Being Normal Is Getting Harder

It's getting harder to be normal. The catalogs of ways we can be inadequate, the pathologies to which we might succumb, and the concerns about which we must be mindful grow ever longer.

Always, we are in need of help. When an old friend died recently, the funeral home sent me an email with a link to "grief resources." I am told, "It's hard to know what to say, do, or even feel when you're going through the grief process." Grief counselors offer to teach me which of the feelings I may (or may not) be experiencing are "normal" and when they should subside. For the equally elusive task of relating to others, they offer specialist instruction in "how to show sympathy."

In this, as in so much else, there are countless ways to be "deficient." My emotions might be wrong: too intense, not intense enough, or last too long. My actions toward others in the situation might be insensitive or insufficient. Of the ways in which our thoughts, feelings, and behavior can be deviant, problematic, troublesome, undesirable, or disordered, there is no end. Not only can a lot go wrong, but there is a lot we can be that is "wrong."

As the horizon of inadequacy expands, so too does the felt need for professional guidance and intervention. Normal is no longer some usual or unimpaired state. Now, it is an achievement, dependent on the guidance, techniques, and approval of the myriad specialists in living—the "normalizers"—to whom we turn, from doctors to therapists to life coaches.

We readily articulate and experience our troubles in the basic terms of professionals and avail ourselves of their ministrations. Even certain lay people, those adopting the role of what Dutch sociologist Abram de Swaan called "proto-professionals," offer their care.¹

The flurry of self-diagnosing promoted by social media influencers is a good example of such lay activism. In the stance of experts, the influencers redefine everyday troubles in the language of symptoms as problems amenable to professional treatment.

Seeking Validation

When I ask young people about the reasons for "self-diagnosis," the single most common reason they give is "validation."

Validation? An odd word. When we ask to be heard on a sensitive matter and get a positive response, we usually use words like affirmed or acknowledged or accepted. Not in this case. With a diagnosis, people want their personal struggles and distress "validated."

As we might expect, validation is a clinical term. In psychotherapy, it is a tool for managing the client. In selective moments, therapists extend recognition to clients' thoughts and actions or signal their nonjudgmental stance. Similarly, according to the dictionary, to validate something is to give it official sanction. To confirm or substantiate it with evidence or on an authoritative basis. To attest to or authenticate its genuineness.

Whether or not they pursue treatment, just such external verification of experience is what young people want from a diagnostic category. When their struggles are linked to official, authoritative medical knowledge, they become real and recognized to themselves and perhaps to others.

I am not criticizing help-seeking. Although understandable, there is a loss in such deference. To see the loss, consider this thought experiment from the novelist and physician Walker Percy.² An American couple, he proposes, has driven down to Mexico. While traveling there, they get lost. Then:

"After hours on a rocky mountain road, they find themselves in a tiny valley not even marked on the map. There they discover an Indian village. Some sort of religious festival is going on. It is apparently a corn dance in supplication of the rain god.

"They are entranced. They spend several days in the village, observing the Indians and being themselves observed with friendly curiosity."

Their enjoyment of the village and the festival, however, Percy writes, is not free of "a certain restiveness in the sightseers themselves." One clue to their anxiety, he suggests, is "in their subsequent remark to an ethnologist friend. 'How we wished you had been there with us! What a perfectgold minee of folkways! Every minute we would say to each other, if only you were here! You must return with us.'"

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"This surely testifies," Percy continues, "to a generosity of spirit, a willingness to share their experience with others." But, he counters, "I am afraid, this is not the case at all. It is true that they longed for their ethnologist friend, but it was for an entirely different reason."

What they wanted was not his companionship or ethnological explanations; it was his approval. "They wanted him, not to share their experience but to certify their experience as genuine." Only then, at last, could they rest easy, assured that they were "having the acceptable experience."

Quite clearly, the need for expert certification can undermine our confidence and ability to engage the world on our own terms. This loss, Percy writes, "is not a marginal process, as might appear from my example of estranged sightseers." It signals a more general surrender of sovereignty. From our own powers, we become alienated. And because this surrender seems so natural to us, Percy adds, the impoverishment is unlikely to even register.

Am I having an acceptable experience? That is the question that those seeking "validation" are asking. Is my unhappiness genuine, of the approved sort?

Am I Normal?

That isn't their only question.

When talking about disorders, young people often pit their self-diagnosed condition against a more all-encompassing sense of deficiency. They are falling short, they say, or overwhelmed or the odd person out. They are not enough—flexible, emotionally intelligent, outgoing, goal-directed, fit, successful, and standing out from the crowd. Their other accomplishments notwithstanding, they often see themselves as failures.

Not only are the ways to be deficient multiplying, but the scope of deficiency is becoming more comprehensive. It can engulf the whole self. Young people report not merely being deficient with respect to some valued trait or capacity. They also feel or feel judged by others as deficient in themselves. More than something is wrong—something is wrong with me.

As a college student told me in an interview, "I'm not a bad person. I just have a thing." What having a "thing"—a specific disorder—meant to her is that she is not, in her essence, a defective person. Or, as others expressed such global judgments, not "lazy," or a "different person," or a "crappy person," or a "loser." Not persons, that is, who are beyond help.

Having a recognized condition is an "easier pill to swallow," noted another student, because it limits the scope of the difference. To being a flawed self, having a "thing" is a welcome alternative.

In looking to validation in a diagnosis, then, young people are not just hoping to certify that their struggles are of the proper sort. On a more basic level, they are also asking for some external validation that they are of the proper sort. That they, paradoxically, might be normal.

As being normal gets harder, so too does our dependence on the normalizers. It is not their fault; they are only trying to help. But we have to be ready to struggle for our own experience and that of our children. And the struggle begins, as Percy suggests, with recognizing that there is a struggle.