What's Normal Anyway? Mental Illness, Neurodivergence, and More

Written By Caroline Smith

When you’ve struggled with things like mental health, disorders, neurodivergence, dysfunctional thinking patterns, maladaptive behaviors, and other mental and emotional issues, it can be hard to move through the world as if you are normal. As someone who has struggled with the symptoms of autism my whole life and social anxiety for almost a decade, I know how it feels, but I’ve always wondered, what even is “normal”? How did I even get to be this abnormal, and most importantly, how can I actually be normal without trying to fake it?

In this episode, we’ll explore in-depth the concept of “normal,” including what’s considered normal and abnormal in terms of mental health and relationships, how you can find self-acceptance with the reality of not being normal, and towards the end I’ll give you my best advice for how you can become as normal as possible based on my own experience being an autistic woman who had to overcome an almost decade-long battle with social anxiety.

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Transcript

Welcome to The Introverted Misfit Podcast with me, Caroline Smith, where we discuss topics related to the human experience of connection and communication with a slightly awkward, introverted twist.

In today’s podcast episode, we’ll explore in-depth the concept of “normal,” including what’s considered normal and abnormal in terms of mental health and relationships, how you can find self-acceptance with the reality of not being normal, and towards the end I’ll give you my best advice for how you can become as normal as possible based on my own experience being an autistic woman who had to overcome an almost decade-long battle with social anxiety.

Before we get into the meat and potatoes of this episode, I’m excited to announce that my previous online course, Communicate with Quiet Confidence, is now officially a 1-on-1 coaching program for introverts who struggle with social anxiety and social awkwardness, so that you can become a socially confident introvert. So If you’re interested in learning more about my coaching program, you can check the link in the description or visit theintrovertedmisfit.com/coaching.

A few days ago, I picked the last couple of cucumbers from my very pathetic excuse of a garden.

I call it pathetic because my neighbor has this huge tree that blocks out like 4 hours of prime sunlight, and the soil needs a lot of amendment and tilling because it’s really hard., but that’s beside the point.

And I noticed that one of them looks a little wonky and misshapen. For those of you listening to the audio format of this podcast you can’t see the cucumbers I’m holding up, but I do have them here.

From what I’ve learned through research and experience, the weirdly shaped fruit is sometimes caused by inconsistent watering and/or sunlight which messes up the flow of the nutrient uptake which then messes up the consistency of the fruits growth and development.

In this specific case, I think it was more to do with the fact that the plant was already starting to die off as we enter the cooler months in Alabama, but whatever the cause, it didn’t develop properly because it didn’t get exactly what it needed at the exact moment it needed it.

But if I were to cut it open, it would likely sill have perfectly good seeds inside, some of which would grow into perfectly healthy plants if you put them in the right environement with the right conditions.

And I’m sure if I tasted it, it would taste like a regular cucumber.

I just looks a little different and it’s not as complete as it could be.

In addition to it’s environment, there’s also a genetic component that contributes to how it turned out, because it looks like it was on track to be a little girthier than the much slimmer one in my hand.

Seeing these cucumbers is not what inspired me to do this episode — although I will admit it’s kind of perfect timing — but I’ve actually been thinking about this question, “What does it mean to be normal?” ever since I was 6 years old, because that’s when my parents noticed that I was not “normal.”

Most kids my age were interested in getting know their peers — I was not.

Most kids my age would’ve had at least a core group of 2 or 3 friends that they would hand out with regularly and play with at recess — I was fine playing by myself, except for every now and then when someone would play with me because their usual group of friends were absent.

Sometimes I would muster up the courage to play kickball with the other kids, but for some reason I just couldn’t get the art of communication quite right.

Like there’s a certain way you have to approach joining a group of people or even individual people, and there’s a way you have to engage with them for the entirety of the social interaction, and if you don’t get it just right at least 70% of the time, you risk being socially excluded.

Well, all of these struggles made sense when I was diagnosed with being in the autism spectrum as a teenager, or at the time I was diagnosed it was referred to as Asperger’s Syndrome.

