and have rigid boundaries, some have revolving doors and slippery floors.

Let us consider some examples: Age , understood as chronological age, Footnote 2 is inherently transitory, and the categories in which a lifetime is socially structured are passageways: We more or less involuntarily move through them. Gender is more rigid and static. At least in the Western world, we are sorted into a sex category (West & Zimmerman, 1987 ) at or before birth and, even today, mostly expected to inhabit it for life. However, transitioning is, in principle, possible. Age and gender are probably the oldest classifications in cultural history, and both are key dimensions of social organization (Linton, 1942 ). Like gender, one is perceived to be born into categories of ‘ Race ’ or Ethnicity . Unlike gender, switching categories is not an option (Brubaker, 2016 ). We are mostly born into categories of Class , but there is room for movement – both upwards and downwards. People can be born into the category of Disability (that is: sorted into it before birth), but also be thrown into it by illness, injury, or accidents. Once in the category, it is hard to leave. Apart from these ‘big five’ there are myriad others that belong to specific areas of life (education, employment, sports, sexuality, etc.). They all come with specific parameters for entering, leaving, and moving between them.

In addition, we hardly ever inhabit just one category, let alone are defined by just one distinction. We ‘are’ not merely our gender, nor ‘our’ ethnicity, nor ‘our’ dis/ability. Footnote 3 We are the proverbial ‘all of the above’ – our categorial affiliations are multiple and simultaneous, and we share them with others. However, we are not ‘all of the above’ at all times or in the same intensity (Hirschauer, 2017a ).

Against this backdrop, let us revisit our initial question: What does it mean to live a ‘normal life’? A preliminary answer is: It has to do with the interplay of un/doing differences and doing transitions; with the categories we live in, how we inhabit them and how we move through them, as well as how they relate to one another. That is, what living a life is. But what makes it a ‘normal’ one? And how does that relate to our personal ‘normality’?

What Is ‘Normal(-ity)’?

Before looking at how the distinction between the ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ relates to human categorizations and doing transitions let us first briefly consider ‘normality’. Normality is a complex and fluid concept. ‘Normal’ is an umbrella term that denotes many and often contradictory things, and there are many different approaches to defining and assessing normality.

In his essay on “normalism” Link ( 2009 ) notes that the “normal” is both a platitude in modern societies and a key concept for understanding them. Link’s interest lies in theorizing the normal and normalization as fundamental phenomena of modern Western societies. In this vein, he distinguishes his understanding of normality from other meanings such as aesthetic banality, everyday routine, normativity, and social standardization. For Link, “normalism” is a complex of discourses and practices which (re-)produces normalit ies – in the plural – by defining normal zones and their boundaries for various areas of life in specialist discourses and fields like medicine, psychology, sociology, and the like. These normalities are integrated into more general cultural notions of normality which are then, in processes of “normalization”, taken up by everyday individuals (or imposed on them) as orientations for their own life (p. 20).

Link’s distinctions help grasp the scope of the ‘normal’ as a concept. However, from a sociological viewpoint, and for our question about normality and the life course, his definition of normality is too narrow. Indeed, normality has been a core interest of Sociology from its beginnings, since one of its main interests is understanding how the orderliness of everyday life is stabilized. When we talk about a ‘normal life’, the everyday understanding of normality – which does include all the varied things Link explicitly excludes – matters. How can we grasp that?

With Goffman ( 1977 ), we can understand the normal as a frame , an interpretation pattern and a way for people to organize and make sense of everyday experience. The ‘normal’ typically lies beneath the threshold of perception: it is so obvious, self-evident and taken for granted that it stays invisible as something remarkable (Zerubavel, 2018 ). This is possible because, in everyday life, we mostly go by assumptions and fictions of normality. Rather than actively checking and assuring that everything goes according to standard, we mostly assume that what we encounter will be pretty much as usual, until we have good reason to doubt it. This is what Schütz and Luckmann ( 1973 ) refer to as the “natural attitude” towards the everyday lifeworld: to assume its naturalness and unquestioned givenness. As far as other people are concerned, we mostly rely on typified perceptions of them and typically reach a sufficient understanding by assuming their typical motives (pp. 229–242). As Goffman ( 1971 ) aptly observes, most of the time, we present and are “normal appearances” for each other: “present but of no concern” (p. 257). Sacks ( 1977 ), in turn, has shown that a large part of everyday life and of ‘being present but of no concern’ is the job of “doing being ordinary”.

Besides these foundational expectations of normality, about how things will probably be, there are more normative expectations of how things (and people) should be: ideas about normality carry cultural beliefs about what is wrong or right, desirable or undesirable, obligatory or unthinkable. If these expectations are not met, and sanctions follow, notions of normality become norms . As Foucault ( 1976 , 1977 ) has observed, norms are an integral part of cultural efforts of normalization – of bringing subjects to conform to cultural standards of normality through techniques of discipline. Their prescriptive character also links them to cultural recognition and disdain. Herein lies a source of stigma and cause for discrimination and ostracization, and the feeling of being discreditable (Goffman, 1975 ).

Whether the ‘normal’ appears as the given routine of everyday life or a normative rule, what is considered or treated as ‘normal’ (and what that implies) depends on context (geographical, historical, situational) and changes over time. Expectations may differ between social milieus, generations, and cultural environments. And finally, expectations and definitions of the ‘normal’ depend on point of view and perspective. Several, possibly even contradictory versions of normality may co-exist.

As varied as notions of normality are its counterparts. They range from the uncommon, the exceptional and extraordinary, to the deviant and the ‘abnormal’. Degrees of deviance are charged with meaning to different degrees and are valued and sanctioned differently. Think, for example, of deviations from what is considered a ‘normal’ body weight. A little jiggle here and there may be commented on, a considerably higher body weight might be labeled “morbidly obese” and be followed not only by harassment but by medical procedures. Not every deviation from the ‘normal’ is deemed negative, however; some deviations are normalized themselves and barely perceptible in everyday life (say, intellectual capacities just slightly below or above average), some even celebrated (as “high giftedness”), while others become painfully palpable (as “mental disability” which can be followed by stigmatization and exclusion from the job market etc.). Sanctions depend on the binding quality of the expectations a deviation irritates (cf. Dahrendorf, 1960 ).

The ‘normal’ is not a fixed social category, and much less are ‘the normal (ones)’ a fixed group of people. It is a category whose population is in constant flux. At some point or another, most people will make their way in and out of the normal zone, or rather: will be sorted in and out of it. The (normal) life course may itself be considered a mechanism of normalism in that it prescribes an ideal(-typical) way of and trajectory for living a life which people are oriented towards through socialization. Transitions may then be considered both points and processes of normalization or its counterpart, of staying or getting on track or deviating from it.

Such transitions can occur between life phases, developmental states and stages, social roles etc. As such, they are always also transitions between affiliations to human categories. The following section will investigate how notions of normality and categorizations as ‘normal’ or ‘deviant’ are related to un/doing differences and doing transitions.

Un/Doing Differences, Doing Life Course Transitions, and Un/Doing Normality

This section presents three ways in which the distinction of ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ and human distinctions and categories can intersect: (1) categories as such can be considered ‘the’ normal or deviant in a set of categories, (2) affiliations to categories of different human distinctions can be considered normal or deviant in their combination , (3) transitions between categories of a single distinction can be considered more or less normal. The examples given in this section are not meant to be exhaustive, but a starting point for further examination. Also, they need to be simplified for the sake of illustrating different logics of differentiation. There will always be variations and different perspectives in lived reality.

