You're Not Normal

There’s no such thing as “normal” when it comes to people, but our society sadly often worships at the altar of what’s perceived as normal.

What I read: “Worried you’re not normal? Don’t be – there’s no such thing” by Sarah Chaney. Published January 30, 2023.

I’ve never been normal. My guess is you’ve never been normal either. Because none of us are normal in the sense of the word that’s often casually tossed around. Yet, most of us struggle at times with not feeling normal.

Few of us are immune from the mysterious power of the so-called normal.

While I’ve always known I’m not normal, I didn’t realize the concept of normality as applied to people is a relatively new construct. The modern concept of normal didn’t start to become a cultural reference point until 1835.

Our modern notions of normal emerged in Belgium in 1835, when Adolphe Quetelet, a 39-year-old astronomer and statistician, began the trend of comparing human characteristics against an average.

Plot enough data about human beings and eventually you’ll likely end up with something approximating a bell-shaped curve, a graphical representation of many people’s characteristics with a preponderance of people hovering around the middle point. This bell-shaped curve spawned efforts to codify normal and became known as a “normal distribution.”

Unfortunately, the middle point of such a distribution of data points ended up being perceived as the correct or ideal measurement when applied to human beings, a concept popularized by Quetelet in his book, A Treasise on Man, a book that outlined his method of social physics.

‘[E]very quality, taken within suitable limits, is essentially good; it is only in its extreme deviations from the mean that it becomes bad.’ The ‘average man’, as Quetelet called him, was also the ideal human being, in body, mind and behaviour. This can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If everything is designed for someone of average height, from the length of a bed to the height of a table, then this average man inevitably becomes the ideal human within that society.

In short, the notion developed that what was average was also ideal. When one ponders that for even a moment, it seems preposterous. But people create and foster some preposterous assumptions, and this is one of them.

The false belief that what is normal in terms of people’s characteristics are also what is good and best among those characteristics ended up infiltrating science, medicine, and society generally.

The origin of enshrining normal ideals also has a racist past. Most of the data used by people like Victorian scientist Francis Galton were skewed to identify white and middle or upper class people as more normal and therefore better human specimens.

Youth was also a touted ideal and that mindset resulted in older people falling outside of the normal realm which allowed for easier shunning of the elderly or physically challenged.

Sexologist Robert L Dickinson and sculptor Abram Belskie created and donated to the Cleveland Health Museum in 1945 two statues that used physical measurements of tens of thousands of people as references. They named their sculptures Normman and Norma. The result of the collaboration between Dickinson and Belskie resulted in an unrealistic physical standard with normal considered being white and youthful and with body type and measurement parameters that few Americans fit. Thus, essentially everyone was “not normal” by their definition.

But because the application of the term ‘normal’ to humans has always conflated average with what is desired, Norma created an expectation that went beyond a particular size or shape of body. When the bright white plaster statues of Norma and Normman were displayed to the public as ‘Native White American’ (according to their label in the Cleveland Health Museum), this set a standard. The ‘normal’ American was white, youthful and athletic; those already marginalised by their exclusion from the study’s data (people of colour, disabled and/or older people) were now also deemed to be less American. Similarly, the 1917 Army Alpha IQ test judged participants on their knowledge of middle-class American culture, and concluded that those who were less familiar with it (immigrants and working-class people, including many people of colour) were less intelligent. As with the average man, this reinforced the idea that a certain type of person was ‘normal’ even if they were not the most statistically numerous.

I’ll leave it to the article to explain more about all this, but I hope this helps you understand that any self-perception that you’re not normal is a falsely created societal expectation and assumption that you should ignore to maintain happiness. Our self-esteem is dependent on us casting aside any comparison against what’s normal because that exercise is destined to be incredibly disappointing.

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