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silveradept) wrote2023-12-30 02:34 pm
silveradept) wrote2023-12-30 02:34 pm
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December Days 2023 #30: Things I No Longer Believe Fully: I'll Never Be Normal
[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#30: "I'll Never Be Normal."
Finally, the finale to the Mount Normal Trilogy. I no longer believe I'm fundamentally broken, nor that it's possible to be normal, so we make it to the conclusion and find out that in so many, many ways, I actually am quite normal. Despite my long-standing belief that I would never be normal.
When your belief about normalcy is that it's related to what the majority does, or most of the people around you, or that almost everyone else does around you, then non-normalcy was assured, or so I thought, when I started doing things openly that the minority of people supposedly were, like totally nerding out, or being in the higher-level maths classes. Which might have worked on a local level, in the small sphere of people that I was around for that era of my life. But then I went to university, and from there on, to the world outside, and it turned out that things that might have been locally weird turn out to be absolutely normal when you're gathered in a place that's specifically designed to attract people who have the same interests that you do.
Wielding a couple of classic pieces of stuff I've picked up from the Internet here, to show us that so many things can be normalized, whether it's for good or for ill. The Gender Subversion posters from Crimethinc are a familiar thing to me. The classic poster about gender roles was something I saw early on, and thought of it as a useful tool for normalizing the idea of roles that were outside the tight strictures that my provincial upbringing wanted to put into play. The new version that's there is even more explicitly political in its outlook, but it serves the same purpose as to what behavior is to be normalized and what behavior is to be sent off as harmful and weird. A lot of the censorship forces in the world insist, very loudly, that they are the normal ones and that even if they don't have a large vocal crowd, they are supported in their actions by the "silent majority" or the "moral majority" that isn't exactly right here, right now, but totally agrees with them in all of their particulars and to the degree that they are protesting or trying to get something done. The truth of the matter is that their most successful tactics are generally to put one or a small handful of sympathetic people into positions of power, and then have those people use their power to enforce the agenda, rather than being able to demonstrate in some other capacity that they really do have the majority position. Turns out that most of the time, if they want to ban books or restrict access or deadname and out children, most parents and adults are furious with them and do not agree with them. (And are more than happy to vote out the dicks a lot of the time.)
The other thing that I'm thinking about in the situation of what is normal is something like Topsy-Turvy Day, or the Carnival, the idea that when you bring enough people together in any given spot, the definition of what qualifies as normal relies more upon the people who are currently in the space than what society considers normal or acceptable. When you're at the con, what's considered acceptable dress and acceptable commentary on that dress is different than when you're in a grocery store. When you're at the stadium, what's acceptable dress and commentary is different than at the con. Enough people going along with the idea is often enough to shift the definition of normal, at least temporarily, to match what the group wants, rather than what a supposedly objective normal would be. I suppose it could be summarized as somewhere tangential to "If you find yourself in Rome, do as the Romans do," because it's really "If you find yourself among Romans, do as the Romans do." There are caveats, of course, because sometimes you find yourself in the company of people who offend your basic sensibilities or your morals. Sometimes you'll have to fake it so you can get away. Sometimes you want to tell them off. And sometimes you wonder how things transpired to this point that you find yourself in the company of such disreputable entities, and how your normal got changed so much that this is the company you keep now. (Well, okay, that happens in fiction a lot more in real life, since a lot of the times, in real life, the process is really that you find the people who think of you as normal and surround yourself with them, so it's not usually the case where you have a moment of wondering whether you're the baddies or not.)
Because the definition of what's normal is very reliant on the situation and the people around you, at least as much, if not more, than what abstract ideas of morality and ethics say is normal, it becomes easy to see how even someone who believes their very existence and interests couldn't possibly be normal ends up around a whole bunch of people who see them as perfectly normal. Or even statistically normal. Mind you, it's taken the Internet and leaving the small towns where I grew up before I could get a big enough sample of people to recognize this normality. You can make friends on the Internet regarding shared interests, for example. Or you can go to meetups arranged mostly through the power of the Internet and find plenty of people with similar interests. (And go bowling with them, fairly regularly.) Or when you're at a university, you can follow the endless flyers of people advertising their interests to find interesting people and end up sitting on the board of a tabletop game convention for all the years that you were at that university. (I didn't play all that many games, because I really wasn't into the tabletop scene, but it was always helpful to have an actual student on the board for access to the various services the University would provide for student organizations. So I learned a fair amount about running conventions from that. That's normal.) Or you follow the fliers and have good conversations with anti-war protesters against the imperial exercises of your country, or someone who wants to recruit the educated bourgeoisie to the cause of the revolutionary proletariat and have some weekly conversations with them about the viability of the idea and what the obstacles will be to implementation. Those are normal university experiences, I'm sure. As are the completely normal experiences of traveling to Florida or California to play an instrument in a football game, and to have been directed by John Williams in a piece that John Williams arranged. There's a big group of people who had that specific experience, so that was entirely normal for that situation, even if it may have seemed entirely impossible to anyone who didn't happen to follow that particular thread of their existence. (And one of the people who was there with me for that experience eventually ended up working at Lucasfilm as one of the archivists, before they were sold to Disney. I have no idea if she's still working there or not. That's a perfectly normal experience, right?)
