Episode 13
Dismantling 'Normal': Why Different is Not Broken
What is “normal,” and why does everyone want it so damn bad?
No, really. When did we start treating “normal” like the holy grail instead of the steaming pile of… well, I’ll let you fill in the blank.
On this episode of Different, Not Broken, I—Lauren Howard, your host, also known as L2—am pulling normal out of its gilded cage, shaking it around, and tossing it straight into the trash where it belongs.
If you’ve ever felt like you missed the memo on how to be “normal”… if you’re tired of feeling broken just because your flavors of weird don’t match up with someone else’s, this is the episode you didn’t know you needed.
I’m laying down the law (and maybe some four-letter words) about why chasing normal is a one-way ticket to nowhere—and why different isn’t just okay, it’s inevitable.
We’ll dig into the origin story of “normal” as a concept, how it creeps into our vocabularies starting in childhood, and why it’s a constant refrain for people going through autism and ADHD assessments.
(Plot twist: not fitting the mold isn’t a sign that you’re broken—it’s evidence that the mold is, frankly, garbage.)
But here’s where it gets interesting: even medicine doesn’t actually believe in a single flavor of normal!
And we'll get into that...
If that’s not a reason to click “play,” I don’t know what is.
Love you, mean it. –L2
Useful links
Join our Patreon community - https://differentnotbrokenpodcast.com/patreon
Sign up for our updates - http://differentnotbrokenpodcast.com/newsletter
Timestamped summary
00:00 "What is Normal?"
03:09 Redefining 'Normal' in Childhood
06:37 Interpreting Lab Reference Ranges
10:32 "Comfy Sandals and Dog Dilemma"
15:55 "Embrace Your Own Normal"
17:29 Tense Meal and Nonsense Talk
20:27 "Questioning Nike Collection Value"
Mentioned in this episode:
Wanna learn to write like me?
Here's how you can!
Transcript
The idea of normal is a crock of shit.
Speaker A:We're gonna pull that out of our vocabulary and talk about why.
Speaker A:All right, here we go.
Speaker A:I'm gonna pretend I'm pushing record.
Speaker A:Cause that feels right.
Speaker A:Okay, I'm pressing record.
Speaker A:Boop.
Speaker A:Hi, everybody.
Speaker A:I'm Lauren Howard.
Speaker A:I go by L2.
Speaker A:Yes, you can call me L2.
Speaker A:Everybody does.
Speaker A:It's a long story.
Speaker A:It's actually not that long a story, but we'll save it for another time.
Speaker A:Welcome to Different, Not Broken, which is our podcast on exactly that.
Speaker A:That there are a lot of people in this world feeling broken.
Speaker A:And the reality is you're just different, and that's fine.
Speaker A:So, quick rundown of the rules.
Speaker A:We talk about this every time.
Speaker A:If you want to know more about them, pop back to our first episode.
Speaker A:First, I'm going to curse a lot if bad language is a problem.
Speaker A:Sorry.
Speaker A:Second, I'm going to tell a lot of stories, even on things that don't sound like they have stories.
Speaker A:Third, I'm going to tell a bunch of dead dad jokes.
Speaker A:It's just par for the course around here.
Speaker A:And fourth, anything that comes out of your face is appropriate here, so you do not have to worry about filtering any part of you to join us in this space.
Speaker A:I never felt like I fit in.
Speaker A:I thought I was broken.
Speaker A:I knew I wasn't normal.
Speaker A:Okay?
Speaker A:So if you've stuck around for any length of time, you know that a large portion of what we do at LB Health is testing for Autism Spectrum Disorder and other related diagnoses.
Speaker A:And so one of the things we hear from our patients literally daily is how they never felt like they fit in or they never felt normal.
Speaker A:Normal, normal.
Speaker A:Normal.
Speaker A:Normal is bullshit.
Speaker A:Normal, normal, quote, unquote, normal, normal, normal, normal, normal.
Speaker A:And there's this.
Speaker A:This intensity we see from a lot of our patients to feel, quote, unquote, normal.
Speaker A:And I get it.
Speaker A:I understand it.
Speaker A:It's like this standard that is set when we're growing up that in order to fit in, you have to be, quote, unquote, normal, quote, unquote normal, unquote normal, unqu.
Speaker A:Normal.