Human distinctions are themselves rarely considered normal or deviant. It is mostly the categories they comprise, which are organized by this distinction. Of course, human distinctions can also be neutral with respect to normality, such as the distinction between people with or without their wisdom teeth: it is of no or low social significance and consequence in most of everyday life and it would be considered odd to draw such a distinction at all.

Human distinctions that have greater social significance may be more or less organized by normality and in different ways. Some distinctions entail a clear and dichotomous distinction between what is considered ‘normal’ and what is not, often with one way to be normal and many ways to be deviant (e.g., the distinction between ‘able’ vs. ‘disabled’); some will envisage the normal and abnormal as poles of a gradient and allow for ‘more or less normal’ categories (heterosexuality and degrees of sexual ‘deviance’); some will designate a ‘normal zone or range’ in which several of their categories fall (intelligence, height, number of sex partners, …), and the boundaries of that normal zone can be more or less fuzzy. These different logics of normality can also change over time.

When differences entail a normal zone or pole, categories are not merely descriptive but are often endowed with more or less value. Frequently, whatever is considered ‘normal’ is valued higher. Hence, distinctions of the normal and the deviant often also mark power asymmetries. Although the notion of normality is not per se linked to statistical prominence, oftentimes the category used for a minority is also deemed ‘not normal’ and functions to stabilize the unmarked ‘normal’ state of the majority (Zerubavel, 2018 ). A classic example of this is the distinction between hetero- and homosexuality. Preferring sex partners of ‘the other’ gender is still considered normal, while being labeled as homosexual is mostly still being labeled as outside of the norm, at least as remarkably different. The organization by the (ab-)normal is not always that obvious. Some differences appear to be purely descriptive at first glance. The distinction between ‘men’ and ‘women’ is primarily descriptive, yet the two sides of this distinction are not equal in their consequences for the people in them.

Another aspect is how people ‘inhabit’ their categories. Hirschauer ( 2017a ) speaks of “degrees of purity” of social affiliations. Being in a category not only means to be placed on one side of a distinction but in a “more or less central or peripheral zone within the category” (p. 49): One can be an ‘ideal’, a ‘prototypical’, an ‘average’ or ‘marginal’ exemplar of a category’s population. Classic archetypes of deviance are the ‘effeminate man’ or the ‘infantile adult’: They are deemed deviant because they are breaching expectations about the appropriate behavior for membership in a category by filling their category in a way that would be deemed appropriate for a member of another (or the other) category. They irritate the logic of differentiation by moving gradually between poles that are differentiated categorically , they ‘lean into’ other categories and their prerogatives and duties. Normality and deviation here have less to do with transitions between categories than with transgressions of their boundaries. However, not all transgressions are observed similarly. To what degree a transgression into the “category-bound activities” (Sacks, 1995 , p. 241), behavioral styles, or aesthetic expressions of another category will be socially overlooked, tolerated or even celebrated, differs between differences and is an open empirical question.

How does this relate to living a ‘normal’ life and being a ‘normal’ person? People who are sorted in one of the categories considered deviant in one distinction tend to be identified (or often identify themselves) with that category. It has often been observed that falling into a deviant category in one respect can lead to being considered not-quite-normal overall : Living a ‘normal’ life and being a ‘normal’ person, then, is the task of staying out of the wrong categories. In addition, it is about staying within the parameters and boundaries of those categories and inhabiting them in the ‘right’ way, keeping a good eye on how much one transgresses into other categorial territories and finding the ‘right’ place within a category. This aspect of combined affiliations to different categories is explored further in the following section.

Combinations

A second way the distinction of the normal and the deviant organizes human categorization is related to combinations of social affiliations. Affiliations to different human categories are connected in different ways.

Hybridity. A first type of combination is the double membership in categories of the same distinction. Examples like androgyny, bisexuality, or intersexuality all combine categorial affiliations that are often deemed mutually exclusive. Such “strong hybrids” (Hirschauer, 2017a , p. 49) do not transition between categories and cross their boundaries but blur the boundary itself. Such cases of ambiguity are often met with scepticism or rejection because they irritate a cultural urge for categorial purity (Bauman, 2007 ). The framing of their double membership and transgressions is connected to doing transitions . Bisexuality is sometimes (disparagingly) considered transitional – ‘just a phase’. Here, doing transitions is both a way of de-normalization (in that categorial transgressions are marked) and normalization (because a restoration of categorial order is envisaged). Similarly, intersexuality at birth has until recently been taken as grounds for surgically transitioning individuals to a state of categorial unambiguity. Double affiliation tends to be viewed as an identity of individuals whose personifying categorial ambiguity becomes grounds for their categorization as outside the norm. Ideas about categorial unambiguity are connected to cultural recognition, which, as Nederveen ( 2001 ) states, “stretches or revalues social boundaries but does not transgress them” (p. 219). Becoming (ab-)normal is about crossing and not crossing the right boundaries.

Couplings. Another case of combinations concerns categories in different distinctions. Some categorial affiliations or even entire distinctions are reserved or designated for members of particular categories: you can only be x once you’re y . A good example is age categories. While age is considered linear and continuous, it is culturally divided into categories. Along with membership in a specific age category come ideas about categorial affiliations in other distinctions: a child is commonly not thought of as hetero- or homosexual but is not supposed to have a ‘sexual orientation’ at all. Similarly, you likely will only be considered a ‘mother’ when you are also a ‘woman’, etc.

Some categorial affiliations are linked to categories of other distinctions: when you are x you are also expected to be y, but not z . A common theme here is ‘congruence’ – the idea that affiliations to some categories go together, and others do not. Its opposite has been described as ‘status inconsistency’: a situation where a person’s social status is different or contradictory in different respects. While some inconsistencies have been normalized (artists can be high in prestige yet low in income and that is just what they are expected to be), others are marked as deviating from the ‘normal’. Not always is this about social status in the sense of prestige but in the sense of ‘being x’. For example, being in both the categories ‘gay’ and ‘parent’ has been unspeakable (yet a reality) historically, is becoming increasingly common today, but is still considered outside the norm, at least not unremarkable.

How links between categorial affiliations affect (attributions of) normality is also indicated by how expectations about how to inhabit a category ‘correctly’ can change with other affiliations. While gender is expected to stay the same over the life course, it is expected to be ‘done’ differently with age: As a teenager, it is perfectly fine to be obsessed with one’s gendered body and gender performance – but not in one’s late forties. Here, doing transitions is part of doing difference: Part of doing gender ‘correctly’ is doing age transitions ‘correctly’. Other distinctions, in turn, remain untouched – ethnicity and its performance, for example, are not expected to change with age.

Concerning living a ‘normal’ life and being a ‘normal’ person, we might say that becoming (ab-)normal is about coordinating one’s memberships in categories as to reach or maintain congruency .

Transitions

The two aspects addressed so far focused on being in categories. However, as stated at the beginning, life is just as much about moving through and between human categories. Such passages between human categories happen in the course of life course transitions and they are life course transitions. A third way the distinction of the normal and the deviant organizes human categorization is in these transitions and in how they are ‘done’, i. e. accomplished and framed. Most human distinctions come with a specific logic as to how one is to move or not move through the categories they comprise. Becoming ‘(ab-)normal’, then, is a question of sticking to or deviating from this logic.

To Transition – or Not? A first question is whether transitioning itself is deemed normal. Depending on the distinction in question, categorial transitions may be considered automatic, obligatory, welcome, optional, undesirable, or even impossible.