And I'm normal in that I had a bad relationship that I had to pull myself out of, and I'm normal in that I moved a long way to find work, and I'm normal that I play video games and board games, and I'm normal that I have a household of people who I like being around and who at least tolerate me, and I'm normal that I have a cat, and I'm normal (or more rapidly becoming normal) because I'm someone working with my neurodivergence, and I'm normal that I have a lot of rough spots from the traumas of living through this particular chunk of my life, and I'm very normal that I have professionals to help with those traumas, and I'm normal that I have friends where our interests overlap, even if our geographic proximity doesn't. There's so much normal that's going on in my life, even as I focus on the things that I think aren't normal, either because I think of them as things that will drive other people away from me, or because I think of them as things that might draw other people to me. And in so many, many cases, it turns out that the things I think of as strange really are much more normal, or at least are more normal for the people that I've chosen to hang around with, even if they might be weirder to the wider society.
While I might believe that I'll never be normal, that's certainly not the case, and one of the joys of my life is that I keep finding people for whom what I have thought of as strange, weird, or even deviant is perfectly normal to them. By having an expanded perspective on where the boundaries of human interaction and action and all the rest are, it allows me to feel much more in the pocket and the bell curve, even in the wider society. Admittedly, I don't want to lose my weird status completely, because I've built a lot of my identity around being someone who isn't normal in all of my aspects, but I want it to be normal weird rather than the kind of weird that I've been made fun of (or nearly fired for), the kind that's quirky and eccentric, rather than the kind that's toxic or seen as moral failures and unacceptable. I've had enough of being singled out for being weird and being told that I'm not okay behind my back and also to my face. So while I may never summit Mount Normal fully, there's definitely a place for me and a whole bunch of other wonderful weirdos along the way.
#30: "I'll Never Be Normal."
Finally, the finale to the Mount Normal Trilogy. I no longer believe I'm fundamentally broken, nor that it's possible to be normal, so we make it to the conclusion and find out that in so many, many ways, I actually am quite normal. Despite my long-standing belief that I would never be normal.
When your belief about normalcy is that it's related to what the majority does, or most of the people around you, or that almost everyone else does around you, then non-normalcy was assured, or so I thought, when I started doing things openly that the minority of people supposedly were, like totally nerding out, or being in the higher-level maths classes. Which might have worked on a local level, in the small sphere of people that I was around for that era of my life. But then I went to university, and from there on, to the world outside, and it turned out that things that might have been locally weird turn out to be absolutely normal when you're gathered in a place that's specifically designed to attract people who have the same interests that you do.
Wielding a couple of classic pieces of stuff I've picked up from the Internet here, to show us that so many things can be normalized, whether it's for good or for ill. The Gender Subversion posters from Crimethinc are a familiar thing to me. The classic poster about gender roles was something I saw early on, and thought of it as a useful tool for normalizing the idea of roles that were outside the tight strictures that my provincial upbringing wanted to put into play. The new version that's there is even more explicitly political in its outlook, but it serves the same purpose as to what behavior is to be normalized and what behavior is to be sent off as harmful and weird. A lot of the censorship forces in the world insist, very loudly, that they are the normal ones and that even if they don't have a large vocal crowd, they are supported in their actions by the "silent majority" or the "moral majority" that isn't exactly right here, right now, but totally agrees with them in all of their particulars and to the degree that they are protesting or trying to get something done. The truth of the matter is that their most successful tactics are generally to put one or a small handful of sympathetic people into positions of power, and then have those people use their power to enforce the agenda, rather than being able to demonstrate in some other capacity that they really do have the majority position. Turns out that most of the time, if they want to ban books or restrict access or deadname and out children, most parents and adults are furious with them and do not agree with them. (And are more than happy to vote out the dicks a lot of the time.)
