The Meaning of Normal

I am trying to identify an internal deficiency, yet I fear that it is an impossible task. I do not believe that introspection is capable of recognising causations; at best, it can merely recognize the flaws perceived or categorized by others. An analogy may make this idea clearer. Say a woman is born without the ability to see the color green. In place of emerald, and malachite, and olive are shades of gray. This person has never experienced green and is incapable of detecting her own specific blindness, but tests reveal to her and others that she cannot in fact perceive the color green. Now the woman knows that she has a disability, granted it is a minor one, but a disability nevertheless. She can look at a field of grass and “know” that what she is seeing is incorrectly perceived, but she cannot comprehend how it is incorrect. Only a person who has experienced green can truly understand the absence of green. By comparison, only a person who has experienced “normal” can understand living in an “abnormal” state.

I am aware that when compared to the standard person (if such a thing exists), my thought patterns are more negative and pessimistic. This awareness was obtained by being told as much. Prior to others recognizing my condition, I could not have known that I had a disorder. This is not to say that I did not feel depressed. Rather, feeling depressed was thought of as normal. But, having it brought to my attention that depression is disordered thinking, I now know that my perception of the world is distorted. How it is distorted is beyond my people to comprehend. I cannot identify my own blindness.

Just as the color-blind woman cannot understand “green” by simply being told that she lacks the ability to see it, I cannot understand “normal” thought simply by being told that I think abnormally. But in either case, would the disorder exist if it was not first recognized by an outsider? If the woman had never been told of her disability she would have gone about her life unbothered by the notion of green even existing. Similarly, if I had never been made aware of the fact that the way I think is disordered, I would certainly be depressed but I would not be occupied with ideas of obtaining normalcy.

The questions then become, are internal disorders simply relative? Does a person not have a problem unless it called such by another? Are these disorders nothing more than perceptions based on external observation? Is there substance to the idea of an internal disorder?

I am inclined to believe that we all deviate from the so-called norm (which is really nothing more than an average of behaviors and thought processes), and that in certain cases, a person’s deviation is sufficient to be recognized by others. No one is in fact normal, but some are further from it that others. For those of you questioning the reason for this post, there is no point to it other than to explain my selection of “normalisaverage.blogspot.com” for the address and “N of 1” as the name for my blog. “N,” when used in statistics, is the sample size selected from a set population, so N of 1 refers to an individual selected from everyone else to use in further analysis. If we are all that N of 1, then our internal problems do not materialize, because we become our own average, that is to say we become our own normal.