and why was it so important to me? To “fit in” means to me that I will be more loved, more cared for, and more needed. I longed for these feelings. I yearned for these feelings. I spent my entire life seeking real love, true caring, and a greater feeling of being needed. Yet I had always come up short. If only I could be normal, I thought; then I would fit in the way I’ve always wanted to.
I know I’m not unique in this regard: It seems that we all want to fit in somewhere. But the thing I thought was helping me fit in was having the opposite effect. I spent too much of my life far from normal, getting loaded, acting in ways that even I didn’t accept as proper. Once I stopped drinking and using other mood-altering substances, I began to have a shot at becoming normal and fitting in with the rest of society. This idea was so novel, so untried, that at times it seemed impossible. However, I know that it is possible, and I’m giving it a shot.
When I arrived in my twelve-step fellowship, I found something I had been yearning for my entire life. I discovered there were many people just like me, and I easily fit in. We understood each other; we spoke the same language. We laughed at the crazy things we used to do and cried over the traumas we had caused. We “got” each other; we knew where each other had been. Why shouldn’t we? We had all been through very similar wringers. We shared the same delusions, illusions, hopes, and dreams. What a wonderful feeling to find people I could relate to without being drunk. What a joyous thing to have people who understood me, who shared my feelings, my fears, and my longing to be cared for, to be needed, and to be loved. My fellowship saved my life, and I will be forever grateful. Of course, as we say in my fellowship, “you can’t keep it unless you give it away,” and that’s what I practice now, and hope to for the rest of my life.
One of the great things about my fellowship is the inclusiveness. As I see it, my fellowship keeps the doors open to a wide range of thinking and ways of dealing with problems. In fact, the door is always open and anyone can get in. To join, all I needed was a problem and a desire to stop. The first thing my fellowship and program did for me was to help me stop. The second thing the program gave me was a set of tools with which I could begin to grow. I was never told that I could only use program resources in order to grow. My fellowship knows they are not the be-all-and-end-all. They encourage people to do or to be as much as they want to.
The first step of my program talks about powerlessness. Step One requires the admission of powerlessness, while the remaining steps help me to live a better life—a life without active addiction. Step One is the only step that mentions a substance. The remaining steps exist to deal with personal growth—spiritual, physical, mental, emotional, social, and volitional. When I address each facet of my being and am able to achieve balance, life is better than I could have ever dreamed possible. It is through using the Twelve Steps in everyday life that I can attain my own desired level of normalcy. There is no limit to how far I can grow.
My fellowship also provides me a place to try out new behaviors, actions, and thoughts. By attending meetings, I can share my thoughts and get feedback. If I can maintain an open mind and learn to take criticism constructively, I can learn about who I am with help from my peers, and I can do so in a safe environment. I talk with my sponsor and others in the program, and I am able to push myself to new limits. I learn to trust people and to trust my own thinking.
When I have opportunities for learning and growth, which some people choose to call problems, I think them over and try to solve them with advice from my sponsor. I make a habit of calling him on a daily basis. I mention anything I may have learned along the path of recovery. These conversations allow me to learn about my thought processes. If my solutions coincide with my sponsor’s way of thinking, I can then begin to trust my decision-making. Prior to entering recovery, I trusted my own faulty thought processes. As others in the program have said, my best thinking usually got me into trouble, and my recovery depends on my ability to share my thoughts and concerns with my sponsor and to seek his advice.
Dictionary definitions of “normal” include words like “usual,” “standard,” “customary,” “common,” “average,” and “typical.” Philosophers and social scientists have spent countless hours and millions in grant money trying to define “normal.” Maybe it’s easier to define normal by thinking about what it is not, rather than what it is!
We do know that what’s normal for one person may not be normal for another. Perception plays an important role in what seems normal. Each of us perceives normal differently. Perceptions come to us through our senses, but our understanding and expectations influence our perceptions. Since everyone’s ability to perceive and understand how the world works is unique, everyone has different expectations, so naturally, everyone has the potential to see normal in a completely different light. It is no wonder that the world is full of people who seem so dissimilar.
Some people believe that chocolate ice cream is a delicious treat, while others think it is nothing special. (And some people have sensitive teeth, which makes eating ice cream very painful, if not impossible.) Some folks can smell a rose from twenty feet in a heavy wind, while others must practically stick their nose right in among the flower’s petals to catch the scent. In either case the person doing the smelling may like or dislike the scent. Yet, in both of these cases, there is a norm. Chocolate ice cream has a taste that is normal for it, and a rose has a smell that is normal for it. If I placed a spoonful of chocolate ice cream in my mouth and tasted pastrami, or sniffed at a rose and smelled window cleaner, I would be concerned that the world had gone terribly wrong. What is normal is what we have learned to expect.
Back to those dictionary definitions. According to them, normal can mean “conforming to a standard,” “adhering to a pattern,” or “the usual or expected.” Debating these definitions would be fruitless; I’ll select the ones I found most useful in formulating my own definition and present them here.
In order to conform to a standard, the standard must be set and identifiable. The same is true for adhering to a pattern. Therefore, it should be safe to say that the usual becomes the expected, which becomes the standard or pattern. What usually happens is what I expect to happen. After a while, it simply becomes a pattern; I do this, and that happens. To me a standard is something I can rely on, something tested time and again that has always produced the same result. In the beginning, my using performed in this way. It was reliable in that it always made me feel better—except on those mornings after I drank too much. After a while, drugs and alcohol lost their reliability and the results of using became abnormal. Unfortunately, by the time this happened, I could not stop using. The abnormal had become normal in a weird, twisted sort of way.
When I began working, I learned what a normal day at work was like. While my normal day was much different from that of most people—most people do not build cars for a living—it was normal to me. If one day I woke up and drove to work, only to find that I was expected to do accounting, I’d consider that a departure from the norm. Things never got quite that weird at work, but I did have some very abnormal days during my time as an autoworker. For instance, I can remember times I went to work, expecting to report to my regular job, only to discover that I had been temporarily reassigned to another job on the assembly line. It was the same type of work; I was still building cars, but I was in a different department, in a different part of the building, working with different people, handling different parts, and so on. Sometimes I liked the change of assignment and sometimes I hated it. How I felt was determined by my expectations of what I thought was my normal job. Man is a creature of habit, and we tend to develop a comfort zone. We seek stability and don’t like surprises. We do not expect the unexpected. We expect the normal, or what has become normal to us.
Normal is not always easy to pinpoint or describe. It varies from person to person, day to day, season to season, year to year, and understanding to understanding. Other potential variables include my patience, tolerance, and willingness to change. They all play a part in my understanding, as does my ability to be honest with myself, and to keep an open mind. Since normal is so hard to put a finger on and to hold in