The other thing that I'm thinking about in the situation of what is normal is something like Topsy-Turvy Day, or the Carnival, the idea that when you bring enough people together in any given spot, the definition of what qualifies as normal relies more upon the people who are currently in the space than what society considers normal or acceptable. When you're at the con, what's considered acceptable dress and acceptable commentary on that dress is different than when you're in a grocery store. When you're at the stadium, what's acceptable dress and commentary is different than at the con. Enough people going along with the idea is often enough to shift the definition of normal, at least temporarily, to match what the group wants, rather than what a supposedly objective normal would be. I suppose it could be summarized as somewhere tangential to "If you find yourself in Rome, do as the Romans do," because it's really "If you find yourself among Romans, do as the Romans do." There are caveats, of course, because sometimes you find yourself in the company of people who offend your basic sensibilities or your morals. Sometimes you'll have to fake it so you can get away. Sometimes you want to tell them off. And sometimes you wonder how things transpired to this point that you find yourself in the company of such disreputable entities, and how your normal got changed so much that this is the company you keep now. (Well, okay, that happens in fiction a lot more in real life, since a lot of the times, in real life, the process is really that you find the people who think of you as normal and surround yourself with them, so it's not usually the case where you have a moment of wondering whether you're the baddies or not.)
Because the definition of what's normal is very reliant on the situation and the people around you, at least as much, if not more, than what abstract ideas of morality and ethics say is normal, it becomes easy to see how even someone who believes their very existence and interests couldn't possibly be normal ends up around a whole bunch of people who see them as perfectly normal. Or even statistically normal. Mind you, it's taken the Internet and leaving the small towns where I grew up before I could get a big enough sample of people to recognize this normality. You can make friends on the Internet regarding shared interests, for example. Or you can go to meetups arranged mostly through the power of the Internet and find plenty of people with similar interests. (And go bowling with them, fairly regularly.) Or when you're at a university, you can follow the endless flyers of people advertising their interests to find interesting people and end up sitting on the board of a tabletop game convention for all the years that you were at that university. (I didn't play all that many games, because I really wasn't into the tabletop scene, but it was always helpful to have an actual student on the board for access to the various services the University would provide for student organizations. So I learned a fair amount about running conventions from that. That's normal.) Or you follow the fliers and have good conversations with anti-war protesters against the imperial exercises of your country, or someone who wants to recruit the educated bourgeoisie to the cause of the revolutionary proletariat and have some weekly conversations with them about the viability of the idea and what the obstacles will be to implementation. Those are normal university experiences, I'm sure. As are the completely normal experiences of traveling to Florida or California to play an instrument in a football game, and to have been directed by John Williams in a piece that John Williams arranged. There's a big group of people who had that specific experience, so that was entirely normal for that situation, even if it may have seemed entirely impossible to anyone who didn't happen to follow that particular thread of their existence. (And one of the people who was there with me for that experience eventually ended up working at Lucasfilm as one of the archivists, before they were sold to Disney. I have no idea if she's still working there or not. That's a perfectly normal experience, right?)
And I'm normal in that I had a bad relationship that I had to pull myself out of, and I'm normal in that I moved a long way to find work, and I'm normal that I play video games and board games, and I'm normal that I have a household of people who I like being around and who at least tolerate me, and I'm normal that I have a cat, and I'm normal (or more rapidly becoming normal) because I'm someone working with my neurodivergence, and I'm normal that I have a lot of rough spots from the traumas of living through this particular chunk of my life, and I'm very normal that I have professionals to help with those traumas, and I'm normal that I have friends where our interests overlap, even if our geographic proximity doesn't. There's so much normal that's going on in my life, even as I focus on the things that I think aren't normal, either because I think of them as things that will drive other people away from me, or because I think of them as things that might draw other people to me. And in so many, many cases, it turns out that the things I think of as strange really are much more normal, or at least are more normal for the people that I've chosen to hang around with, even if they might be weirder to the wider society.
While I might believe that I'll never be normal, that's certainly not the case, and one of the joys of my life is that I keep finding people for whom what I have thought of as strange, weird, or even deviant is perfectly normal to them. By having an expanded perspective on where the boundaries of human interaction and action and all the rest are, it allows me to feel much more in the pocket and the bell curve, even in the wider society. Admittedly, I don't want to lose my weird status completely, because I've built a lot of my identity around being someone who isn't normal in all of my aspects, but I want it to be normal weird rather than the kind of weird that I've been made fun of (or nearly fired for), the kind that's quirky and eccentric, rather than the kind that's toxic or seen as moral failures and unacceptable. I've had enough of being singled out for being weird and being told that I'm not okay behind my back and also to my face. So while I may never summit Mount Normal fully, there's definitely a place for me and a whole bunch of other wonderful weirdos along the way.
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