The Case For Being Normal
"The ordinary acts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest." - Thomas Moore
The word “normal” used to evoke for me the image of a flat line drawn across the center of a piece of paper. It was a row of colorless suburban lawns, each filled with automatons pretending to be families. It was a word for mediocre and listless, for the smell of sawdust, a bright mural painted over with taupe. It was the word for a silent misery that could never be outwardly expressed, only endured, like a tumor that you carried your entire life until one day it decided to kill you.
Normal was boring. It meant boring.
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But maybe I've gotten everything wrong.
I've adjusted to my daughter's rhythms. We wake up with the sun and go to bed with the dark. We play outside for hours a day. We go on stroller rides, and I chase her across the yard. We eat regular meals and take regular baths. We are always running toward the light. She doesn't have complicated ideas or pretensions about how she's supposed to behave. She simply is.
Her natural routine has forced me to take stock of my ideas about normalcy. Now that she's here with me, I don't have time to be the starving mad genius, the nocturnal typist, hyped up on caffeine and tequila, presumptuous enough to think I can make wild loops around the moon. I can’t push myself to the brink anymore, abuse myself, because that’d mean I would in turn, make my daughter’s life worse. I have to take careful inventory of my energy and moods.
Last Saturday, we went to a festival (although it got closed down due to the weather), played at an indoor playground, and had a late lunch with my aunt and grandmother before finishing off the day playing in the front yard until the sun went down. If someone ten years ago told me that this would now be my life, I probably would’ve balked at its mundanity. It would’ve seemed like a cookie-cutter life, something lived because of convenience and not intention.
But that night, before I went to bed, I realized that I was actually living inside my life, not beside it, like some kind of sneering observer. I actually enjoyed small things again, like a cup of coffee, a walk, and a nice shower.
I’d read so many books about how horrible it was to be normal, books written by desperate people with their teeth scraping the edge of the earth, white-knuckling the dirt so they wouldn’t be spun out of gravity. People who died in jail or shot their wives in a drunken stupor or ended up drinking white wine on the floor of a bathroom until their teeth rotted. I took their arguments at face value. I didn’t want to be normal. If these writers would rather die from a heroin overdose or spit blood across the keyboard than be normal, then surely being normal was something even worse.
I didn’t understand at the time that this wasn’t some reasoned, measured result they’d come to from careful analysis. This was just simple post hoc rationalization. These writers were already broken, so they concluded that was the only acceptable thing to be.
It's easy to lie to yourself when you live a life through words instead of experiencing it through sensation. You can be led by broken people and be utterly unaware of it because you have no solid footing on which to understand their arguments.
Yukio Mishima in his book, Sun & Steel, talks about how he begins a journey of transforming himself through fitness and sunlight. This is transformative for the nerdy, intellectual Mishima, who, up until that point, had lived his life with an academic mindsight. He’s thrust back into his body, where he learns what it means to experience life via the senses and finds that words as a medium are ultimately lacking. He writes:
“The men who indulged in nocturnal thought, it seemed to me, had without exception dry, lusterless skins and sagging stomachs. They sought to wrap up a whole epoch in a capacious night of ideas, and rejected in all its forms the sun that I had seen. They rejected both life and death as I had seen them, for in both of these the sun had had a hand.”
To a nerd, this is a revelation. The people wrapped up in ideas are often lost in the construct of words. They’ve become subsumed by the intellect and thus, the ideas they transmit are “ideas of the night”, that are separated from true understanding.
For that, you need the sun. You need to experience a full life as humans are meant to experience it.
Normal doesn’t have to mean beige walls and a miserable death.
Normal can mean waking up with the sun, to a child's smile and open arms.
Normal can mean becoming attuned to the seasons and holidays, allowing yourself to be transformed by the weather and rotations of the earth.
Normal can mean trying on white sundresses in Aritzia because you’re excited about the open and warm air of summer, its pools, and beaches.
Normal can mean sitting down to appreciate a meal with your family and becoming enamored with its taste and full range of sensation.
Normal can mean hanging out with friends on a Saturday afternoon while your children play in the driveway.
Normal can mean a life that isn’t stunted by pretense and overintellectualization. It can mean a life that isn’t frittered away by rationalizations and convincing arguments of why you don’t deserve happiness. Happiness does not have to be earned with blood. You are allowed to just exist. You can crawl back into your body and appreciate its simple, animal desires.
The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb (With a new Epilogue) is now available! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.
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