Let us again consider age. Nothing seems more unremarkable as ageing – after all, you age while you read these lines (sorry!) without actively doing anything, really. Yet, while your lifetime count goes up automatically, progressing through age categories is different. While continuous transitions are mostly overlooked as transitions and are normalized in their everydayness, transitions across categorial boundaries carry potential for attributions of normality and deviance. Consider adulthood: In Germany, for example, when people celebrate their 18th birthday, they not only move from one category in a questionnaire or dating app to the next – they also transition into a different legal category of citizenship with rights and duties reserved for people in that category and above. That, however, does not imply that they abruptly feel or see themselves as “adults”, as a different kind of people, but that they enter a life phase in which they move towards a new identity gradually (cf. Arnett, 2000 ). While the transition to adulthood is ‘done’ on a legal, institutional level, it needs to be done on a level of individual behavior, too. This is where normality in a different sense comes into play. As members of a certain age category, individuals are expected to behave in an ‘appropriate’ manner. Transitions shift expectations, and subsequently, behaving according to these expectations can shift individuals from one category to another: Doing transitions , in this case, lies (amongst other things) in the shifting of expectations through discursive or institutional practices, but is also accomplished by doing being x in the ‘right’ way on an individual level. Deviating from this logic can, in turn, be deemed as a failure to transition, and subsequently lead to attributions of being outside of the norm: Becoming (ab-)normal is about inhabiting a category in the right way. This has to do with another aspect: Becoming (ab-)normal is also about progressing through categories in the right order or direction. People are expected to transition through age categories in order : ageing should, up to a certain point, follow a logic of progress and development. In fact, the logic of the transition and the quality of the categories the transition connects, are related: While transitions between ‘states’ may be considered mere ‘change’, those between ‘stages’ are considered ‘progress’ – and vice versa.

Unlike the supposed naturalness and normalness of transitions between categories of some distinctions such as age, but also phases of educational of professional life, other transitions between categories are culturally marked as unusual or deviant. Rogers Brubaker ( 2016 ) compares the two prominent cases of Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal whose transitions between categories of gender (Jenner) and race (Dolezal) were met with markedly different reactions. While Jenner’s coming out as transgender was met with a positive response and appraisal, Dolezal’s outing as being white was met with a moral outcry. Brubaker’s analysis shows that the acceptance and considered normality of transitions between categories differ between distinctions. While it is increasingly considered normal – or at least ‘normally deviant’ – to transition between gender categories, there is no such cultural option for ethnicity or race . This differential treatment of transitions can itself be considered doing transitions : Transitioning between gender (or rather: sex) categories is considered at least possible, while race is deemed unchangeable and attempts such as Dolezal’s are sometimes even deemed ‘unreal’. To deny Dolezal’s claim to a specific categorial affiliation is, in a way, to ‘undo’ her transition in the sense of declaring it impossible. The normality or deviance of transitioning between categories at all is related to the quality of the distinction at stake: it affects its openness or resistance to change.

How to Transition? A second question concerns how a transition is made. Firstly, the biographical timing and duration of transitions may be made relevant with respect to normality. Some transitions are expected to be made at certain points in time (=life), and there are expectations about how long some should take. The case of infant development is striking here: parents, like doctors, like nursery staff, are constantly monitoring whether a child is developing ‘normally’, that is: at the same speed and at a same or similar age as others. Learning to eat with a spoon at 6 years old and being able to read at 2 years old will both be considered not normal. But other, less obvious cases might also have to do with timing. For example, the supposed behavioral and sexual deviance of LGBT*IQ people might stem from a temporality issue: commonly, puberty is perceived as the phase of life in which an excessive preoccupation with one’s gender and sexuality is deemed ‘ordinarily abnormal’. In LGBT*IQ people it can be prolonged or postponed due to societal conditions and inhibitions in place when people were younger and of supposedly “appropriate” age for being preoccupied with their sexuality. As Wanka ( 2020 ) notes, cases of “transitional deviance” (p. 194) with respect to timing are quite common and do not necessarily lead to negative consequences but are even necessary for stabilizing normativities: ignoring some deviations makes the norm as such less prone to disruption while sanctioning others exemplifies the norm. Doing transitions through defining and marking their ideal timing and what are ignorable, tolerable, or inexcusable deviations from it is a way of defining zones of normality and thus of controlling categorial transitions.

Secondly, the mode of transition can be made relevant. While some transitions are seen as merely ‘occurring’, others are seen as something that must be actively and practically done – performed or accomplished, maybe even be marked by rites of passage that make a transition accountable. Part of doing transitions is determining the parameters for how a transition is to be done. For example, in Western societies, the transition between gender categories cannot just be decided by an individual but must be practically done by several parties (through individual behavioral changes, administrative procedures like a name change, medical treatments like hormone-therapy or surgery, etc.). This process is then also framed as a transition , i. e. as a process in which an individual changes category but stays essentially the same person. Normality comes into play in different respects: Transitioning between gender categories requires those transitioning to at least temporarily cross the boundary of the normal zone, e. g. by undergoing psychological evaluation and accept ascriptions of a “gender identity disorder”. The successful passing as a member of the new gender category is, in a way, also a way of shedding ascriptions of deviance by a kind of ‘undoing doing transitions’: by covering one’s tracks and making transitional efforts unaccountable.

The three ways in which un/doing differences, doing transitions and un/doing normality can intersect presented in this section are, of course, not a finite list. The entries on it are subject to historical change and, as will have become apparent, to specific points of view. Research into these processes and logics of how attributions of ‘(ab-)normality’ are linked to ways of un/doing differences and un/doing transitions, and especially into other forms beyond the ones mentioned here, will shed light on the ever-shifting normative orders of societies.

(Ab-)Normal People in Transition(s)

This chapter started out by asking how we can conceptualize a ‘normal life’. It offered reflections on the role of doing life course transitions and affiliations to, combinations of, and transitions between human categories for cultural definitions of normality and deviance. How, finally, is living a ‘normal’ life related to becoming and being a ‘normal’ person? I have suggested an understanding of ‘becoming (ab-)normal’ as an ongoing process of affiliation to human categories and of doing transitions. Part of doing life course transitions as transitions between human categories is determining their (ab-)normality with respect to timing, direction, mode, etc. How, then, do attributions of normality to life course transitions affect those engaged in them? To think about this, it may be helpful to understand individuals or kinds of people as products of transitions , rather than units transitioning . When and why, we could ask, are individuals or types or kinds of people, as cultural phenomena, produced as co-products of doing transitions?

According to Simmel ( 1908 ) individuals emerge at the intersections of social circles. What makes them uniquely themselves is, somewhat ironically, the combination of affiliations to categories they share with others. We could imagine the ‘normal’ and the ‘deviant’ as another set of circles, with blurry outlines and of ever-changing size, that form new overlaps with the categories, combinations and transitions underneath, like floating bubbles over the social pattern of multiply overlapping circles, through which some things appear ‘normal’, and others do not. We could then picture ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ people as emerging when normality and deviance are attributed as a quality to categorial affiliations, their combinations, and as part of doing categorial transitions.

Foucault, in his study on the history of sexuality (Foucault, 1977 ), analyzes how ‘the homosexual’ was historically constructed both as a kind of people , a sexual “species” (p. 47), and as a distinct kind of individual . This cultural production of a ‘perversion’ and a population ‘belonging’ to it addressed a societal problem: The assumed relational sense of the gender distinction lost plausibility the more men and women were declared to be fundamentally different beings. The restoration of relations between men and women as normal and natural required the marking of relations between men and between women as unnatural, and the “implantation” (p. 41) of this desire in individuals outside the norm(-al). On a much smaller scale, Smith ( 1978 ) offers a reconstruction of how the deviance of a single individual is produced in her study on “K” and how she ends up being categorized as “mentally ill” by her college flatmates. K’s being labeled as deviant is not only a way for them to make sense of her behavior, but also a way for the teller of K’s story to ascertain their own normality.