Speaker A:Except it's also crap because, like, what is normal?
Speaker A:Like, is there actually a thing that is normal?
Speaker A:Because to me, like, if the standard for things is happiness or being fulfilled or consistently like you have a purpose, that's gonna look different from person to person.
Speaker A:Like, vastly different from person to person.
Speaker A:I think when we were talking about young people especially, or normal children, which, again, I don't like that word, but that's Kind, you know, the way it gets phrased.
Speaker A:We're talking about kids who have tons of friends and they're engaged in activities and they get good grades in school and they sleep through the night and they eat all the foods.
Speaker A:Like all of that is, you know, that's your perfect ideal child, right?
Speaker A:Except it's not at all.
Speaker A:Because you could have a kid who maybe is not super social and doesn't test limits and doesn't violate the house rules, but also gets good grades and feels happy and has friends.
Speaker A:Is that not normal?
Speaker A:Normal?
Speaker A:Normal.
Speaker A:Normal is bullshit.
Speaker A:Normal, normal, quote unquote normal, normal, normal, normal, normal.
Speaker A:Because they're not doing what we consider to be like traditional teenage or childhood rebellion.
Speaker A:If you have a kid who's really happy and well adjusted and kind to all their friends and has a small core group of friends, but they struggle in school, is that not normal, normal, normal, or is that just different?
Speaker A:Do they just process things differently?
Speaker A:And I use kids as the baseline here only because most of the people that we see say that autism starts in childhood.
Speaker A:You don't get autism as an adult.
Speaker A:You weren't diagnosed as a child.
Speaker A:And so they use their childhood as the baseline for when these things started because that's what it is.
Speaker A:And how, you know, they felt othered or different or incomplete as a child because they weren't quote, unquote normal.
Speaker A:What is normal?
Speaker A:Normal is bullshit.
Speaker A:To be very clear.
Speaker A:Throw that out there.
Speaker A:The idea of normal is total bullshit.
Speaker A:There is no normal path for any two human beings.
Speaker A:And I mean, if you take two totally separate people who are living life completely differently, engaging with people, other people completely differently, working in different fields, doing everything, completely different in every way.
Speaker A:They can both be, quote unquote normal, quote unquote normal, quote unquote normal.
Speaker A:There is nothing that says that one of those people just by nature of diverging from what the other person is doing is in some way doing something wrong.
Speaker A:So every time we have somebody who says that and it kind of comes up in conversation or it comes up as part of something that people are trying to achieve, we do our best to really, even as part of the diagnostic process, like pull that out of their vocabulary.
Speaker A:Because we're not striving to make anybody, quote, normal.
Speaker A:What is normal?
Speaker A:Normal?
Speaker A:Because that's not a thing that exists.
Speaker A:It's not there.
Speaker A:That's not something to strive for.
Speaker A:It's not something you're ever going to achieve.
Speaker A:There is no normal.
Speaker A:Everybody is weird and quirky and different in some way.
Speaker A:Some people Hide it better than others.
Speaker A:And in general, the people who hide it tend to be very unhappy.
Speaker A:The people who hide it most tend to be unhappy.
Speaker A:I take that back.
Speaker A:I'm sure there are people who hide their weird.
Speaker A:Who are perfectly fulfilled in their lives somewhere.
Speaker A:I've never met them, but they probably exist anyway.
Speaker A:So as we're trying to kind of undo those things and untrain those things, and this is not even something we use from a clinical perspective.
Speaker A:We talk about it in our groups which are non clinical.
Speaker A:I talk about it with people I run into all the time.
Speaker A:And it's that normal doesn't exist.
Speaker A:And even if we're talking about it from a clinical sense or a medical sense, how we describe normal in a healthcare setting, the word normal is used, but it is not used as a single data point.
Speaker A:It's used as falling on a range of normal.
Speaker A:So if you go to the doctor and you get labs drawn, if your glucose is.
Speaker A:And I'm just, again, I'm not a clinician, I'm just pulling all of this out of thin air.
Speaker A:I've looked at thousands of lab reports in my career, but I am not qualified to interpret them.
Speaker A:But I am able to look at a lab report and say, okay, the reference range is X to Y.
Speaker A:And as long as we're between X and Y, this is something that the clinician is not going to need to review necessarily or not a red flag thing that they need to review.
