Normal.
What a weird concept. What a fleeting concept. What is normal?
Growing up, this was a term thrown around a lot in my household. Never in a positive light. At least not to me or my siblings.
There’s a saying in Nepali:
धोबीको कुकुर, घरको न घाटको
Dhobi ko kukur, ghar ko na ghat ko.
Loosely translated, it means
a launderer’s dog, doesn't belong to either the launderer or their clients.
You don’t belong. And we all want to belong. This perfectly capture the third culture kid demographic. Yet, it was weaponized as a way to enforce compliance. If you don’t do this, then you don’t belong anywhere* * What a terrifying prospect for a kid.
The hilarious bit. This haranguing backfired. It exposed me to all the ways I could be different. And it exposed me to different people. Nobody was normal. Refreshing and terrifying. Here were my parents, and their parents, and my whole family clinging to a normal that doesn’t exist. I looked up to a lot of these folks. And the number has dwindled since. What a shock that was.
Folks who I knew were learned. Folks who had achieved great things in their life. One may say that they achieved it by not questioning the assumed normals. That would be a good argument for a few contexts. But to weaponize it as a way of control felt wrong. This led me into a period of contrarianism. I would question everything.
I got into several heated arguments with folks. Now, I understand why it was hard for me to let it go. It was modeled to me in my home, and culture that there was one truth. Arguments were not experiences in earnest discussion, but arenas to come out victorious in. That was the only model I knew. I look back, and think about what a chore I must have been. Unable to look at things from any other perspective.
I think honest discussions require two things, empathy and curiosity. As a kid, I had a lot of the latter and an inability to extend the other. But that is for another post.
Despite all that, I realize why we latched onto normalcy. It is comfortable. Right, as in our comfort zone. An apt name.
As the erratic waves of grief hit me, I find myself unable to do the basic parts of my routines. Normalcy feels like the floating debris you hang on to. You hang on and hope. I thought that, as I finally brought myself to brew a cup of coffee. I don’t drink as much as I used to. After diagnosing my ADHD, and medicating it, caffeine no longer has the same draw. But the act of making it, the taste, and the smells signaled a start to my day. What an unusual thing to look forward to. For the briefest of moments, it felt like nothing had changed. A second to breathe.
I think younger me would not know how to process this. Younger me was not yet aware of his internal processes and thoughts. But normalcy might have been the debris that those folks were holding on to, because we can never know the inner storms others are wrestling. And we deal with them in our own ways.
The nepali saying still rubs me the wrong way. I want to write more about that one day.