So, we may say that individuals of a certain ‘type’ or ‘kind’ may occur, as a solution to irritations of expectations of normality and social order . Concerning doing transitions, it appears that some ways of transitioning between human categories are considered normal, and that extends to the people transitioning. Transitions that are considered normal are seen as status changes of individuals, while ‘deviant’ transitions further push individuals into a special category for those involved in them, thus (re-)producing them as kinds of people.

Of course, understandings of what it is to be ‘normal’ and how we value it change over time and with context. Indeed, in late modernity, being outside of the norm might even be considered appealing (Reckwitz, 2017 ). But again: this does not hold for all kinds of being outside social norms or cultural normalities. Things are more complex. Notions of the ‘normal’ differ between human distinctions, categories and transitions, and so do valuations of them. Figuratively speaking, even more bubbles are floating into the picture.

With all these iridescent bubbles floating around, it is easy to overlook that many of them will not burst and dissolve into nothing at the slightest touch, but that the game of distinctions addressed in this chapter has very tangible consequences. One is that since those who are classified are always themselves classifiers (Bourdieu, 1984 ), the arrangement of kinds of people and individuals in a social space that is structured along the axes of normality and value positions individuals and groups in positions of varying recognition and power. Some kinds of people and individuals lose their own rights to participate in the game of establishing normality gradually or completely, while others tend to gain more influence in it.

It may precisely be the underdetermined meaning and value of normality that hints at its cultural function. Since there is no absolute definition of what ‘normal’ means, it is best to understand the distinction of the normal and deviant as a principle and motor which drives and organizes the un/doing of human distinctions and social affiliations, a kind of meta difference that crosscuts other human distinctions. And it might be the undetermined value of the ‘normal’ that allows for incentivizing or de-incentivizing categorial transitions and change and hence (de-)stabilizing social and normative order.

Tracing the complex interrelationships between definitions of the normal and deviant and valuations and devaluations, as well as further conceptually grasping the relations between normality, human categorization and doing life course transitions will require a more comprehensive and systematic investigation. This chapter aimed to present some first reflections on these complex relations. Empirical studies of actual cases of co-productions of normality and deviance and kinds of people may both profit from and help elaborate an understanding of these relations and help understand ‘becoming (ab-)normal’.

This thought echoes basic ideas of relational sociology, which does not take fixed substances or entities as a starting point of inquiry, but social relations (for an overview see Dépelteau, 2018 ). However, my aim here is less to engage in the related ontological discussions, but to highlight un/doing differences and doing transitions as one aspect of how individuals and social groups come into being in cultural practices.

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Acknowledgement

This work has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) as part of the Collaborative Research Centre 1482 Studies in Human Categorization – Project-ID 442261292 – SFB 1482.

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Tobias Boll

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Barbara Stauber

Institute of Social Pedagogy and Adult Education, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Andreas Walther

College of Public Health & Human Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

Richard A. Settersten, Jr.

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Boll, T. (2022). Becoming ‘(Ab-)Normal’: Normality, Deviance, and Doing Life Course Transitions. In: Stauber, B., Walther, A., Settersten, Jr., R.A. (eds) Doing Transitions in the Life Course. Life Course Research and Social Policies, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13512-5_11

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7 Powerful Reasons You Should Stop Trying to Be ‘Normal’

Here are seven reasons why you should stop trying to be normal and start being yourself instead:

1. Normal May Mean Playing it Safe

It takes courage to stand out from the crowd and follow your own path. It may be easier to simply do what everyone else is doing, but it probably won’t be nearly as fulfilling.

It can take a huge amount of energy to try to be normal. When you choose normality, you may inadvertently be giving up some of your own strength. You can empower yourself by choosing to honor your authenticity and staying true to who you are.

The choice is yours. You can either choose to potentially be limited by concepts of normality, or you can choose to free yourself and live your life in a way that feels natural to you. You may never know what you can achieve until you try. So rather than trying to be normal, use that energy to discover your own unique potential.

2. Normal Is a Subjective Ideal

The concept of normality is more of a subjective opinion than an objective reality. Each culture develops its own consensus of what is normal. What one culture may consider commonplace another may find unusual.

“The world ‘normal’ suggests there is a right and wrong way to be a person,” said Pandora L. MacLean-Hoover, LICSW . “There isn’t. There is a spectrum of acceptable behavior in lawful societies like ours. It’s vast and varies greatly.”

3. Normal Is Not Easily Defined

It is often easier for people to define abnormal than it is to nail down a definition of normal. The reason for this is there is no clear definition of what normal is. It is only when someone deviates from what is generally conceived as ordinary that people become concerned with such labels.

“People widely embrace the notion they can always do better,” MacLean-Hoover said. “In doing so, they frequently deny themselves opportunities to validate their efforts. I suggest people become acquainted with the phrase, ‘I did my best.’”

4. Perfection Does Not Exist

Often, when people are trying to be normal, what they’re really trying to achieve is perfection . Perfection is unattainable, and when you strive for it, you may end up focusing too much on perceived flaws and not enough on strengths.

According to Andrew Archer, LCSW , a major drawback of trying to achieve perfection is that it is generally driven by a feeling of not being “good enough.”

“The self-fulfilling prophecy of perfectionism leads to perpetual cycles of dissatisfaction because the person gives 110% all the time, but never believes that they themselves are worthy or deserving in some way,” Archer said. “The negative belief gets in the way of ostensible achievement.”

Humans are not perfect. Mistakes happen and that is how we learn. Choose to find the beauty in the imperfections. If everything was already perfect, there wouldn’t be any room for growth.

5. People May Miss Out on Your Uniqueness

When you identify yourself as normal, you may be giving up your personal identity . We all have our differences. Embrace yours, and respect those of others.

Everyone possesses unique characteristics and qualities. When you deny yourself the right to be uniquely you, the entire world could be missing out. Can you imagine how boring life would be if everyone was the same? Everyone possesses unique characteristics and qualities. When you deny yourself the right to be uniquely you, the entire world could be missing out. Do yourself and the rest of us a favor: be yourself and be proud of who you are.

“If being ‘normal’ means being the same as others, then the benefits for being different are enjoyed in the form of recognition. This is especially true for creative people ,” MacLean-Hoover said. “Striving for normality may magnify fear of failing while it diminishes creativity. Being curious and creative requires taking risk. Worrying about living up to a nonexistent standard puts a person’s emphasis on the outcome instead of the process.”

Emphasizing the outcome and seeking external acceptance is not likely to help you feel fulfilled. You are more likely to find genuine happiness through self-acceptance . Rather than trying to get other people to love you, try to simply love yourself .

6. Labels Are for Soup Cans, Not People

Labels are useful for some things, but they often don’t fit in well with the messy world of human emotions and personality traits . Even psychological diagnoses can be challenging to make, as no two people diagnosed with a single condition are exactly alike.

If normal is equated with the status quo, then abnormality becomes equal to nonconformity, Archer said.

“The American Psychological Association and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual are good examples of a process that is implicitly defining normality through a diagnostic classification system of ‘disorders,’” Archer said. “There is a sense of abnormality created when a person is diagnosed with a ‘mental illness.’ The injustices of this system are both the eradication of culture within the process and the lack of definition for ‘normal.’”

People are not easily categorized, and perhaps this is for the best. Human life is too organic to be rigidly classified. Normal might be more of an abstraction than a human experience.

