AM I NORMAL?

We have an ingrained and cultural desire to pursue what’s “normal”.  Parents attend “well baby” checks to verify that their baby’s height and weight fall within “normal limits”.  Our teenagers sometimes go to extremes to fit in and feel “normal”.  We take drugs to have our chemistry fall within the “normal” range.  

It’s “normal” to hate Mondays, to dread the teenage years with our kids, and to normalize the expectation that the honeymoon phase of our love relationship won’t last.   When my youngest son refused to eat solids until the age of 16 months, time and again we were told…, that’s NOT “normal”.

Normal is our supreme reference point.  The one by which we measure how well we’re doing in all aspects of our lives and when we sometimes fall outside of “normal”, then we’re suppose to worry.  “Normal” is a set point for comparison…but we’re also told that comparison leads to destruction.  The smoke in mirrors with “normal” is that the habitual and the familiar are synonymous to “normal”.  

Think of the Tylenol commercial that says something along the lines of “for that everyday, normal headache…take Tylenol”.   Um…headaches aren’t normal. Ever.   But they are common.  Common has become ubiquitous for normal.

When we don’t fit the mold and do exactly as expected, the pattern disruption makes us abnormal.  But what if abnormal is a good thing?

What makes us all so amazing are the things that differentiate us.  My kids have one of those cliché signs in their bathroom that reads “Why try to fit in when you were born to stand out!”.  We tell our kids this all the time, yet deep down, maybe we want them to be like everyone else?  But, we can’t have it both ways.

Currently our American state of normal looks like this:

Only 28% of us exercise - being sedentary has become normal.

Over 70% of Americans are overweight or obese (Forbes magazine Oct. 16, 2017), this is normal…being a size 2 is what a size 6 was 20 years ago.

80% of Americans today will die of chronic illness.  High blood sugar, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and being overweight are all so common that they’re touted as “normal”.

25 million Americans take antidepressant drugs to feel normal, 9.4% of children have ADHD as compared to the children who behave “normally” and it’s normal to sit for more than 8 hours a day.

The chiropractic paradigm teaches us that we all have a unique innate intelligence that inherently moves us in the direction of better health and better healing.  That we all have a purpose and that purpose is to make our dreams come true.   Why is it that when we talk about optimal health and thriving and dreams come true…we use words like “dreamer”, “naive”, “hippie”, “granola” and “quack”.

Our current culture normalizes illness, normalizes sadness, normalizes struggle and certainly normalizes stress.  If these are our current reference points for normal, then no wonder for the first time in humankind, out kids aren’t predicted to outlive us.

What if we simply trusted that we’re meant to excel?  That we deserve it and that we were born for it?  What if we refuse to normalize the chronic illness that’s killing 80% of us due to our lifestyle choices?  (The science reports this, not me).   If we refuse to support the companies that normalize massive sugar intake and hydrogenated oils (fast foods and processed foods), and glyphosate (GMO foods) and endocrine disruptors (beauty products) then we’ll literally change the nature of how we define normal.

What if we collectively just raised our expectation of normal?  Maybe it really is that simple…or maybe I’m just being naive.