“Normal”
This is not normal. It can't be. We won't let it be.
“Normal” is one of the words I’m fighting with the most right now. My normal day today involved going to the dentist’s office, walking slowly through the grocery store with a cart, and cleaning my pottery studio. Some of my friends experienced a different normal of listening to whistles go off outside their homes, watching ICE sit outside their kids’ schools, fielding texts about masked and armed bounty hunters. I am living inside one “normal,” and they’re being forced into another. My worry is not only about the violence itself, which is enough. It’s about what happens if this, too, becomes normal—just more noise in the background of Minnesota life.
When I say I’m afraid of this becoming normal, I mean I’m afraid that my nervous system—and yours—will quietly file it under “just the way things are now.” I mean I’m afraid that the image of ICE vehicles parked outside schools will become as ordinary in our minds as school buses. That whistles and Signal notifications and “Did you hear where they were last night?” will fold into the soundtrack of our days the way sirens did in the early pandemic. I remember how quickly we went from banging pots and pans for frontline workers to barely thinking about the fact that they were still walking into trauma every shift. I don’t want the people absorbing the brunt of this moment in Minnesota to become the next forgotten bearers of the brunt.
What We Mean When We Say “Normal”
When we say “normal,” we usually act like we’re naming a fact, not a judgment. At its root, though, normal comes from norma, meaning a rule or standard—a tool used to decide whether things line up. In statistics, normal describes an average distribution, that bell curve we’re all supposed to fall under somewhere. In medicine and psychology, it often means within expected range: vital signs, lab values, mood, behavior that doesn’t set off alarms.
In everyday life, though, normal usually means one of three things: common (many people do this), habitual (I do this regularly), or socially sanctioned (this behavior is accepted or rewarded where I live).
Those meanings slide into one another, and that’s where trouble begins. Something can be habitual without being healthy. Common without being humane. Sanctioned without being safe. When I say it’s normal for kids to practice active shooter drills in their schools, I’m really saying it’s become familiar and common in our culture’s experience—not that it’s okay. But if we’re not careful, our language will trick us into believing otherwise.
When “Normal” Is Actually a Red Flag
I have a very personal example of how bad I am capable of letting “normal” get. It used to be normal for me to drink a liter of vodka every day or two. And feel awful. And lie. And steal. Was it normal? No. It was habitual. It may even have felt predictable, like part of the rhythm of my life. But it wasn’t neutral, healthy, or benign. It was slowly killing me. I needed someone, including myself, to be able to say: This is familiar, but it is not okay.
This is one of the most important distinctions we can make, in our bodies and in our politics:
Normal ≠ optimal
Normal ≠ healthy
Normal ≠ inevitable
In addiction, disordered eating, chronic overwork, or prolonged caregiving stress, the nervous system adapts to conditions that are actively harmful. Over time, those conditions begin to feel normal not because they are okay—but because the brain is trying to survive them.
When “Normal” is Worse than a Red Flag
When we zoom out from our own lives into culture, it gets even messier, because we don’t always agree that a harmful “normal” is actually harmful. Sometimes, people actively glorify what is slowly killing them—or killing someone else. You can see it in how extreme food restriction gets praised as discipline or “clean eating,” even when it crosses the line into medically dangerous starvation. You can see it in how some people not only tolerate but want their neighbors picked up by ICE, or cheer when communities are flooded with armed enforcement. In those worlds, the red flag isn’t just ignored; it’s waved like a banner.
This is where normal stops being a private distortion and becomes a political project. If I’m starving myself and calling it virtue, that’s one layer of harm. When a whole subculture builds status around that same starvation, punishes people who opt out, and markets it as aspirational—that’s a machine turning harm into a norm. The same goes for immigration enforcement: it’s one thing for a person to feel frightened and conflicted watching a raid; it’s another to build an identity around wanting people disappeared, to call it law and order, to raise kids on the story that this is what “good” citizens support. In those cases, what’s being normalized isn’t just suffering—it’s the belief that someone else’s suffering is necessary, deserved, or even enjoyable.
