"A Normal Person"

I was talking to someone this week who has recently had a pretty life-changing event happen to them. In my mind I was wondering how long it would be until they felt like a Normal Person again. My brain did a double-take at the phrase.

First of all, I'm brushing off all of the standard lines like: "No one is normal!" "Who would want to be normal?" "Normal is boring." I'm not talking about generic normalcy here. I'm talking about the ability to have a day where you just do your stuff and get it done and fall asleep at the end of the day... that kind of normal.

When someone dies, you think about them all the time, and every moment is punctuated with their presence (or lack of). That's not normal. But after days, or months, weeks, or years, you return to 'normal'. Right? Hmmmm (as Sawyer would say).

Can I just guess that whatever the big event is that shook you our of your Normal life changed you forever? It's not "Normal" that you're looking for anymore, but more of an equilibrium. The person who went through an excruciating disease will always have the physical reminders, the scars, the missing pieces of his or her body. But the mind will eventually let it fade into the background.

But the brain AND the body have been transformed by the experience. Right? So it's not that someone wants to return to Normal. It's that they are ready to finish this current transformation.

Right?

***Stephan read this last night and said, "Wow. This is the kind of stuff I say at the bar after 4 drinks!"

*******I'm editing this to include this link to an article and video from Runner's World titled, The New Normal. It's  a very clear graphic way to know what he was going through.