Speaker A:There might be reasons to review it in specific diagnoses and things like that.
Speaker A:But like this is not a red flag alert that I need to get in front of a clinician really quickly.
Speaker A:You go to the doctor and you get your labs drawn and your glucose is 99.
Speaker A:Or you go to the doctor and you get your labs drawn and your glucose is 80.
Speaker A:Well, in some cases, 20 sounds like a big range, right?
Speaker A:Like 20 different things that could be different between two people.
Speaker A:Medicine has a concept of not normal, but within normal limits, which means as long as you fall between X and Y, we consider you working properly, your body is working properly.
Speaker A:So as long as your thyroid is not under this or over this, you're healthy.
Speaker A:As long as your liver studies are not under this or over this, we don't worry about them.
Speaker A:And then the other more expanded side of that is if you fall a little bit outside of range, so let's say 100 is the minimum number that it's supposed to be and you're 98, the first thing you do is not panic.
Speaker A:It's Run the labs again.
Speaker A:It could have been lab error.
Speaker A:It could be you just ate too late the night before.
Speaker A:And that's a number I pulled out of thin air.
Speaker A:I don't mean it as an indicator of any certain thing, but you ate too late the night before, you didn't follow the fasting directions, the blood sample got contaminated in some way, the machine was working incorrectly.
Speaker A:Who knows?
Speaker A:It could be so many different things.
Speaker A:So when you get a range that sometimes that's wildly out of parameters, and sometimes it's just a little bit out of parameters, you go, run the labs again.
Speaker A:Sometimes when you're just a little bit out of range, they go, eh, that's not a big deal.
Speaker A:Let's just watch it.
Speaker A:We're not going to intervene.
Speaker A:Sometimes for certain things, a little bit out of range does matter because it means that, you know, because it's not a range that has a lot of variance in it and a little bit actually matters, or you have something about your body where that little bit actually matters and so it needs to be intervened.
Speaker A:But often if things are just a tiny bit one way or the other, even if they're not specifically on the range, they'll just go, well, we'll watch it.
Speaker A:We'll look again in three months, we'll look again in six months.
Speaker A:Because there is this wide range of things that are, yes, things that are good, things that are okay.
Speaker A:And as long as you're on that range, you're good.
Speaker A:You don't strive for quote, unquote normal in medicine.
Speaker A:You strive for healthy.
Speaker A:You strive for functioning correctly.
Speaker A:And that looks different in different bodies, in different situations, in different environments, in different ethnicities, in different backgrounds, in different medical histories.
Speaker A:It looks different.
Speaker A:And you can look completely different and still be normal.
Speaker A:So when we talk about, quote, unquote normal, quote unquote normal, normal, throw that in the trash.
Speaker A:You have to figure out what your range for normal is.
Speaker A:It's not going to be one data point.
Speaker A:It's going to be a ton of data points.
Speaker A:It's going to be a ton of variances and changes and things that might be okay for you that are not okay for other people.
Speaker A:I could go two weeks without leaving the house and not notice there is a situation.
Speaker A:I've probably talked about this before, but I have like a pair of shoes I wear out of the house.
Speaker A:They're cute, I like them, they're comfy.
Speaker A:My feet don't hurt if I walk around in them.
Speaker A:A plus.
Speaker A:I've repurchased these shoes like probably seven or eight times.
Speaker A:Because while they are absolutely very comfortable shoes and they're sandals and they're sparkly and they're cute and I like them, they also apparently are very delicious to dogs because I've had three different dogs eat a pair of these shoes.
Speaker A:So not only do I have multiple pairs of these shoes, but I have an uneven number.
Speaker A:I have an odd number of these shoes.
Speaker A:I don't know if I have two lefts or two rights, but sometimes I always end up with two of one shoe and then I have to go find the other shoe because they ended up in the wrong place.
Speaker A:And I don't know why I just haven't thrown out the second shoe that is a duplicate.
Speaker A:Probably because I expect one of my dogs to eat the remaining pair and I want to make sure we have a full set, even though I will probably just end up with three lefts at that point, because that's definitely my luck here.
Speaker A:But anyway, so I have these shoes and I love them.
Speaker A:I've been wearing them basically exclusively for many, many years because I'm an old lady.