That’s the reason I’m not considered to be “normal.”

And this topic got me thinking about other mental illnesses and disorders, like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and conditions that can have a significant negative impact on daily life and relationships, and how those affect people’s ability to live normally.

I think I’ve explained my story enough in previous episodes, but for the new listeners, my struggles with socializing and communicating were the root cause of my severe social anxiety for the better half of a decade.

And now that I’m out of that very lonely and depressing stage of my life — for good I hope — I sometimes wonder what exactly I did to become what’s considered normal.

Or am I even considered normal since technically autism is a lifelong diagnosis, so I still have it, just minus the debilitating social anxiety and the inability to socialize in a way that’s expected of me.

In the remainder of this episode, I’m going to attempt to do the following:

  1. Explain what normal means

  2. Give my opinion on whether or not we should feel bad about not being normal

  3. Explain my personal experience and research about how you can strive to be as normal as is possible for your condition

But before I get into all of that, I want to offer a huge disclaimer here that I am not a licensed mental health professional, so please don’t take the advice that follows as 100% fact — it’s just what I think as someone who hasn’t been considered normal for nearly my entire life at this point.

1. What does normal even mean?

In terms of mental health and how humans relate to one another, I think normal means to behave in a way that keeps you and those around you in a state of general emotional homeostasis.

So whatever situation you are doing through individually or those around you are going through collectively, whether it’s the good, the bad, or the ugly, behaving normally means you and everyone else are able to return to emotional homeostasis or emotional stability in a reasonably timely manner.

It also means that the emotional highs and lows are not so extreme that you and others around you can’t function and think logically.

When you look at the clinical definition of all of these mental disorders, one of the most common symptoms is a lack of emotional regulation in varying degrees and forms, so basically an issue getting back to emotional homeostasis.

I was listening to a podcast interview with the psychoanalyst Erica Komisar, and she was using a metaphor of sailing in the Caribbean to explain the difference between emotional regulation vs. emotional dysregulation.

She was saying how to in order to be regulated, you want to feel like your smooth sailing in the Caribbean where the waves don’t get so out of control that you can’t get to your destination, but contrarily when you’re dysregulated, it’s like you’re sailing in the Pacific during a storm, because the waves — or the emotional highs and lows — can get so out of control that you can’t function properly.

So that’s what I think of as normal.

Sometimes, the word “normal” can be considered offensive or derogatory, and I definitely agree with that in certain contexts, but I also think that trying to completely avoid using the word “normal” can invalidate people’s experiences.

For instance, I don’t know if any of you tuning in right now have ever interacted with someone who is severely emotionally dysregulated, but if you have you know it’s often very clear that something about their thought patterns is off.

And it can be frustrating, especially when you really care about the person, because no matter what you say to them or how much you try to help them see things differently, nothing sticks.

It’s kind of like watching a hamster run on a hamster wheel, but the wheel is on fire, and they just cannot figure our how to get themselves off the wheel.

In my own life, I’ve had people with varying degrees of disorders from the least severe to the most severe tell me in their own words, “I wish I was normal.”

And I’m including myself in that group of people especially when I was in my state of social anxiety and depression.

If you think about it, saying something like that is a very big statement to make, and who would I be to tell them that they shouldn’t use that word “normal” because it’s offensive?

It obviously has great meaning for them, because as we just went over, normal is a baseline for stability, which is something that everyone needs.

So that’s my thoughts on what’s considered normal, but that leads to a different question:

2. Should you feel bad about yourself for not being “normal”?

My answer to that question is that that’s the wrong question to be asking.

Let’s say you are feeling bad about your mental and emotional state.

In my opinion, it’s not a question of if you should or shouldn’t be feeling that way; it’s about getting to the bottom of why you feel that way.

I discussed the topic of the purpose of feelings and emotions in an earlier podcast episode titled The Only Skill You Need to Master Emotional Intelligence, but the summary is all emotions have a purpose; they are letting you know that something is right, or something is wrong and we should address it.

I should clarify here that when I say “we should address it,” that does not automatically mean you need to act on it.

