The Book I'm Writing

forget the "new normal"... what if "normal" doesn't even exist?

The idea for my latest book began with a cow.

I wrote in Hope: A User’s Manual about a farmer in Cambodia who worked in the rice paddies until he lost his leg from the explosion of an abandoned landmine:

He was outfitted with a prosthetic leg, which caused a great deal of pain when standing in the water of the rice paddy each day. The man struggled more and more, eventually becoming depressed.

Western doctors might have put the man on antidepressants, but the doctors in Cambodia handled it differently. They spoke with the man in depth, understanding his trauma and the physical pain he was in, and its impact on his work. They asked, “What about dairy farming?” They bought the man a cow and helped him make the transition to a life that didn’t involve a physically painful and emotionally retraumatizing location. Within a few months, the depression was gone.

Photo by Joel Vodell on Unsplash. Joel writes: We spent the night in Ubud - about a 15 minute scooter ride away from these rice terraces/paddies… I love the patterns these farms create. It’s crazy to build a farm on the side of a mountain, but I’m glad they did.

As readers of the Blue Room know, we’ve been no strangers to anxiety and depression in the Dana household, and we aren’t alone. Many people struggled during the recent pandemic, and a spike in adolescent depression and anxiety goes back at least a decade.

Depression and anxiety are holistic issues and require holistic solutions: therapy, coping skills, and medication, to name a few. We’ve also unearthed a few diagnoses of neurodivergence along the way, which emerged during this process. But our kids didn’t really start to thrive until they left the big, chaotic, ultra-competitive high school and enrolled in a school with a philosophy that fit their learning style and temperament. We are fortunate, I’ll even say privileged, to have been able to make the shift. But the move also led us to wonder: was there actually something fundamentally “wrong” with our kids, or were they simply more sensitive to the social toxins in the broader environment? Or both? What were their struggles teaching us about the world we live in, and the dysfunctional systems we take for granted? And what do we ultimately want most for our kids, and for everyone for that matter: better tools to get by in an ailing world, or a world transformed in a way that’s healthier for them and for us all?

Yes, therapy and medication can be life-saving. But too often we patch people up and send them back into systems that are ill-suited for human flourishing. We have a lot of rice paddies, and we need more cows.

* * *

At the recommendation of a friend, I picked up Gabor Maté’s bestseller The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture:

Over four decades of clinical experience, Maté has come to recognize the prevailing understanding of “normal” as false, neglecting the roles that trauma and stress, and the pressures of modern-day living, exert on our bodies and our minds at the expense of good health. For all our expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how today’s culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance. Now Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick, connects the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society—and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing.

To call my reading of this book a conversion experience would be an understatement. While Maté’s interest is psychological, mine is spiritual, holistic; indeed, the “myth of normal” permeates almost every aspect of human experience—not just in mental health, but also in race, gender and gender identity, sexual orientation, class, disability, nationality, religion, and more.

The book I’m writing seeks to be a “Myth of Normal” for the church and the broader culture. Though inspired by Maté’s work, it will stand alone; I don’t intend to converse with his book so much as expand on its thesis. “Normal” isn’t just a myth; it’s a maladaptive concept that contributes to cycles of shame, stigma, and othering. 

What does it cost us to cling to rigid ideas of what is “normal”? 
How do our institutions, religious and otherwise, uphold “normalcy”?
What if, in fact, there’s no such thing as normal? How might such an idea be liberating for everyone?

So… that’s what I’m writing about.

Thanks for being on the journey with me!