Maybe abnormal is healthier than normal

​I had a conversation with a dear friend yesterday who told me she was struggling to find peace in her new normal. I told her what I've come to learn, learn quite the hard way, really, and that is that there is no such thing as normal.

So many of our personal challenges come when we don't live up to some vision of normal and constantly beat ourselves up for it.

Additionally, there are times we convince ourselves life is going well because what we're doing looks like some vision of normal, when in reality that normal is quite destructive.

Normal is deceptive, mainly because normal is a myth.

We all have these very individual lives with very different variables, who one earth has the capacity to form a vision for normal.

Who could possibly define it?

A lot of my struggles in the aftermath of divorce came when I tried to settle into a new normal. I did that - not always knowingly - by first establishing what my new normal should be.

Then I went to work trying to squeeze myself into it.

The problem is that vision was most formed by how others did divorce and not by the things I needed to do to best take care of me and my boys within the framework of my circumstances.

And if I'm being truthful, that divorce largely came about because I spent years trying to figure out and live up to the standards of a normal marriage instead of trying to figure out the healthiest way for two people to grow together.

What two people growing together looks like is different between every two-person relationship. So, today it makes perfect sense that one would wake up one day and realize that a couple of decades of normal wasn't normal at all.

In fact, it couldn't have been more abnormal and unhealthy for the two people involved.

So, I want to encourage you today, if you're feeling abnormal, if you're having a hard time settling into a new normal, the lesson to take from that is get rid of any vision you have of normal and adopt a vision of your best self.

Your best self in whatever circumstances you are facing.

In fact, I wish that would be EVERYONE'S new normal. This idea of looking at the moment we are in, and doing the healthiest thing possible for me and the people around me.

There is no normal to help us know exactly what that looks like, so don't judge yourself by one.

The reality is we are all quite abnormal, and if embraced properly, there is something really beautiful about that.

Go embrace your new abnormal this week, you might find it healing.