7. Normal May Not Change the World

Normal may be similar to usual, average, typical, or expected. Normal implies conforming to a preconceived standard, which can limit your potential. You might never achieve the extraordinary as long you choose to remain ordinary. Normal generally doesn’t mean stretching limits. Normal doesn’t commonly mean thinking outside the box. Normal usually doesn’t mean achieving greatness.

“Typically, we get caught up in comparison of what we think was normal or should be ideal when we reflect on the past or daydream on potential future understandings of who we think we are,” Archer said.

Don’t be normal. Be you.

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• 15 comments

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Who can even say what normal is anymore? What is natural and feels right for me is going to be the opposite of what another person may feel. I think that it is far better to have grace, be accepting of others as well as yourself instead of always seeking to meet some standard of normal that no one even recognizes anymore.

I tried for so long to fit into that conformity box that after a while I didn’t even know who I was anymore. I spent too much time looking for the person that I thought that everyone else wanted me to be instead of focusing solely on who I was and what I wanted out of life. I think that I spent way too long doing that; but on the flip side after a while I really did learn what I wanted out of life and now that is so clear to me now.

Be yourself. That’s all that we can do in this world to be happy is just to find a way to stay true to who we are. It is not easy because I know that there will be times when we feel that we are being pulled in a direction that tells us that we must be this or we must be that. But then one constant that you will always have in your life is when you are true to who you really are and you can draw from your own inner strength. That is something that will inevitably disappear if you are only worried about what others are thinking and not what will in essence make you happy.

normal is boring, different is exciting

I often wonder just how much good in this world we think that we are doing by continuing to do the same old thing all of the time. I know that there is a temptation to do what is familiar but you have to know that doing something that forces you to think outside of the box can be a wonderful learning tool for you as well.

Why be normal? Isn’ t that on a t shirt somewhere that I’ve seen before?

There is a line between taking chances and being stupid. I am all for encouraging young people to take some chances in their lives, I do think that this can be good for them and that they can learn a lot from doing that. But don’t be stupid about it.

Nice article. Good job team!

Why encourage normalcy? I find that a better thing to encourage is for one to be oneself, not some cookie cutter version of others aorund you. If you are just like everyone else then is there really anything all that special about you?

It is a very article indeed

Knowing Right from Wrong. Go with your heart.

extraordinormal

I’m both normal and extraordinary, it’s possible, because my role model, Peter Hitchens is extraordinary. Not every action I take is what he does, but I took only the basics of his character mixed with my own uncommon twist to things: my diet, my beliefs, my learning, a combination not alike to the same mixture from others, because some of them differ from the beliefs of others, plus my own invented beliefs thrown in: antidisbelief, roboticism, antidisintellectualism, to name a few beliefs of my own invention. The emancipation of Germany’s the emancipation of mankind, and I intend to emancipate myself with my future job, and hopefully with my work in philosophy, recognizing is another invented belief of mine: I came up with the philogony (style of thinking, not a philosophy) that when a thing is recognized you can perceive it immediately from what is already known, like “ahh, that’s what it is, I recognize that” together with the belief that if it was unrecognizable, you wouldn’t get that first impression. On the contrary, my normal life involves a not-so-normal diet (mainly raw vegan, with the occasional vegan), and therefore I’m limiting cooked foods to ones in my cookbooks used occasionally, to vegan burgers, vegan hotdogs, and vegan pizzas and canapes and coffee, cola drinks and ginger beer & that’s it, and I smoke ( :O ). On my road to normality I’m not trying to be like everybody else but only as common as Peter Hitchens and as uncommon as a smallish amount of it. What fascinates me about him is that compared to my lonely and rather scary distinctiveness and freakiness of my past this guy isn’t so scary, and hence to fit in better is to take a role model, to stop being hated is simply to stop being different (people hate different) and again take a role model. I’ve been asking a few questions as to whether they’re normal and the default answer is yes. However I’m not too normal and to me that’s a cookie cutter standard of my own invention, hence the above name. However the beliefs attached to both raw veganism and Bolshevism as Peter Hitchens used to believe is 1. better health, 2. the peasant and industrial workman rather than the middle class, 3. the animals, 4. the feudal police and bondman are the enemy, 5. the environment, 6. the Proletariat, which is the Bolshevik lifeblood, and so forth, so you see certain things have beliefs attached. I abandoned a very few beliefs of mine and they were painful to give up but I felt better for it, less hateful (wasn’t hating as much), but I remain a mentalist and an anticlerical, to name a few of my hates. So yeah, be normal, and see how you will feel happier and better for it. Take a role model.

What even is normal you can’t be normal everyone has their little problems so no one is normal

I stopped trying to be normal and became the crazy side I used to hide from everyone else. Now, I get to laugh and enjoy life without worrying about people judging me (they still do, but I don’t care about what they think). I graduated college with a paralegal degree and plan to start a retail side business that I’m expecting to boom once I start. If I tried to stay normal, I would have had a different story to share.

Of these abnormal things, they feel funny, I can smell the weirdness in them, but I suppose popular people want to use me as a scapegoat, especially my dad who boxes everything in the need to conform, I say no, why should I be a popular and accepted person? By definition persons are different to all mankind, an individual human being, being different, even to the point people don’t recognise what I am is what’s defined as a person. I’m a person because of all the normality which does work and is widely liked by the mainstream, may lead to me being cruel to people, ignoring fun, being disrespectful, putting people in categories. No way, if anything I’d rather play this weirdo who’s all alone, listening to the doors, than follow mediocrity of people who are against me, who want to probe me with questions, and to talk at me, not to me, and generally label me as strange, normal people is the downfall of mankind and the dumbing down of nations, if anyone popular gets pissed off at me in every mental facility I’m in then no, I don’t want to be that person.

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College Essay Topic Help: Make “Being Average” a Superpower

Two teenagers sat across from me. I was helping them brainstorm topics for a college app essay.

“I’m an average student,” one of them wrote during the free write exercise. The other one wished that she was smarter, and “had something interesting to write about.”

I’m Just Average

I could have said the same thing about myself at that age, but would have been too insecure to admit it. I also struggled with finding a topic and worried I wasn’t interesting enough. And I hadn’t faced down a monumental challenge that demonstrated my courage or strength of character.

Looking back at my younger self, I think I underestimated the challenge of trying to overcome being “average” in an age that rewarded passions , talent, and extraordinary ability.

Take my twelve years of piano lessons . I started when I was in first grade. I learned how to read music and made my way slowly through lesson books. I didn’t realize how mediocre I was until I attended a music camp in high school. By then, I had played piano for ten years, a majority of my life.

It was only when the first student, and then the second, went up to play their audition piece in front of everyone that I realized that I was way out of my league. Their pieces were memorized; to me they sounded like professionals. I sat in my chair, piano book in hand, trying to figure out how to escape from that room before my turn came, trying to figure out what I would do for the next two weeks.

I probably ended up there because no one had thought to discourage me—not my gentle mom nor my piano teacher who probably needed the extra income. One winter he even asked me to accompany the high school chorus he directed. I was excited by the concept until the actual day came. I was always nervous when I played in front of people–even my piano teacher—but that night my anxiety soared to new heights.

When he gave the downbeat to start, I hit a wrong note. When the singing started, I lost track of timing. My well-rehearsed fingers flew through the piece as I willed the experience to be over as quickly as possible. When I looked up, my teacher was red in the face, stomping his feet. He wanted me to hear the beat. But beat had no relevance to me in that moment.