Go watch the full video to get the full context of that discussion, because I really want that difference to be clear.

So for instance, growing up with autism and the resulting social anxiety that followed, the reason I felt bad about not being normal is because it was negatively affecting my ability to create relationships, maintain relationships, and just function on a day-to-day basis in my personal life and at work.

It’s common for people with disorders like anxiety or depression to feel bad about not feeling normal because their condition often negatively impacts themselves and the people in their lives.

And I know it can make you feel even worse about yourself when the normal people around you are dismissive of what you’re internally going through, and their comments can make you feel even worse about yourself than you already do.

What I’ve come to realize is that a lot of times their dismissiveness is accidental and it comes from a place of ignorance, because some people really have no appreciation for just how complex the brain and the nervous system are.

In fact it’s the most complex organ in your entire body.

The fact that it’s so complex and intricate is amazing, but it’s also kind of scary because it’s complexity makes us very vulnerable to things going wrong, or neural pathways not connecting the right way, and certain synapses not firing when they should be or firing when they shouldn’t be.

From the time you’re still in your mother’s womb to how you’re treated when you enter the world, something can happen to you or someone can say something to you consistently enough in your childhood that it changes the way you think and behave for the rest of your life, because the first 5 years of your life is when you experience 90% of the brain growth and development that you will have in your entire life.

That’s why I think it’s not about asking if you should or shouldn’t be feeling a certain way about your mental state, but instead it’s a question of how you can get to the bottom of why you feel that way so that you can use that as motivation to change.

3. So now the question becomes how do we use those negative feelings we have as a catalyst for improving our situation?

And again, my advice is just from my personal experience with autism and social anxiety and my research, and depending on the severity of your disorder, it should not be a replacement for what a professional mental health expert can do for you.

Here are the 3 main steps: self-acceptance, gratitude, and self-improvement.

  1. Self-acceptance

    Self-acceptance is an important first step, but I think a lot of people get this step wrong, because they can use it as an excuse not to change their behavior.

    It’s almost like they use self-acceptance as the end goal instead of using it as the starting point towards the end goal.

    Self-acceptance is essentially you declaring, “This is what I have to work with.”

    “This is me in all of my strengths, weaknesses, flaws, struggles, and triumphs, past trauma, and I’m going to accept that reality, and do the best with the cards I was dealt in life.”

    That’s what I call the starting point of making a change.

  2. Gratitude

    Gratitude is being thankful about all of the good things instead of focusing on the bad things, and this is useful in giving you a positive outlook on life.

    And trust me, whatever your situation, there is almost always someone who has it worse than you.

    I remember being in middle school and hearing a guest motivational speaker deliver a speech to us, and I don’t remember what his genetic condition was called but he was born with none of his limbs.

    No arms, no legs, but he did have a little foot attached to one of the stubs where his legs should be.

    And the gist of his speech was that he could decide to focus on all of the things he can’t do in life because he has no limbs, but that would make him miserable, because he can’t change anything about the fact that he has no limbs.

    It would be a useless mindset to have.

    So he talked about how he chose to have a positive outlook despite all of the negative things he could be focused on.

    Even in my case with having autism: yes, my I struggled a lot with figuring out the social and emotional aspects of communication and relationships, but that is not the worst thing in the world.

    There are people out there without autism or any disorder for that matter who genuinely don’t even want to be on earth anymore because they can’t find peace of mind and mental stability.

    That’s the power of gratitude.

  3. Self-improvement

    Finally, self-improvement, which probably has to be the most difficult step out of the three.

    Depending on your unique situation, that is much easier said than done, but I think anyone is capable of doing it in a way that’s best for them.

    I just refuse to believe that anyone is not capable of changing their situation. I mean, what kind of life would that really be if we were all just moving through life thinking we have no control over the outcomes?

    That’s a very demotivating and disempowering outlook to have.

    So exactly do we go about self-improvement?

    For some people, that may include therapy and possibly medication for treating the symptoms.