So then the question shifts from Is this normal? to Whose normal is this, and who pays for it? My old drinking-normal hurt me, but it primarily collapsed my own life. A normal that celebrates starvation hurts the person restricting and everyone who’s taught to follow them. A normal that celebrates raids and deportations is built on the idea that some lives are disposable so other people can feel safe, pure, or in control. If we don’t agree that those normals are bad, it’s usually because we’re not standing in the same spot: some of us are living the harm in our bodies, while others are benefiting from distance, from power, or from the illusion that they’ll never be the ones on the receiving end.
“Normal” Is Relative—and Deeply Contextual
One of the hard things about talking about “normal” is that it’s always relative. For some people, frequent business travel feels normal; staying home feels unsettling. For others, the reverse is true. Neither is inherently better. “Normal” here simply reflects what a nervous system has practiced most often.
Right now, many people report that it feels normal to live under constant stress and duress due to heavy enforcement presence, surveillance, or systemic threat. When extraordinary pressure becomes chronic, the brain stops treating it as an emergency and starts treating it as background noise. That doesn’t mean the situation is acceptable. It means humans are adaptable—sometimes too adaptable. My fear is that those of us who are not being hunted will adapt to their terror as if it’s just another feature of local life. I don’t want to wake up one day and realize that, in my body, ICE at schools feels as unremarkable as snow in January. And disinformation is the standard. And that lying by our administration is okay.
I also want to acknowledge here that for many people who’ve been historically marginalized and excluded—or included and discriminated against in a racist or sexist way—this has been their reality for a long time. Now that the white people are finally able to see it/are paying attention (I do not mind this reductionism), it’s finally a problem. That’s a fair assessment and we should sit with it.
What’s Happening Neuro-biopsychosocially
When I talk about all this, I’m also worried about how brain, body, mind, and society are interacting. From a neurobiological perspective:
The brain prioritizes predictability over comfort
Stress-response systems recalibrate their baseline
Hypervigilance or shutdown can become default states
From a psychological perspective:
Meaning-making shifts (“This is just reality”)
Learned helplessness can emerge (“Nothing I do matters”)
Coping strategies become rigid because flexibility feels risky
From a social perspective:
Group norms reinforce individual adaptation (“No one else is freaking out; I guess this is fine”)
Silence or normalization reduces friction
Systems benefit from compliance born of fatigue
In short: neural pathways strengthen around whatever we practice most, even if what we’re practicing is enduring harm. If we repeatedly practice walking past headlines about raids to get to the cereal aisle, our bodies learn that this is how a Minnesota morning feels. And that is exactly what I don’t want.
Is a New “Normal” Permanent?
Here’s the part I cling to: No—and that matters.
Much of what we call “normal” is conditional and temporary, even when it feels entrenched. Neural pathways are shaped by repetition, not destiny. What was learned under pressure can be unlearned under safety—but only if safety becomes real and sustained.
The danger isn’t adaptation itself. The danger is mistaking adaptation for truth.
When I got sober, it didn’t happen because I woke up with a brand-new nervous system. It happened because, slowly, I repeated different choices enough times that my system began to expect something else—less chaos, fewer toxins, more real rest. The same principle applies collectively. If we allow our bodies to fully absorb the message “this is just what Minnesota is now,” we will build a future around that assumption. If we keep some part of ourselves oriented to a different possibility—where schools and community centers are not hunting grounds—we keep other neural and relational pathways alive.
Why We Might Choose Other Words Instead
This was a big deal when I was an editorial director for Hazelden Betty Ford. Saying “normal” just wasn’t accurate. It’s not a diagnosis. It’s not something we want to use as a category of being or behaving. But outside of a big mental and behavioral health organization, plenty of people use it in a casual way, but maybe we shouldn’t. Because “normal” flattens nuance. So, let’s replace it with more precise language. I’m practicing this in how I talk to myself and to you.
Instead of normal, try common.
Instead of normal, try expected under these conditions.
Instead of normal, try familiar.
Instead of normal, try what I’ve adapted to.
So instead of saying, “It’s normal now to see videos of raids in our feeds,” I can say, “It’s become common in this political moment to see raids in our feeds.” Instead of, “It’s normal that I can go to the dentist while my friends are listening for whistles,” I can say, “This is what I’ve adapted to; my body gets to relax in places theirs currently can’t.” These alternatives open space for curiosity rather than judgment. They remind us that context matters—and that change is possible.