Speaker A:The dog ate one of them and so I was down to one shoe.
Speaker A:And you can't leave the house with only one shoe on.
Speaker A:I mean, you can, but I don't think that would fall within normal limits.
Speaker A:What is normal?
Speaker A:Normal?
Speaker A:I think that would actually be pushing the boundaries of our whole premise here.
Speaker A:So I ordered a new pair.
Speaker A:For some reason it was going to take a couple days to get there.
Speaker A:They got delayed even further.
Speaker A:They finally got there.
Speaker A:Like, I don't know, almost a week later.
Speaker A:I want to remind you, this is like the only pair of shoes I wear out of the house.
Speaker A:I did not notice they were late because I did not need to leave the house in that time or certainly didn't even attempt.
Speaker A:That's how often I think about leaving the house.
Speaker A:Like, can it come to me?
Speaker A:Cool, let's do that.
Speaker A:My husband, on the other hand, as much as he's very much a homebody like I am, he has to get out.
Speaker A:Like, he will start climbing the walls.
Speaker A:It's not about peopling for him, but he just likes to go and see things and do things and drive.
Speaker A:He loves to drive.
Speaker A:He likes to drive places, he likes to go find ideas.
Speaker A:He likes to go walk around Lowe's for hours, which I didn't realize.
Speaker A:Like, is that a man thing?
Speaker A:Do they just go to Lowe's and grunt?
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:But he will find reasons to go to Lowe's all of it, like, but he's gotta get out.
Speaker A:We are both very introverted people who have all.
Speaker A:Almost no desire to people with other people.
Speaker A:But if he stays in the house, the way that I don't mind doing this is not an exaggeration.
Speaker A:I will literally find him on the roof.
Speaker A:He's done it before.
Speaker A:We owned.
Speaker A:His record for time between owning a house and getting on the roof is seven hours.
Speaker A:I time it anytime we bought three houses since we've been married, I think.
Speaker A:And the shortest time is three hours.
Speaker A:I think the longest time was like 19 hours.
Speaker A:But like, it's like a thing.
Speaker A:Both of those things are normal.
Speaker A:Normal, normal, normal.
Speaker A:Normal is bullshit.
Speaker A:Some people might say that me not leaving the house for two weeks is not normal.
Speaker A:I say to those people, I do my job, I take care of my kids, everybody's fed, all the bills are paid.
Speaker A:My dogs are very, very happy.
Speaker A:We have a successful life.
Speaker A:I run four businesses, I record a podcast, nobody's hungry.
Speaker A:I just don't find a lot of reasons to put shoes on.
Speaker A:My husband finds so many reasons to put shoes on that he has 100 pairs of shoes in our closet.
Speaker A:The point of all of this is don't strive for something that doesn't exist.
Speaker A:Are you happy?
Speaker A:Are you fulfilled?
Speaker A:Are you doing what you need to do to live a productive life?
Speaker A:By whatever you define as productive, are the people around you taken care of in the ways that you are responsible to take care of them?
Speaker A:And if the answer is I'm not happy, then you figure out where that's coming from.
Speaker A:You don't try to change something about yourself as if that's the problem.
Speaker A:There are lots of things that could lead to you being unhappy.
Speaker A:You could have a shitty job, you could be feeling clinically depressed.
Speaker A:You could be living in a democracy that is crumbling around you at the hands of giant toddlers who should never have been permitted to get anywhere near our government and in response, have tried and basically succeeded to turn us into full fascism so that they don't ever have to acknowledge the fact that they were not supposed to be in government to begin with.
Speaker A:All of those are great reasons to not feel happy.
Speaker A:Also normal reasons to not feel happy.
Speaker A:Not being happy is an appropriate response to those kinds of stressors.
Speaker A:So you can address the things that are making you feel unhappy.
Speaker A:You can address the things that you would like to do to feel more fulfilled.
Speaker A:But none of that goes back to changing you as a person, because odds are, the range of normal is so wide, you're on There somewhere.
Speaker A:And if you're living your life the way you want to live it, and that is a problem for other people who don't pay your bills, who don't have to be in a relationship with you, who rely on you for things that you absolutely have to provide to them, then it's not their business and you get to be whoever you want to be or whoever you just are.
Speaker A:So we look for within normal limits.
