I seem to be pondering this subject a lot lately. Maybe it’s because I had a birthday this week, and whenever you turn a year older, it makes you think a bit more about who you have become.
I was talking to my daughter the other day, and she mentioned she’s been falling asleep earlier than usual, most likely because she’s been under some stress and her body just needs a bit more rest. “Yeah, but it’s so not normal for me,” my night-owl daughter insisted, disappointed in herself.
“Listen,” I said. “You’d have a happier life if you decide right now to eliminate the word ‘normal’ from your vocabulary. The very word is a trap. There is no normal, not in life and certainly not in ourselves. It was normal for you to stay up late, now it’s normal for you not to, and maybe someday it will be normal for you to do so again.”
What even is normal, anyway? Personally, I don’t think it’s normal to dislike chocolate, but I know plenty of people who do. And I think it’s quite normal to love to read, but I know plenty of people who don’t.
At one time, it was normal to believe women shouldn’t have the vote, and now it’s not. Today, it’s normal in America to avoid eating bugs, but someday we may find them on our menus.
As for our inner beings, when we were young it may have felt normal for us to fear what was under the bed, but most of us no longer do. We may have believed we were growing up in a “normal” family, or wished we were. We may have thought we wanted a “normal” life, or sworn we’d never lead one (how’d that work out for you?).
As artists and creatives, we also formed early opinions of what was normal for us, only to discover that it’s normal to fear both success and failure (how does that make sense?); and normal to be passionate about a project and also to have to force yourself to work on it; and normal to say yes to some commissions just for the money, but also normal to say no to large amounts of money just because it doesn’t feel right. Normal for creatives, as you can see, is a sliding scale.
As a society, we love to quote the artists who refused to be normal. We hold them up as proof that success in the arts means bucking the status quo at every turn. When we induct them into their respective Halls of Fame, we celebrate their rebellious uniqueness, even as we induct right beside them the artists who quietly went about doing great work while leading “normal” lives outside the spotlight. Normal, whatever that means, seemed to have worked for them, but we’re not gonna talk about that.
With such mixed messages, no wonder I’ve always felt confused as an artist. When I was young, I vowed I’d never have a “normal” job, even as I hoped to have a normal marriage and family and live in a normal house. I longed for the normal path to success with my writing, even as I hoped my writing would always be above normal. I defended the things about me that were not “normal,” even as I took on the normal roles I thought were expected of me.
Lately, I’m too tired to worry about whether my thoughts, beliefs, feelings, behaviors, or even my work are normal, and too tired to pretend like they’re not. I’m not looking to define a “new normal” for myself, by the way. That’s just another trap. I’m simply grateful to have made another trip around the sun living my normal artist life, regardless of how normality shows up on any given day, or whether it shows up at all.
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