Chasing Normal

And finding ourselves along the way

In the original The Devil Wears Prada, Miranda gives what’s now called the cerulean monologue, where her goal is to establish the authority of her decision-making and to point out Andy's naivete and lack of fashion sense.

Of course we love this scene, it's Meryl Streep doing her thing and we're all impressed by what Miranda's saying. But every time I watch it, I get why Andy laughs. It doesn't fly with the Runway employees, but Andy’s just being who she is, someone with a different background and different priorities. And while she gets schooled by Miranda, Miranda is also admitting that those in power get to define what matters and what's normal, and everyone else has to chase it. And by the time people catch up, what's normal has already changed.

A sociologist named Pierre Bourdieu spent his career studying this, and even wrote a book about it called Distinction. His point was that taste isn’t really personal, it’s more like a marker of position, and it has to keep moving and changing as people catch up or it’s no longer a marker. By the time we get the dress, it’s so last year. By the time we love an album, it’s old news. By the time we subscribe to any trend, it’s on its way out.

I’m 54 and I’ve seen these cycles again and again, the jeans, the body types, the colors, the slang, the shoes. They come and go and we follow, wondering what’s “right” and whether we’re doing “it” correctly. We want to follow the masses and do what's "in," but we also want to stand out and be special, like we've got what the masses have, plus something extra. It’s a known paradox, and social psychologist Marilynn Brewer even gave it a name: optimal distinctiveness theory.

This means we have a strong need to belong AND a strong need to be distinctive. It's a both/and situation and a constant tug of war, because one provokes the other. If you're feeling too much like everybody else, you blend in and get bored. And if you're trying something new, you get insecure or worried you’ll be ostracized. And back and forth you go.

This is just typical human behavior at any age, so there's nothing to feel bad or worried about, it's normal. But then we have to ask: what does "normal" really mean? Turns out it's not just one thing, it's three things, each meaning something different which makes it hard to pin down.

Statistical normal - what most people actually do.
Most adults check their phone within minutes of waking up. That’s common, not necessarily good or bad, just what the data shows.

Normative normal - what people are supposed to do, the standard we’re measured against. Experts say you shouldn’t touch your phone for the first hour after waking up, that it’s bad for your focus and your mood. That’s a normative rule about what’s societally or clinically “correct,” regardless of what most people actually do.

Experienced normal - what feels good and right to you, personally. You reach for your phone the second you open your eyes, and it doesn’t feel like a problem at all, it just feels like Tuesday. Or you grab it for the first time after a shower and coffee, and that feels right.

And these three types of normal almost never line up. Someone can be statistically rare, "wrong" by whatever standard is being used, and still feel completely genuine to themselves. And someone else can be statistically typical, doing exactly what they're "supposed" to do, but have no real sense of what's genuine to them because they only adhere to the crowd and never check in with themselves.

And of course there are plenty of examples that live somewhere in the middle too, and all of it is very human and comes from whatever we learned early on about what it means to be good, right, or safe. What may seem easier (but is actually harder in the long run, and is why people end up in my therapy office...) is following the crowd and trends so closely that you always "fit in" and judge those who don't. But then the problem is that you never get to know what you genuinely like or who you genuinely are.

Life is more interesting and fun when we can appreciate what we like or our own sense of genuine distinctiveness, the kind that's true and not created for an audience. Like someone who's spent years getting genuinely good at something others might call strange, or someone with taste in clothes, movies, or music that is uniquely their own. They aren’t choosing these things to be performative, they’re just showing up as themselves.

If we're not sure what makes us genuinely distinct, we may “borrow” it from somewhere else to feel interesting or unique.In Buddhist psychology (and Brené Brown talks about this too, in Atlas of the Heart), there’s a concept called the near enemy: a quality close enough to be mistaken for a virtue while actually working against it, like pity masquerading as compassion or indifference masquerading as calm.

Borrowed distinctiveness is the near enemy of uniqueness; it looks similar and stands right next to the real thing, but it's not quite it. It can show up when we look for our worth through who we know, or our personality type, or our zodiac sign: I know someone famous! I'm a 7. I'm a Pisces. Of course these can all be true and real parts of you, but they're not you. They’re just ways of describing characteristics you may or may not actually have. An enneagram number or birth chart placement can be a lens for self-reflection, but it's not the end of the story, and knowing someone famous is a fact about your life, not a fact about your worth.

Of course we can still know and play with all of this interesting stuff and find pieces of ourselves inside it. I actually enjoy all the personality tests and horoscopes. I love being a Leo, and I’ve been thinking more about it because my birthday is coming up. I realize I’ve never really been the Madonna, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Jennifer Lawrence kind of Leo (August birthdays), and I’m more of the Sandra Bullock, Lisa Kudrow, Daniel Radcliffe kind of Leo (July birthdays... and see how I use famous people to define myself? 😉).

No, but really, the way people describe and perceive Leos has only ever partially fit me, and I’ve always felt like I had a little more Cancer energy layered on top of the Leo energy. Then I read that a lot of astrologers actually consider July Leos different from August Leos, and I was like, aha! That’s what I thought!

Who knows if that's even true or if all astrologers agree, but there was something about finding a new layer of consideration that made me feel more like myself, more seen. Like I don't have to be whatever people picture when they think Leo, because I'm a July Leo.

And that's the fun part, using these tools and this whole understanding of "normal," to find ourselves in a big world. It helps us appreciate who we are and how everyone else shows up. We're all normal and genuinely distinct in many ways, and in some ways, not at all. That doesn't make us good or bad, or more or less special than others. It just helps us find us.

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