Speaker A:We don't look for normal.
Speaker A:Normal's bullshit.
Speaker A:We have a range of normal.
Speaker A:It's vast and sundry and there's all sorts of things involved in it.
Speaker A:And it is based on things way better than how many friends you have or how many parties you go to or how many loud concerts you can stand at with strangers breathing in your airspace.
Speaker A:There's just better metrics for life.
Speaker A:That's not a knock against concerts.
Speaker A:If you like concerts, totally go to them.
Speaker A:But there's just so many people.
Speaker A:For this week's small talk again, remember, this is something we do every week.
Speaker A:So we were driving home the other day from dinner.
Speaker A:It was like a weird dinner because my mother in law's crown on her tooth fell off.
Speaker A:And so she was like stressed the whole meal.
Speaker A:And it was just like a very tense meal, not for a good reason.
Speaker A:Also, like, the server left us without water for a long time and then got really annoyed when I was like, can we please have some more water?
Speaker A:And I was like, I feel like that's like one of the like baseline free things you get in a restaurant.
Speaker A:But okay.
Speaker A:Anyway, so it's just a weird meal and we drop her off at her house and then we're driving home, which is a very short drive.
Speaker A:And I swear to God, I thought I was having a stroke because my children are making noise.
Speaker A:They are doing something that sounds like talking, but I swear to God these were not words.
Speaker A:And they are talking back and forth, responding to each other and they're not words.
Speaker A:And I was like, do I smell toast?
Speaker A:Like, is this what is happening?
Speaker A:I don't understand.
Speaker A:And finally I went, are you guys speaking a secret language?
Speaker A:And they went, yeah.
Speaker A:And I was like, this is the most destabilizing thing I have experienced in a long time.
Speaker A:What is happening?
Speaker A:So that was the moment that I knew that them taking over the world forcefully was a foregone conclusion that was absolutely going to happen because now they can communicate without anybody knowing.
Speaker A:It was terrifying.
Speaker A:I was like, actually, I actually looked at my husband and I was like, what is happening?
Speaker A:What day is it?
Speaker A:What year is it?
Speaker A:Help.
Speaker A:They were, like, making up new words as they went.
Speaker A:And they would just be like, I think this word is for storn.
Speaker A:Jock.
Speaker A:And the other one would be like, yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker A:And then they would just, like, start using it.
Speaker A:And I'm like, no, no, no.
Speaker A:None of the reject.
Speaker A:None of this makes sense.
Speaker A:And then at that same meal, there was, like, this grid of circles that you could color in, and it was like a Connect4 board.
Speaker A:I think that's what it was supposed to be used for.
Speaker A:But my youngest was just, like, coloring it in.
Speaker A:I took a picture because I didn't tell her why I was taking a picture, but she went through the whole thing.
Speaker A:Five of six lines in a perfect pattern.
Speaker A:Same every single line, and did the last one different.
Speaker A:And I was like, oh, God, tell me your child is an anarchist who's going to violently overthrow a government without telling me.
Speaker A:This is borderline serial killer behavior.
Speaker A:So I took a picture of it, and I was like, I'm going to keep this forever because someday somebody's going to show up to my door and be like, when did you know that she was going to be a despot?
Speaker A:And I'm gonna be like, we were sitting in a bonefish, and I got confirmation.
Speaker A:No, no, nay, nyet.
Speaker A:I reject these kids.
Speaker A:I just.
Speaker A:You think you're prepared?
Speaker A:You're never prepared.
Speaker A:Thanks for being here, guys.
Speaker A:Have a good day.
Speaker A:Love you.
Speaker A:Mean it.
Speaker A:That's not why he has 100 pairs of shoes.
Speaker A:He swears he collects Nikes.
Speaker A:Clearly he does, because we have 100 pairs.
Speaker A:But he swears he collects valuable Nikes, and I have not seen that value yet.
Speaker A:I have just seen a lot of shoes in my closet.
Speaker A:And if the value is shoes existing, then yes, we have a lot of value in our closet.
Speaker A:But if the value is making money on the shoes that he was supposed to resell, I think he's been bamboozled.
Speaker A:But supposedly collecting 100 pairs of Nikes is also on the range of normal.
Speaker A:Who knew?
Speaker A:Anyway, anyway.
