most of us are rather interested in
being normal we want to belong and worry
about ways in which we don't quite no
matter how much we praise individualism
and celebrate ourselves as unique we are
in many areas just deeply concerned with
fitting in it's therefore unfortunate
that our picture of what is normal is in
fact very often way out of line with
what is actually true and widespread
many things that we might assume to be
uniquely odd or disconcertingly strange
about us are in reality completely
average in ubiquitous those simply
rarely spoken of in the reserved and
cautious public sphere the idea of the
normal currently in circulation is not
an accurate map of what is actually
customary for a human being we are each
one of us far more compulsive anxious
sensual high-minded mean generous
playful thoughtful dazed and at sea than
we are ever encouraged to admit part of
the reason for our misunderstanding of
our normality comes down to a basic fact
about our minds that we know through
immediate experience what's going on
inside us but we can only know about
other people from what they choose to
tell us which will almost always be a
very edited version of the truth we know
what we've done at 3 a.m. but imagine
others sleeping peacefully we know our
somewhat shocking desires from close up
we're left to guess about other people's
from what their faces tell us which is
not very much this asymmetry between
self-knowledge and knowledge of others
is what lies behind loneliness we simply
can't trust that our deep selves can
have counterparts in those we meet and
so we stay silent and go melancholy the
asymmetry encourages shyness to for we
struggle to believe that the imposing
competent strangers we encounter can
really have any of the vulnerabilities
and ADEA sees we're so intimately
familiar with inside our own characters
ideally the task
of culture should be to compensate for
the failings of our brains by assisting
us to a more correct vision of what
other people are normally like by taking
us in a realistic but entertaining way
into the lives of strangers this is what
novels films and songs should constantly
be doing defining and evoking states of
mind we thought we were alone in
experiencing in order to alleviate our
shyness and our loneliness we are
particularly bad at recognizing how
normal it is to suffer and to be unhappy
around relationships for example we
constantly operate with an image of the
bliss of others which mocks and
undermines our own efforts to keep going
with many flawed but eminently good
enough unions we find it hard to bear in
mind that more or less everyone is
beneath a cheery surface intermittently
profoundly sad and rarely not anxious we
become embarrassed to by our close-up
knowledge of our own sexuality which
appears necessarily more perverse than
that of anyone we know it almost
certainly isn't we simply haven't been
told the full story
ideally artworks would offer us a hugely
consoling truth that are hidden worries
the nagging anxieties we keep to our
chests and our stranger thoughts and
compulsives don't actually make a
strange on the contrary they are
precisely what make us normal one great
goal of a love novel for instance should
be to tell us what love and long-term
relationships are really like so that
our own tribulations wouldn't appear so
readily assigns that everything had gone
wrong our culture often tries to project
an idea of an organized and poised and
polished self at the standard way that
most people are we should discount this
myth other people are always far more
likely to be as we know we are than they
are to be like the cardboard cutouts we
meet in our social lives
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