There’s a phrase that people often say when they have gone or are going through something difficult:
“new normal.”
As in, “I’m just trying to figure out life in this new normal”
“We are taking it day by day in our new normal”
Raise your hand if you’ve ever said this yourself or to someone else.
(HAND UP)
Yeah.
It’s kind of a thing we all say in those moments when everything has changed, and yet you can’t make it change back so we are just trying to figure life out.
A new normal is what we say when we mean this is the way it is now and so we just have to adjust to the new way things are.
A new normal.

But here’s the thing.
I think all that crap that changes everything isn’t normal.
Cancer? Not normal.
Losing a spouse or child or friend? Not normal.
I mean it happens, but that doesn’t mean it SHOULD happen, or that it was supposed to happen or even that we are supposed to decide the life we have afterwards is the normal one and the way it was before is the way it wasn’t supposed to be.
This is the problem with bullshitty theology like “Everything happens for a reason” because what could the reason possibly be for cancer or heart attacks or losing loved ones? So we suffer? So we know how good it used to be?
So we meet someone else?
Um NO. All those options suck actually.
So I’d like us to all declare, together, a moratorium to the phrase “A New Normal”
It’s crap.

Let’s call it a new abnormal.
Things aren’t the way we thought they would go.
It’s not “normal.”
Nothing about life is “normal.”
There is no normal.
It’s all abnormal, really.
It’s just that sometimes our abnormal changes.
The only constant is change, so let’s stop pretending that all the crappy crap that happens is the way it’s supposed to go and call it what it is.
Abnormal.