"Normal"

It is amazing how much we take this word - normal - and all it subsumes for granted. I have been struggling for about 2 weeks now with a really excruciating lower back pain issue. It started, not too surprisingly, with a chain of abuses: schlepping 40 iMacs, lifting a boat engine, and then, surprise, heat. I have never had such excruciating pain (and no, this is not exquisite in ANY sense of the word).

It all leads me to reflect on "normal". Our typical take on this little word seems to invariably draw on notions of the perverse (themselves culturally constructed): "odd" sex practices, deviant behavior, "handicap", and all the rest.

But it is certainly remarkable how quickly we come to appreciate "normal" when the tiniest of everyday things becomes impossible: pick that up off of the floor (can't); sit down and then get up to get the phone (can't without huge pain); "Normal", in these conditions of major pain, quickly becomes something so utterly mundane as to render all of those other "definitions" ridiculous (or perhaps I should say "ricockulous"). If we think of something as normal in terms of what is somehow implicitly thought of and constructed as ABnormal (that's the "bad" stuff mentioned above, remember?), then anything outside of that must then be re-framed as something quite different, something acceptable, even palatable. So, pain that renders one immobile or unable to get up must then be a "condition" - at once acceptable and certainly palatable (thought not by any means desirable from any perspective). Similarly, any "condition" that becomes chronic - eg. anything that might permanently render one in such a state - must be re-framed as "disabled" (politically obsolete), "handicapped" (also politically obsolete, even insulting), or "differently abled". This is NOT to suggest that ANY of that sort of challenge to an individual is somehow "less", but only to frame this exploration of "normal". "Abnormal" is, in a very real sense, anything we are NOT, as long as it is broadly acceptable in a social setting.

But it is when the minutia of daily living pulls us into a state where who we were yesterday is made into "past tense" that "normal" suddenly shifts, and takes on a whole new meaning. We are not "differently able", nor are we "perverse", but rather, severely limited in our capabilities to the extent that the mundane becomes exotic.