The other day I was driving home and I was thinking about how normal I feel. I feel like on average I assume that I’m smack in the middle of the bell curve (I haven’t added a comment box yet so you all can’t tell me where you think I fall, I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life). Anyway, my point with this is how predicatble I feel becuase of this. Like… I am just normal, if you make a guess about me based on “normal development” you’re probably going to be right.
I say this becuase when I was younger I remember my doctor telling me that when I got to middle school I would “find my people.” And for the most part, I did, until I was in 8th grade. Then my doctor told me that I’d find my freedom in highschool. And of course, I did. I remember when I went to college and I was sad, I missed my family and my friends from home. I called my parents frequently but eventually, as I was told, that went away. All I’m saying with this is that I feel pretty normal. The things that are supposed to happen, do.
None of those are particularly annoying predictions, they were all pretty moot and came to pass. The one I really hate is what my math teacher said at our highschool graduation. He said something like “cherish it now becuase as soon as you cross this stage, time flies.” Three years later and I am almost done with college. And it feels like it went way faster than highschool did. And it scares me that he was right. The thing I fear most is getting to the end of my life and not knowing where all the time went. I used to look at older people in my life and how they could just stop going to the doctor, or how they could get so busy they wouldn’t shop, or clean. But the older I get the more I realize how easy it is to fall into that trap. My track record of falling into whatever normal human archetype there is out there makes me nervous that I’ll fall into others.
Given that I’m, you know, studying psychology, and I think something like 6 credits away from having a whole BS, this got my thinking about normalcy in a clinical setting. One of the things I was thinking about is how the more predictable a person is, the easier it is to treat. At least that the whole idea behind manualizing treatments. Now obviously this gets into a whole issue about categorizing people, is it a good thing? Is it really helpful? Jury’s still out on that one. The current standard is the DSM V, which would have you believe that everything can be categorized. A newer approach, one that informs my own research, is RDoC, which believes in a more dimensional approach. You can think about it like the move from categories of Autism to Autism Spectrum Disorder (this is a dimensional model leaking into a traditional categorical approach). Not to get too deep in the weeds but a lot of the categorical approach exists for a reason, like insurance, or communication between clinicians, and to some extent it’s helpful. I mean, as I’ve pointed out, there’s certainly people that follow pretty standard archetypes, and that’s something you can use to help them develop. In my own example, people knew how I was feeling would change, and for the most part they were right.
Of course, there is always the risk, or maybe it’s a certainty, that by categorizing people, you miss the boat. Like with race based medicine, it can be quiet limiting and detrimental. But a lot of how we treat “abnormal” comes down to how we define “normal.” I don’t really know where I am going with this, other than to maybe challenge the definition of normal, so I’ll leave it at this so as to not muddle my previous point.
I guess the real point here is how much of my life, my trajecotry, is normal and predictable. I graduated high school, I went to college, I get good grades, I worry about the food I eat, I get exercise, I do all the things you’re supposed to. And now I work 40 hours a week… just like I’m supposed to. So where does it end? When does the “normal trajectory” of my life just start being projections and stop being prophecies?
I guess thats for me to decide.