Saturday 18 December 2010

What is normal? (and the title of this blog)

I am not normal.

This seems to be a controversial thing to say. I'm always getting told 'There's no such thing as normal'. My housemate (a psychology student) once answered this with a fantastically geeky, matter-of-fact 'There is. It's within two standard deviations of the mean'.

Of course there's such a thing as normal. Just as there's such a thing as 'hate' and there's such a thing as 'beautiful'. Words that are not easily defined still have meaning to most of us. Even without my housemate's scientific definition, we all have an idea of 'normal': normal is what you'd expect to see.

As I assume you understand, the title of this blog is from the scientific measure of how typical something is. (If you don't understand, go and Google or get someone to explain the normal distribution. I'm not doing it here, it makes the post look too dull. You could alternatively read something where the writer is more interested in people being able to read his/her stuff...)For many things, I am outside the two standard deviations, on the edge of that bell curve. I say this, but I have realised many of my oddities/abnormalities can't really be described like this. You cannot plot my bisexuality on a bell curve, or the fact that the laptop I am typing from is resting on a toilet lid. I do not know any system of measuring the volume of one's hair, or if the results would follow a normal distribution. But, still, that's where the blog name comes from.

Of course, most (I always hesitate to say 'all') people will have something 'abnormal' about them. Some people will have more, some people will have less. You could probably make a normal distribution of the number of attributes people have that lie outside of normal, but that'd be a bit silly (but I'd admittedly love it). I believe I'd be reasonably far from the centre of that bell curve, that I am not a very 'normal' person, but perhaps I'm wrong.

As for the people who say it's offensive to say people's characteristics are normal or not normal, I think it's them being offensive. They're implying that somehow only normal is good. Was Einstein's intelligence normal? Is having purple hair normal? Abnormal does not mean worse. Even where it does, it don't see any reason to pretend it's actually ordinary. Everyone's on the worse side of normal for something. I am abnormally anxious, and I think you'll all agree that's a bad thing, but I doubt you're thinking I'm a bad person for it. Saying it's 'normal' for me to hyperventilate if unexpectedly invited to the neighbour's house for tea is just patronising, in my opinion. It reminds me of this article from Ouch! which discusses the idea that people can't just accept that some people have disabilities. But it's worse than that, saying normal is ideal is failing to except that people aren't all identical.

I admit maybe my view on this is due to my Asperger's Syndrome; we tend to have a blunt and literal take on things. But that's how it seems to me, and that's all I can provide: my edge-of-the-bell-curve view on normal. Feel free to comment with your own.