This is Normal

I have found the paradigm shift I needed to finally feel at ease.

This is normal.

Obviously, from a global perspective, these times aren't normal, but what makes this normal is that all of us are going through the same pandemic experience right now.

This perception that I'm not doing enough work, that I have no friends, that I'm falling behind — this isn't unique. I don't know how I didn't realize it before, but everyone feels this way at some point in their life. Being unemployed for a time while I figure things out in my early twenties is normal. Feeling like I don't have enough friends when I've spent two years here is normal (and for the record, I do have friends! More than I thought I do!). Comparing myself to people two, three, four years older than me and not being in the same place as them in life is normal!

My motto growing up was, "Everything will be okay." I had to believe that I would survive my childhood and eventually be able to take care of myself. It served me well and kept me going until I got to a point where I graduated college, established myself in Sacramento, and, indeed, everything was okay. At that point, I began to grow exceedingly anxious. If everything was going to be okay, then why did I not feel okay? The answer seemed so obvious once I realized it. Everything was okay, but my motto was still that everything will be — at an indeterminate time in the future — okay, which clearly jarred with my reality at the time.

Presently, the world has been turned upside-down and things are not okay again. But excitingly, things do not need to be okay to be normal. It sounds bleak, but truly, the only way to not lose one's mind is to accept that life, in whatever condition it may be, is normal. The alternative is to wonder if perhaps the experience of not-normal is solely a personal phenomenon, in which case one would be insane, or driven insane by wondering. Quite honestly, things have not been okay for a very long time. Yet, accepting that this is normal is the first step to figuring out what to fix so that normal is better. Believing the present is not normal externalizes the circumstances. Accepting the present as normal is accepting one's own experiences to exist within it and have agency in it. ◊