The Cult of Normal
But we're never gonna survive, unless
We get a little crazy.
- Seal, Crazy
This fall, we were shown how powerful and necessary crazy can be. A parade of pro-democracy inflatable animals and cartoon characters danced, twirled, hopped, and spun across US cities and towns to protest state-sanctioned violence and authoritarianism. The rallies hosted a funhouse Noah's Ark of frogs, pandas, koalas, T-Rexes, sharks, unicorns, and lobsters, to name but a few. Taking a page from the protest playbook in Portland, Americans showed up in inflatable animal costumes and played to the absurd: holding hands in song, knitting scarves, and shaking their puffy booties to drumbeats.
Underneath the zany antics was a serious message: we will not be silenced; we will not be numbed into submission; we will not walk lockstep into “normalcy”.
Normal is the flag flown by oppressive systems. We are expected to be one color, one shape, one faith, one way of learning and thinking. Schools crush originality by punishing mistakes and worshipping standardized answers. Institutions erase difference, especially now, as this Administration unravels decades of work toward diversity and inclusion.
As a result, we in America are engineering a dull, lifeless, uniform society – grey, rigid, and cold like an old photograph of a military parade. Yet long before this political moment, the lionizing of “normal” had already infected the culture – an impossible ideal for which all must strive. “Normalcy has always been propped up by and constructed on the bodies and lives of the not normal,” writes Jonathan Mooney, author of Normal Sucks: How to Life, Learn and Thrive Outside the Lines.
It wasn’t always this way. The word normal did not even appear in the English-speaking language, as codified by dictionary entries, until the 1860s. The word normal comes from the Latin norma - a carpenter’s square, a tool for making right angles. In geometry, it meant something true, perpendicular, aligned. Over time, this quiet mathematical term wandered into the realm of human life, where it took on a very different meaning. The “right angle” became right, and everything else was implied as wrong, or worse, evil. As statistical thinking seeped into culture, public health officials, educators, politicians, and city planners began to imagine society through the lens of averages. What was once a neutral measure became a moral compass. The “average” became the ideal. And so normal—a concept that doesn’t exist in nature—was elevated to law. We were instructed to be normal. To fit within the mean. To sand down our edges until we matched a line that only existed on paper.
In the 1940s, a group of American researchers set out to give normal a body. They gathered biometric data from large populations, but their measuring tapes and calipers traced only one kind of body—white, able, and conforming. From this narrow slice of humanity, they sculpted statues they called Normman and Norma - the supposed embodiments of health and perfection. These figures were displayed at eugenics conferences as aspirational models of what we should all be. But they were not real people. They were myths made of plaster and prejudice. They became icons of an invented ideal that would haunt generations to come.
Similarly, in the 1940s, Hitler’s clandestine T4 program was implemented, whereupon over 750,000 institutionalized children and adults with disabilities were “euthanized”, deemed unfit to live due to their mental and physical abnormalities. Infants and children were the first to go, via starvation or lethal overdose, and then later adults were added to the execution list via gas chambers. The program was the first instance of state-sponsored, systematic mass murder by the Nazi regime, serving as a blueprint for the later Holocaust. Yet still today T4 was never condemned as a crime against humanity. The doctors were never prosecuted; no memorials were constructed. Why? Because even within diversity and inclusion thinking, race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion are normal, but having a disability means you are broken.
The myth of normal is not history. It’s habitat. It lives in us, quietly shaping our choices, our self-worth, the way we measure beauty, intelligence, and success. It whispers that belonging is earned through sameness. It trains us to mistrust our eccentricities, our sensitivities, our wildness.
Isn’t this all so sad? Doesn’t it feel just all too familiar? Turn now to your quest for normal. Think of the ways you’ve internalized this oppressive mythology. Consider all the edges that have been trimmed off of you so that you might fit into that proverbial round hole.
My mother grew up in the UK during World War II. She was sent off to boarding school at the tender age of six, as was fashionable at the time for upper-middle-class families, to ensure she was shaped into the kind of woman a man would want to marry. She was left-handed. But right-angled means normal and right-handed, so left-handed was “the hand of the devil”. She was forced to write with her right hand, her left beaten into silence with theirs.
My mother writes now left-handed, her elegant defiance is a firm middle finger to the establishment.
Today, as the mythology of normal is celebrated on social media feeds and screamed from the glamorous penthouse rooftops of influencers, as an authoritative regime attempts to scare us straight, and as “normal” is increasingly normalized, let’s take a page from her playbook.
Where does your left-handedness reside? Where are you wild, strange, beautifully nonconforming? What edges have you hidden to survive? Call them home. Make art, playlists, collages, reform your closet, change up your friends, anything that helps your forbidden brilliance surface. Be vocal, visible, and audible, and proudly so, for all to experience. Because when you do, you give others permission to do the same.
I am reminded of one of my favorite ad campaigns, “Think Different” from Apple in 1997:
Here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them,
glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They push the human race forward.
While some may see them as the crazy ones,
we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think
they can change the world, are the ones who do.
-Written by Rob Siltanen of Chiat/Day, with contributions from the team and input from Steve Jobs.Conformity is toxic. Uniqueness is liberating and life-giving.
A new human story is being birthed in these labor pains of the worldwide autocratic backlash. And this new story is happening one human at a time, through each person’s rejection of sameness.
Be aware of the Dementor-like energies that want to make you doubt yourself. They’ll tell you that you are not enough. They’ll groom you to lure you in. They’ll tempt you with glamour and fame—byproducts of fitting into the norm. It’s easy to feel the difference between what feeds your spirit and what takes from it, so use your body as your guide. Trust it.
And when in doubt or afraid, remember the inflatable army, the joyful absurdity of air-filled pandas, frogs, and unicorns. Let that image inspire you to let your own freak flag fly. Because if we don’t get a little crazy, we are never going to survive. But if we do, we may become fully alive.
Kelly Wendorf is an ICF Master Certified executive and personal coach, published author, spiritual mentor, disruptor, and socially responsible entrepreneur. As founder of EQUUS® she specializes in the liberation of robust leadership capacities in those who are most qualified — the empathetic, the conscientious, the accountable, the generous, and the kind. Did you like this essay? Kelly is available for a wide range of services including Coaching, Workshops, The EQUUS Experience®, Retreats, Keynote Speaking and more.