I did not quit my piano lessons, even after the humiliation of that night. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because I thought he needed students and didn’t want to hurt his feelings, or maybe it was because I considered each new song he assigned me as a fresh opportunity, a chance for redemption. Though it took an extraordinary amount of practice for me to master a song, I loved the feeling of my fingers getting the notes right when I finally did.

I could have written about that optimism, my willingness and determination to try again and again despite the process never getting easier. Or about my performance anxiety and the courage it took to face it weekly.

But I was too busy blaming myself for not being better, for thinking that if I practiced more often I would improve.

I guess it was possible; had I worked on my scales daily like my teacher suggested, I might have had more success.

We All Have a Story

But now, as a parent to four musical sons, all with good rhythm, I see what an uphill climb I faced. I see my determination to stick with something that was hard. Back then, I underestimated my resilience in the face of objective mediocrity.

And, I was too embarrassed by being average and could never admit it. It felt like it was my fault. In retrospect, I should have been proud of my efforts that reaped relatively small rewards and used it to my advantage.

“I understand the feeling,” I said to the young adults sitting across from me in the square conference room.

“But I think I could prove you wrong.”

Megan Houston Sager, Ed.M, is a teacher, tutor and writer and also a mom to four mostly grown sons. Find her on her blog,  megansager.com   and on  Medium,  https://medium.com/@meganhsager

Real College Essay Examples: Johns Hopkins

Getting your college essay right is incredibly important, but you already know that or you wouldn’t be here. We have compiled a list of our favorite college essays that earned students admission to Johns Hopkins University. We think it’s best to jot down your own ideas before clouding your mind with the ideas of others , so quickly type those up before moving forward!

Did you write them down great now onto the goodies., a study in ambidexterity.

I was born with an extra hand—kind of. Anatomically, I’m normal. I don’t have a third arm protruding from the center of my chest or anything of the sort. I do, however, have the unusual ability to use both hands equally well. When I was little, I thought of my ambidexterity as a fun trick. I always liked to play with people when learning a new skill:

“Okay, now are you right or left handed?”

“I don’t know,” I would answer with a comical smile. Or even better, “Pick one for me.”

It’s a bit silly, but I enjoyed the simple satisfaction of being different. For me, ambidexterity has always meant versatility. From using my left hand in a restrictive corner while doing yardwork to switch-hitting in baseball depending on the context of the game, my hands give me the flexibility to adapt to my surroundings. As I’ve grown, however, I’ve realized that ambidexterity means more than just its quirky face value. It’s synonymous with many of the other components of my character.

Ambidexterity is part of who I am, yet it’s something few people know I have. It makes sense that only my closest friends know about my dual-handed capabilities. Although I use my talent throughout my day, it usually blends in with the normal functions of anyone else’s hands. In this sense, ambidexterity isn’t some glaring anomaly: It’s only when you realize it’s there does it become special.

Similarly, much of who I am remains unnoticed at first glance, not because of insignificance but because of initial perception. Most of the people who know me have no clue I’m valedictorian; I’m the kid making paper airplanes at the end of class. The rest don’t realize I “do more than just school” but are pleasantly surprised to see me dancing around as Risky Business Tom Cruise for Halloween or just hanging out all over town on weekends. I like to think that ambidexterity helps me juggle these different parts of myself without letting anything go.

In my job as a Little League umpire, I have three distinct identities. To the league manager, I’m the responsible, quick-replying emailer and the primary person for the job. To the coaches, I’m a wave a relief—they know I’m going to make the right call. To the young players, I’m the umpire who gives helpful tips as well as the one they feel comfortable joking around with. Though each of these roles helps me in their own way, collectively, they are the reason I was made the lead umpire of the league.

In terms of academics, ambidexterity means finishing a half-hour phone call trying to understand the complexities of William Faulkner and immediately turning around to text watered-down calculus explanations to help another student. My ability to transition quickly has helped me establish myself as a go-to helper in nearly every subject, but these behind-the-scenes interactions happen away from my teachers’ eyes. Even teachers, however, see the respect other students have for me during class discussions. Outside of class, other students come to me because they recognize that I genuinely want to help guide them toward their own success.

When it comes down to it, ambidexterity means balance. From athlete to academic, from reliable employee to kind-hearted helper, I take on an array of roles in my life. Just as my two hands merge to create a more efficient system, my personal flexibility allows me to handle the many aspects of my life from different angles. Although each part of me is individually effective, my most complete self comes from applying them together. It allows me to become more than just efficient or well-rounded but a better friend, a more fitting leader, and a respected role model. So now, when I run into the inevitable questions in college applications about who I really am, I can answer clearly: I am ambidextrous.

In this real college essay, Justin was able to communicate to admissions his versatility and well-rounded character by writing an essay about his hands. Onto the next!

The blue armchair.

Instinctively, I hold my breath. The pungent fragrance of roasted coffee beans and the shrill sound of steam whistles from the espresso machines force my senses into overload. Before me are mounds of freshly-baked goodies and colossal stacks of books piled on bookshelves as high as the ceiling. Pressing my nose against the glass cover, I don’t budge until the ginormous chocolate-chip cookie is within my possession. With one hand holding my cookie, I collect as many books as my chubby arms can hold and plop into my favorite blue armchair. I would look forward to this routine: every Saturday, when the big hand hit six, my parents would take me to Timothy’s, their coffee shop, and I would begin the day’s quest.

To my childhood self, Timothy’s was my bridge to Terabithia . In this world, I’ve been a resident of Dr. Seuss’s topsy-turvy Thneedville; an acrobat, weaving words into webs with Charlotte; and a palace spy in Wonderland, fighting for my life in a game of flamingo croquet. Braving these adventures instilled in me a sense of invincibility that pushed me to tackle new experiences, even engaging in mischievous absurdities, both in this world and reality.

Draping myself in jewelry constructed out of straws and cup sleeves, I would unabashedly strut all around the café. Expressions of this unwavering self-confidence and sense of invincibility were not solely limited to my sense of fashion, but rather, it was ingrained in every thought and action that I had. I believed that Timothy’s should’ve been called Anna-Banana’s, that the blue armchair was my throne, and that the deliveryman’s dolly was my royal carriage. Ignorant to the laws of gravity, I once jumped off the dolly after reaching peak acceleration, wholeheartedly believing that I could fly. With a bruised ego and scraped knees, I learned a valuable lesson: invincibility is a mere delusion.

I realized that Timothy’s was never a world constructed solely for me, at least in the way I had imagined. There were no adoring crowds, and the blue armchair wasn’t mine. While I had imagined glorious adventures, in reality, my family’s livelihood depended on the success of this café. Moving to Canada without any support, my educated parents relinquished their professional aspirations to build a stable business to provide for me. Awareness of my parents’ sacrifices for my success imbued my understanding of the interdependency of people, their successes, and their failures, providing me with a new lens to construct my understanding of the world.

Shifting from being front and center to an observant spectator, I began to see beyond myself, picking up the art of people-watching. As if placing an invisibility cloak on, I would quietly sink into the blue armchair, discreetly watching peoples’ behavior and interactions with one another. I found myself creating whimsical backstories of circumstance for each passerby, intertwining chance encounters and meaningful exchanges. People-watching not only helped me to become more aware of those around me, was also as an opportunity to explore undiscovered parts of myself.

I learned that despite the many sports that I have experimented with, I am the MVP at bench-warming. I make a mean latte, often topping my creations with adorable foam cats. I adore Broadway musicals and am always ready to showcase my dancing at a flash mob. I passionately believe in advocating for human rights, actively engaging in Amnesty International’s initiatives. And, I discovered that I am not only an advocate for but also identify with the LGBTQ+ community.

