Just Finished Reading: Am I Normal? - The 200-Year Search for Normal People (And Why They Don’t Exist) by Sarah Chaney (FP: 2022) [268pp] 

If you’re anything like me, you have no doubt at some point in your life wondered if you’re ‘normal’. That question was certainly hovering in the back of my mind for a good chunky of my teenage years. But at some point, I, no doubt like many others, had to make a decision: Do I spend an increasing amount of mental energy trying to fit in with those around me (coupled with the resultant stress of wondering if my efforts would be good enough) or do I just say ‘Fuck It’ and decide to me more of myself – although never my WHOLE self – in public and let the chips fall where they may. You guessed correctly if you thought I went to route of increased authenticity...  

Apparently, hard as it is to believe, people in previous ages never questioned their normality nor thought of themselves as normal (or not). They certainly compared themselves to others around them but never held themselves up to a general standard of normality and tried to figure their degree of deviation from the norm. That is something quite new, quite recent, and only really goes back a few hundred years – at best. It also shouldn’t really exist. The well-known Bell curve or Normal Distribution was devised by astronomers to help plot the paths of celestial bodies. They were SO effective at this that statisticians in the 19th century began using them to plot other things, and quite effectively too (although they needed some ‘massaging’ from time to time to ‘fit’). It wasn’t long before human attributes were being charted and the growing insurance industry started using such curves to predict their liabilities and increase their profit margins. It wasn’t long after that that ‘normal’ or ‘average’ became optimal, preferred, something to be aimed at and attained. Normal was superior, anything else was inferior, wrong, abnormal. Less than average weight? Something is wrong. More than average weight? Some is, again, wrong. If you’ve ever been weighed in a doctor's office you’ll probably have been compared to a chart and told that your BMI (Body Mass Index) is too low or, more likely, too high. What they don’t tell you is that the BMI chart is largely based on data from middle-class, white, American males – and probably from some decades ago. BMI figures had to be modified to fit women, don’t apply to athletes and has great trouble applying to other racial groups. It's also far from alone in its divergence between normal/average and the real world. Simply put, the average human does not exist. The more attributes you measure, the smaller the likelihood that any one person will meet them. Sure, there are people of average height, but of average height, weight, skin tone, eye colour, age, education and.... Very quickly you eliminate everyone from the count. 

I’ve read a little bit about this before in ‘The End of Average – How to Succeed in a World that Values Sameness’ by Todd Rose where the author destroys the very idea of average anything. The problem with using the average or idea of the normal as a valuable target to be attained is its toxicity. If the Normal is the highest Good and very few people fit into that category then ‘normal’ becomes just a stick to beat people with and, of course, a BIG stick to beat yourself with. Are you ‘normal’ - whatever THAT means? Do you have a ‘normal’ body? Normal feelings? A normal mind? Is your sex life normal? Are your kids normal and, if not, is that your fault? No doubt you can feel the anxiety building already. In just one small example you can see what I mean – children's weight. One of the first things done to a new-born is being weighed. So, is the baby a ‘normal’ birthweight? Then is the baby gaining weight in line with normal expectations? Too slowly? Too much? I know that my mother was quite anxious to keep hitting that golden ‘normal’ growth line for my sister and, no doubt earlier for my brother and me. Obviously, no one ever questioned where exactly the chart came from and how the data was derived in the first place. But it's important to understand what is meant by this kind of normal especially when it hardly has anything much to do with messy reality. 

I enjoyed this a great deal. Much like the previous book by Todd Rose it made me question the very idea, the very concept, of normality. I’ve never really regarded myself as ‘normal’ in any particular sense. It was nice to see that the very idea of normality is a castle built in mid-air without any real foundation to speak of – most especially when ‘abnormal’ is SUCH a pejorative term. Definitely recommended for anyone who has ever struggled to be, or appear to be, normal...