Staying Flexible Instead of Rigid
Rigidity often develops when systems are overwhelmed. When I was drinking, my life shrank down to a very rigid set of routines that kept the addiction going. In the early pandemic, many of us locked into rigid coping patterns just to get through. Flexibility returns through choice, variability, and naming.
A few gentle practices I’m using (and offering to you):
Name the context: “This response makes sense given what I’ve been living through and where I live.”
Introduce small variations: Take a different route, change one routine, insert one small act of solidarity into an otherwise ordinary errand.
Track what feels regulating vs. merely familiar: Grocery shopping might feel familiar, but calling a friend who’s directly impacted might actually be more regulating in the long run.
Resist moralizing your adaptations: They were intelligent responses to constraint, even if you’re ready to outgrow some of them now.
Flexibility isn’t about forcing optimism or denying reality. It’s about keeping pathways open so that when conditions change—or when you decide to show up differently inside the same conditions—you can change with them.
Switching Between “Normals”
One of the quiet myths about “normal” is that there’s only one of it. In reality, most of us have lived inside multiple normals over a lifetime—sometimes several at once. The nervous system doesn’t erase old baselines when conditions change; it stores them.
Which means learning to move between normals isn’t about creating something brand new. It’s about re‑orienting. Think of it as a location rather than an identity. There’s my drinking-normal, my sobriety-normal, my caregiving-normal, my Minnesota-under-enforcement-normal. I move between them, sometimes clumsily, but they’re all stored in my body.
For my friends whose kids are learning to tell the difference between a school bell and a warning whistle, there’s a before-normal and an after-normal. For those of us who can still go to the dentist and the grocery store without scanning for unmarked vehicles, there’s a choice about whether we use that ease to look away or to look more directly.
Orientation Before Adjustment
In trauma‑informed work, orientation comes first. You can’t decide where you’re going if you don’t know where you are—or where you’ve been. When we name the signs of a particular “normal,” something important happens:
We stop arguing with our experience
We gain reference points
We shorten the transition time between states
I sometimes picture that TV or movie character who can only transport themselves somewhere they can see. That’s how nervous system transitions work. We can’t teleport into an abstract “better normal.” We need a visible, felt reference—something our system recognizes as real and survivable. When we can picture, remember, or sense a different state we’ve occupied before—individually or collectively—we reduce the cognitive and physiological effort of getting there. This is how we abbreviate adjustment.
Conditional “Normals”
Some normals are situational adaptations, not permanent recalibrations. Living under surveillance, threat, or prolonged instability pushes the nervous system into efficiency mode. Emotional range narrows. Long-term planning shrinks. The body prioritizes now.
More danger comes when we forget: This normal emerged in response to conditions. It was foisted on us, especially in Minnesota. For families watching for ICE outside schools, hypervigilance makes sense. For those of us who are not directly targeted, a certain kind of numbing may have emerged as a way to keep functioning. When conditions shift—even slightly—the system needs help recognizing that shift. Otherwise, it keeps running the old program. That’s not pathology. It’s momentum.
Part of my responsibility, as someone not currently being hunted, is to treat my relative ease as a temporary accommodation, not a permanent entitlement. To remember that the calm of the grocery store aisle is not proof that everything is okay; it’s just a snapshot of my conditions in that moment. Because if the Heritage Foundation has its way, women are about to become even more of a target than we already are.
A Final Reframe
We don’t return to old normals unchanged, and we don’t invent new ones from nothing. We learn. We grow. We navigate.
If normal is a place, not a rule, then the skill we’re building isn’t conformity—it’s orientation. Seeing where we are. Remembering where we’ve been. And choosing, when possible, where we’re going next.
When I say I don’t want what’s happening in Minnesota to become normal, I’m really saying: I don’t want my nervous system to confuse adaptation with consent. I don’t want to be the person who can pick up groceries, get my teeth cleaned, and wipe down my studio counters without also remembering who is standing at a window, listening for whistles. I don’t need to have the whole route to a more humane normal mapped out. I just need to be able to say, with some honesty, I can see it from here. And then, with you, take the next small step in that direction.
I have no idea if I used quotation marks accurately as I was writing and editing this piece with as many times as I used the word “normal” in it. In fact, now that I’m typing this before I save it for publishing, the word doesn’t even look real any longer. So, let’s chalk one up for writing “normal” so many times that I made it unrecognizable to my brain. Very fitting.