To say that I have figured out all of who I am would be a lie. Unlike the world of fantasy, there is no single defining moment – no Excalibur, no Sorting Hat – that marks my complete evolution. My niche in the world constantly changes, but what remains steadfast is my commitment to a life of service and adventure, albeit it isn’t as cozy as the blue armchair.

Any essay that references Harry Potter is a winner in our book. Congrats Anna!

A wider lens.

“No, no, no, you’re all doing it wrong! The secret to developing realistic drawings lies in your ability to study every nuance of the object in front of you,” my art teacher advised. “Try sketching with one eye closed; it’s all about perspective, people!”

My classmates accepted his advice and I watched as they attempted to make sense of the lifeless apples and pears that lay on the desk in front of them. I, too, clamped my left eye shut, pretending that this technique altered my view in the same manner it affected my peers. It didn’t. With one eye closed, my fruit appeared precisely the same as it had with both eyes open.

As a result of a Retinoblastoma diagnosis at two years old, my world, which my parents dotingly refer to as “Jillian’s world,” has always appeared slightly different from that of others. I have no recollection of having binocular vision, so depth perception has always been a non-existent ability. For the majority of my childhood, I felt ashamed by my prosthetic eye, purposely pushing my hair toward the left side of my face and avoiding all eye contact that surpassed ten seconds. I hated that my eyes did not appear the same, and constantly worried how others would perceive my abnormality. It was not until last summer, when I received a government scholarship to study Hindi in India, that my perspective regarding “Jillian’s world” was altered by one unlikely symbol: the swastika.

I encountered it upon entering my host-family’s home for the first time. It was plastered directly on top of their front doorstep in between two mosaic footprints. I had seen the swastika millions of times in history books and documentaries, but blatantly confronting it in person was an entirely different story. My heart started to sting as images of skeletal bodies and families torn apart raced through my head. The swastika was the face of the bigotry and discrimination that I strongly denounced. I could not wrap my head around the fact that I was about to spend my summer with people who displayed a hate symbol in front of their home.

Within a matter of days I discovered that my host-family was the complete antithesis of the negative characteristics I had originally associated with the swastika. They took me to lavish weddings and temples and taught me how to cook Indian cuisine. My host-mom showed me traditional techniques to create art and we shared many laughs at my many failed attempts at bargaining with market shopkeepers in Hindi. By the mid-way point in my program I had fallen in love with my host-family and their vibrant culture. It was then that I realized that I needed to take another look at the swastika through my host-family’s lens.

One afternoon, I asked my host-mom what the symbol meant in her culture, informing her that it was an infamous hate symbol in the United States. Her response is forever ingrained in my memory.

With wide eyes and a furrowed brow, she answered, “A hate symbol? No no, we believe the swastik is a symbol for peace and good fortune. Why is it hateful?”

When I mentioned the Holocaust, she appeared even more confused. After further researching the symbol, I found that the swastika, known as the swastik in Hindi, had been a Hindu symbol of peace thousands of years before it was ever a symbol of evil. We sat across from each other, both amazed at how our views of one symbol could oppose one another, yet be equally valid in their own respect; this was the beauty of perspective. Since returning from India, I now push my hair away from my face with headbands and my fear of sustained eye contact has vanished. My disability does not limit “Jillian’s world,” but rather, gives me the ability to see far and wide, apples and pears included.

Notice how Jillian finishes her essay by bringing it back to the beginning. A full circle ending often helps to make the essay feel complete and finished. You definitely want the admissions officer reading your paper to feel like they have finished an essay with an appropriate closer.

How to become an adult.

In the US, legal adulthood comes at 18, but it is my understanding that adulthood comes through responsibility, tears, laughter, and most of all: parenthood. It is effortless to watch other people’s children grow and flourish, but having my own was a terrifying new world for which I was ill-prepared. I was not ready for my first, Stanley, but now I cannot envision a world without him. Today, I am the proud parent of not one, but seven beautiful, boisterous, carnivorous plants. Within my small family I have four sundews, two Venus flytraps, and one tropical pitcher plant. Of course they have scientific names, but I only use them when I am angry and my inner-parent reveals itself. Many might ask, “How does a person become the parent of seven carnivorous plants?” and I can only answer that with a story, my story.

It was an ordinary Wednesday afternoon when I came home from school only to find a charming plant that resembled a leafless, dew-splattered fern perched on the counter. With the eloquence that only a teenager could muster, I asked my mother, “What’s that?” She carefully explained that he was our new carnivorous plant and he was going to be on fruit fly kitchen duty. Over the next couple of weeks my fascination with him grew, and eventually I adopted him as one of my own. In all sincerity, I did not begin as the ideal parent. I would give Stanley water to drink if he looked drier than usual and that was the extent of my nurturing efforts. However, my complacency did not last. Come winter, around his half birthday, Stanley became afflicted with a mysterious ailment. His stems curled and his one delicate green frond dried up. After carefully examining him, I concluded that not only was the lake water I had been using contaminated with some sort of root-eating larva, but my mother’s African violets had given him aphids. It was then that I was faced with the harsh reality of the situation: I had a plant that I was absolutely obsessed with, but knew nothing about.

In my desperation to keep my sundew alive, I began to contact other plant enthusiasts in an increasingly desperate attempt to help my poor Stanley. To my great surprise, a close friend was also a carnivorous plant caregiver and was well versed in childhood care. His advice, coupled with some new dirt and the stocked shelves of the nearby library’s horticulture section, allowed me to nurse Stanley back to health. Stanley regained his strength and shortly after the winter incident, I adopted Simone, another sundew. Then came Diana, my first Venus flytrap. Consequently, the carnivorous plant aficionado was so impressed with Stanley’s care that he entrusted me with the care of his carnivorous plants when he left for college. This brought my family’s size to the current seven.

My true reward of having Stanley is that he opened the door to the world of botany. I would never have invested so much time learning about the molecular structure or chemical balance of plants if not for taking care of him. I have loved learning for his benefit, whether it be discovering the best fluoride-free water, finding the ideal amount of sunlight, or reading that he uses a form of electrical signaling to improve digestion. I also love the rarity of being Stanley’s parent. People have their judgments, but I have also found that most people are genuinely curious and I am always open to questions. Ultimately, I love how Stanley has forced me to be adaptive. That first winter I did not have a “Gardener’s Guide to Carnivorous Plants,” I simply had my own observations. This was the most significant lesson that Stanley and friends taught me: the universe lacks a guide to the galaxy, and life is all about discovering your own way.

In this essay, Michaela illustrates her insatiable appetite for learning and passionate personality. She manages to give admissions insight into her character while expressing her curiosity.

Intercom enthusiast.

The most exciting time to live in Vermont is mid-February. This is the time when one is given the privilege of a 30-minute walk to school in sub-zero temperatures, with a 30-minute trudge home in the dark after a long day. It’s been four months since winter began, and it’ll be two more until it’s over. The firewood is being rationed to keep the house at a barely livable temperature, a steamy 50 degrees, and colds are so rampant that people lose half their body weight in phlegm each day. Yet, however dull Vermont may seem to students and teachers as they wrap themselves in layer after layer of flannel, make no mistake, today is the beginning of an era. Today is the day when Isaac (that’s me) starts his job of putting smiles on grim faces as the reader of the morning announcements.

“But Isaac, that job is super boring! You just read what’s written on a piece of paper,” is what an uninformed person might say, someone who obviously doesn’t know about my passion for annoying the tired and melancholic with smiling positivity. While expression and humor has not historically been a part of this process, and while ad-libbing has been strictly advised against, I go for it anyway. And why not? The worst possible outcome involves only a stern lecture and an expulsion from the job.