    I had to go to a couple of years of counseling for my social anxiety, and it had gotten so bad that my counselor was going to refer me to a psychiatrist to be medicated.

    Ultimately I was very hesitant about that suggestion, so I just told her, “No thanks, I’m going to try and fix this on my own first before exploring that option,” and it just so happened to work for me.

    That might be an option.

    Another option that I did was come up with a regular exercise routine particularly where I could be outside in nature, in the sunlight and fresh air.

    For me that was gardening and going for long walks.

    I was actually reading a couple of studies about the effect of spending time outdoors on veterans receiving treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and according to the results, time outdoors doing an activity like hiking, biking, and fishing, decreased the symptoms of PTSD.

    In fact the more time they spent outside, the greater their symptoms were reduced.

    In one of the studies, Anthony Parmenter who is an adjunct professor and a licensed mental health professional, conducted his own research on a concept called “Therapeutic Fly-Fishing” to help veterans with PTSD recover from emotional distress.

    What he suggests in his paper is that holding the therapy session while fly-fishing, which is a nature-based activity that requires physical movement and Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EDM) might be a more engaging activity for veterans rather than holding the therapy session indoors while just sitting and talking.

    And when you consider all of the other studies that show being outside and doing a physical activity naturally increases your serotonin levels, which is your bodies natural mood booster, it really makes perfect sense that incorporating outdoor activities can be more successful in addition to therapy, counseling, and self-work.

    As always I provide a link to the studies I’m referencing in the description of this podcast episode.

    What do you think: could mother nature really be the greatest healer of them all? Let me know if you agree by leaving a comment below.

    Another suggestion I have for self-improvement is to put hurdles in the way so that you can make it much harder for you to do something irrational or something that’s not a good idea.

    So for instance, if you have a short temper and someone starts to push your buttons, before you even have time to think about it, just get up and walk away.

    Physically remove yourself from that environment.

    If you have an eating disorder that makes you binge on junk food, don’t keep junk food in your house at all, until you are able to discipline yourself around it.

    If you have ADHD, create an environment for yourself that is as minimal and non-stimulating as possible.

    That might mean leaving your phone in another room while you work so that you’re not tempted to check it every 5 minutes and get sucked into scrolling on Instagram for an hour, or if you have a desk job where you work with multiple computer monitors on your desk with a million different tabs open, make it habit of only having the tabs that you need open at once.

    Or consider removing one of the monitors.

    I’m a software engineer and at one point in my career I used to have 4 computer monitors on my desk until I decided to disconnect one of them, and I discovered that the fourth one was definitely overkill.

    I was much less distracted with just using 3 or even just 2 sometimes.

    If you struggle with social anxiety like I did, you’ll eventually have to start socializing with people consistently so that you can teach yourself that people aren’t as scary as you brain is making them out to be.

    And my last suggestion for self-improvement is to be prepared for mentally tough times.

    It’s important to realize that no matter what you do, the work is ultimately going to fall on you, regardless of any outside help that you receive.

    And it’s not going to be easy, because you’re going to be fighting against what your brain is wired to do.

    You’re fighting against your brain’s defense mechanisms, which is a lot of work, especially if those defense mechanisms have been created since birth, but coming from someone who’s done it and still does it today, it’s worth it.

    And it’s also important to realize that the work never stops for the rest of your life, but the key is it becomes easier and easier once those new connections start to become more permanently engrained, until it eventually comes naturally, and doesn’t feel like you’re in a constant internal war.

That’s all for today’s episode. If you are an introvert who struggles with social anxiety and social awkwardness, check the description to learn more about my 1-on-1 coaching program, Communicate with Quiet Confidence, or you can go directly to theintrovertedmisfit.com/coaching to book your free introductory call today.

As always, if you enjoyed this talk, please don’t forget to hit the follow or subscribe button, leave a review and/or comment on whichever platform you’re watching on, and share this podcast with a friend. Thanks for listening, and have a great day!

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Caroline Smith

Caroline is the founder of The Introverted Misfit, a community committed to helping socially inept people become more socially confident in themselves.

https://theintrovertedmisfit.com
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