The Importance of Being Normal
In past decades, we as a culture have become more broadly aware of the phenomenon called “social construction” and its effects on us. As a result, many people question both the applicability and the usefulness of assumptions we have learned ever since our emergence into our culture. There is a new awareness of how these schema shape our understandings of ourselves and each other, and therefore structure what we experience and our relative value in the world.
These cognitive maps and their effects on our experiences and our concepts of ourselves are not as straightforward as a superficial understanding of social construction implies. My brother exemplifies the complexities that our categorizations can involve. Until the month before his high school graduation, Dan was a hard-working, athletic, whip-smart teenager who, by all indications, had a bright future ahead of him. When, at 18 years old, he sustained a TBI—a traumatic brain injury—his life changed immeasurably. He was forced to integrate multiple, serious impairments into his identity, and there has been nothing simple or straightforward about that process.
The difficulty came from our culture’s schematic distinction between normality and abnormality. While typicality is a more accurate and less fraught label for commonly encountered traits with atypicality the tag assigned to those seen less frequently, the normal/abnormal binary is the one that Dan (and scores of generations of others) grew up with.
Like nearly all of us, from the time he was a toddler developing his awareness of the world, the concept of normality vs. abnormality was a primary distinction that ordered his ideas about himself and others. But at 18, newly disabled and forced to reevaluate himself in terms of normality/abnormality, it was clear where his new conditions placed him. His pre-accident goal of becoming a race-horse trainer was replaced by an array of goals determined by a single, overarching aim: becoming normal again.
Dan knew what normal was. A child of the 1960s and ‘70s, he grew up ingesting the valuation of normality as valorous and abnormality as contemptible. Normality was defined by such factors as self-reliance, self-support, productivity, and social integration. Walking and talking were structurally essential to normal life. Working a job, dating, marrying, growing a family—all were hallmarks of normality. When rehabilitation had taken him as far as he would be able to go, and he realized that these avenues were permanently closed to him, he was left with the inescapable conclusion that he was now, for all intents and purposes, abnormal. Yet applying the label abnormal to himself, given the resonances he’d learned it had, was psychically impossible.
Why? Because, like the rest of us, Dan learned the implications of the abnormal from television and books and movies and comic strips and jokes. We learned its ramifications on the playground and in classrooms and school gyms through taunts and bullying, through exclusions that we ourselves understood, whether or not we participated in them, through the acquired, socially mandated disgust we carried for those who didn’t fit. Therefore, anything that indicated atypicality—any adaptive tool, like a wheelchair, or special aid—was anathema to him. Although inescapable necessity eventually forced him to use some devices, he continues, 43 years later, to vigorously refuse others that would certainly make his life less difficult and, ironically, allow him to be seen as less atypical.
And so Dan—hemiplegic, aphasic, with problems of drooling and urinary incontinence—continues to insist that he is normal. His criteria for abnormality has shifted from the external to the internal. Despite some issues with cognition and behavior, he perceives his internal processes as unchanged by the accident, and so he believes he still occupies the normal category. In his world, those who treat him as abnormal—what he calls treating him like a “baby”—are ignorant; they don’t see and therefore refuse to acknowledge his normality. It enrages him, because he knows what abnormal means, and he can’t bear consignment to that category.
As a result, he refuses to associate with other disabled people, unless their disabilities result from accidents that have left their mental functioning intact. He continues to distinguish between normal and abnormal, but the internal vs. external facet adds complexity, changing for him who belongs in which category. It doesn’t, however, change the way he feels about those in each category. For him, the abnormal is still repellent, even mockable. And knowing as he does the stigma attached to being abnormal—the stigma he himself attaches to it—he has had to adjust the determinative criteria so that he still occupies the space called normal.
Dan has had to rework the cultural schema in order to live there. But I’ve reworked it for myself, too. I’ve learned, from Dan, that normal and abnormal don’t mean what I grew up thinking they did. At all.