The Tyranny of Normal: Why So Many of Us Feel Like We're Failing at Being Human

Somewhere, most of us are carrying a quiet belief that everyone else has figured this out. That other people feel calmer, more confident, more sorted than we do. That somewhere out there is a version of normal — and we are not quite reaching it.

I want to gently suggest that this belief, however common, is largely a fiction. And not a harmless one.

The Myth of Normal

Normal, as most of us imagine it, is a kind of average person who is reasonably happy, reasonably confident, and reasonably untroubled — against whom we quietly measure ourselves and usually come up short. But this normal person does not really exist. They are a composite, assembled from the curated outsides of everyone we know, compared against the messy inside of the one person whose inside we actually have access to: ourselves.

Everyone Is More Anxious Than They Appear

In my work, I sit with a great many people — and what strikes me again and again is how much more anxious, uncertain, and quietly overwhelmed almost everyone is than they let on. The confident colleague, the relaxed friend, the parent who seems to have it all together — most of them are managing some version of the same private uncertainty you are.

The Relief in This

There is real relief available here, once it lands. If almost everyone is more anxious, confused, and at sea than they appear, then your own struggles are not evidence that you are failing at something everyone else has mastered. They are evidence that you are human, in a world that does not always make being human easy.

A Note From Sabrina Barbara

One of the quiet joys of this work is watching someone realise, often for the first time, that they are not the only one. That the thing they have been privately ashamed of is, in fact, something almost everyone carries in some form.

You are not failing at being normal. Normal, as you imagined it, was never really there.