Fortunately, there is not much going on this week, which means I have some wiggle room with what I can say. The loud buzz of the intercom whines throughout the school, and the silent apprehension of the day is met, somewhat unexpectedly, with a greeting of 20 “yo’s” and a long, breathy pause. I artfully maneuver someone else’s writing into my own words, keeping the original intent but supplementing the significant lack of humor with a few one-liners. I conclude by reminding everyone that just because the weather is miserable today does not mean that we have to be as well.

Luckily, the principal loves it. And despite the fact that I urge everyone to interrupt my history teacher’s classes to wish him a happy birthday, I get to keep my job for another day. I have people coming up to me left and right, telling me that I made them smile. When I hear that, I smile back.

For the rest of the month, I work to make sure that people hear my message: even though we are at the time when school and winter are beginning to seem endless, there are still reasons to grin. I urge people to attend basketball games or sign up for spring sports. I announce birthdays and other special events. Before every day, I make sure I have a message that will make people think, “you know, today might not be so bad after all.” After my month ends, the announcements have been changed. The next readers tell jokes or riddles, or sing songs and invite others to sing with them. I watch the announcements evolve from an unfortunate but necessary part of the day to a positive and inspiring event. It is now more than just a monotonous script; it becomes a time to make sure that everyone has at least one thing to smile about.

Life shouldn’t have to be a dreary winter day; it should be the satisfaction of a good saxophone solo or the joy of seeing one’s friends every day at school. It is the enthusiasm of a biology teacher, the joy of a sports victory, and even the warm messages of a disembodied voice on the intercom. I use that message to help freshman feel less nervous at their first race or to encourage my friend to continue taking solos in jazz band. And in the most dismal time of year, I use that message in the daily announcements.

Now that you’ve read some real college essay examples, it’s time to work on your own message!

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What it means for the Supreme Court to throw out Chevron decision, undercutting federal regulators

FILE- Gulls follow a commercial fishing boat as crewmen haul in their catch in the Gulf of Maine, in this Jan. 17, 2012 file photo. TExecutive branch agencies will likely have more difficulty regulating the environment, public health, workplace safety and other issues under a far-reaching decision by the Supreme Court. The court’s 6-3 ruling on Friday overturned a 1984 decision colloquially known as Chevron that has instructed lower courts to defer to federal agencies when laws passed by Congress are not crystal clear. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)

The Supreme Court building is seen on Friday, June 28, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Executive branch agencies will likely have more difficulty regulating the environment, public health, workplace safety and other issues under a far-reaching decision by the Supreme Court .

The court’s 6-3 ruling on Friday overturned a 1984 decision colloquially known as Chevron that has instructed lower courts to defer to federal agencies when laws passed by Congress are not crystal clear.

The 40-year-old decision has been the basis for upholding thousands of regulations by dozens of federal agencies, but has long been a target of conservatives and business groups who argue that it grants too much power to the executive branch, or what some critics call the administrative state.

The Biden administration has defended the law, warning that overturning so-called Chevron deference would be destabilizing and could bring a “convulsive shock” to the nation’s legal system.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the court, said federal judges “must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority.”

The ruling does not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron doctrine, Roberts wrote.

Here is a look at the court’s decision and the implications for government regulations going forward.

What is the Chevron decision?

Atlantic herring fishermen sued over federal rules requiring them to pay for independent observers to monitor their catch. The fishermen argued that the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act did not authorize officials to create industry-funded monitoring requirements and that the National Marine Fisheries Service failed to follow proper rulemaking procedure.

In two related cases, the fishermen asked the court to overturn the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine, which stems from a unanimous Supreme Court case involving the energy giant in a dispute over the Clean Air Act. That ruling said judges should defer to the executive branch when laws passed by Congress are ambiguous.

In that case, the court upheld an action by the Environmental Protection Agency under then-President Ronald Reagan.

In the decades following the ruling, Chevron has been a bedrock of modern administrative law, requiring judges to defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of congressional statutes.

But the current high court, with a 6-3 conservative majority has been increasingly skeptical of the powers of federal agencies. Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch have questioned the Chevron decision. Ironically, it was Gorsuch’s mother, former EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch, who made the decision that the Supreme Court upheld in 1984.

What’s at stake?

With a closely divided Congress, presidential administrations have increasingly turned to federal regulation to implement policy changes. Federal rules impact virtually every aspect of everyday life, from the food we eat and the cars we drive to the air we breathe and homes we live in.

President Joe Biden’s administration, for example, has issued a host of new regulations on the environment and other priorities, including restrictions on emissions from power plants and vehicle tailpipes , and rules on student loan forgiveness , overtime pay and affordable housing.

Those actions and others could be opened up to legal challenges if judges are allowed to discount or disregard the expertise of the executive-branch agencies that put them into place.

With billions of dollars potentially at stake, groups representing the gun industry and other businesses such as tobacco, agriculture, timber and homebuilding, were among those pressing the justices to overturn the Chevron doctrine and weaken government regulation.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed an amicus brief last year on behalf of business groups arguing that modern application of Chevron has “fostered aggrandizement’’ of the executive branch at the expense of Congress and the courts.

David Doniger, a lawyer and longtime Natural Resources Defense Council official who argued the original Chevron case in 1984, said he feared that a ruling to overturn the doctrine could “free judges to be radical activists” who could “effectively rewrite our laws and block the protections they are supposed to provide.”

“The net effect will be to weaken our government’s ability to meet the real problems the world is throwing at us — big things like COVID and climate change,″ Doniger said.

More than just fish

“This case was never just about fish,’' said Meredith Moore of the environmental group Ocean Conservancy. Instead, businesses and other interest groups used the herring fishery “to attack the foundations of the public agencies that serve the American public and conserve our natural resources,’' she said.

The court ruling will likely open the floodgates to litigation that could erode critical protections for people and the environment, Moore and other advocates said.

“For more than 30 years, fishery observers have successfully helped ensure that our oceans are responsibly managed so that fishing can continue in the future,’' said Dustin Cranor of Oceana, another conservation group.

He called the case “just the latest example of the far right trying to undermine the federal government’s ability to protect our oceans, waters, public lands, clean air and health.’'

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey called the decision a fitting follow-up to a 2022 decision — in a case he brought — that limits the EPA’s ability to control greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. The court held that Congress must speak with specificity when it wants to give an agency authority to regulate on an issue of major national significance.

Morrisey, now the GOP nominee for governor, called Chevron “a misguided doctrine under which courts defer to legally dubious interpretations of statutes put out by federal administrative agencies.”

A shift toward judicial power

The Supreme Court ruling will almost certainly shift power away from the executive branch and Congress and toward courts, said Craig Green, a professor at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law.

“Federal judges will now have the first and final word about what statutes mean,″ he said. “That’s a big shift in power.″

In what some observers see as a historic irony, many conservatives who now attack Chevron once celebrated it. The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was among those who hailed the original ruling as a way to rein in liberal laws.

“Conservatives believed in this rule until they didn’t,’' Green said in an interview.

In recent years, conservatives have focused on “deconstruction of the administrative state,’' even if the result lessens the ability of a conservative president to impose his beliefs on government agencies.

“If you weaken the federal government, you get less government,’' Green said — an outcome that many conservatives, including those who back former President Donald Trump, welcome.

The ruling will likely “gum up the works for federal agencies and make it even harder for them to address big problems. Which is precisely what the critics of Chevron want,” said Jody Freeman, director of the environmental and energy law program at Harvard Law School.