Normal?

The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.
Jean Kerr

normal  /ˈnɔrməl/ –adjective
1. conforming to the standard or the common type; usual; not abnormal; regular; natural.
2. serving to establish a standard.


I often express my desire to be normal. This mostly comes up when I'm having a bad day due to depression, anxiety, fatigue, migraines, or, in particularly fun days, any or all of the above.

What I probably mean is healthy. If at any other time you ask me if I'm normal, my standard response would be "hell no!". I am at least eccentric, and that's only because it sounds better than "bat-shit crazy" :) My personality is a bit weird in the non-main stream sense, and at least once a week my area of the office falls silent while my co-workers stare at me like I've sprouted a second head. Normally this is because of something I've said, quickly followed by "how do you know this things?". Because it's a thing, and I like knowing!
Anyway, I am not normal when it comes to my hobbies, personality and what I know, say, and do. Or at least some people's bewilderness would make me think so.

But I've not been healthy for most of my life either. I've spent most of it taking anti-allergy meds, including one of the longest injections courses my doctor had ever seen, but I still considered myself normal, even if I wasn't completely healthy. Having to rely on that medication didn't make me feel inadequate and broken, while having to rely on anti-depressants does. Similarly, my father has to take pills for his cholesterol and, while he is also mad, that doesn't make him not normal in that respect. So having an illness or having to rely on medication does not necessarily make us weird.

Once I was complaining to my doctor that I needed to plan things so hard, because I couldn't, say, both go shopping and spend time with Alex: it was one or the other and I didn't have enough energy to do both. And my doctor said that that was normal. That people, especially once they have kids, find themselves all the time in those situations, and have to plan and are exhausted a lot. However, if that is true, I really don't want to be normal.

I think what I mean by "normal" is that I want to be healthy at least to the point that my illnesses don't interfere most days with my life, and I want to be happy. But I don't think I want to be completely normal. I'm pretty sure normal people leave completely boring lives.