Normal?

Normal. The font style I clicked on to write this piece. The way we try to come across when talking to

strangers. The clothes we pick out to wear on the first day of school. The word we throw out like a

fishing line, waiting for a bite to reel it back in. Define that word. Normal. Quantify it. Measure it. How?

Do you count the actions of every person in the world and take the average - is the average normal?

Does some chosen group possess these magical characteristics that unite them under this umbrella we

call normal? Is more normal? Or are more not normal?

If normal were to exist, the only normal quality would be the desire to understand normal. But is normal

worth being? Do we want to resort to some word because we arbitrarily defined its arbitrary definition

as desirable? Laura Hershey does not.

“When I say normal, I don’t really mean anything.” She tosses the word off the pedestal it’s been

worshiped on for centuries. She doesn’t polish it. She doesn’t redefine it. She refuses it. Because maybe

“normal” isn’t a standard — maybe it’s a trap. A tool we invented, sharpened, and pointed not outward,

but inward.

Normal is not a fact. It’s a filter. A ruler held up to bodies that never asked to be measured. A silent

sorting machine: acceptable / unacceptable. Fixable / unfixable. Us / them.

In healthcare, “normal” dresses itself in lab coats and clipboards and medical school expectations. It

hides behind reference ranges and flowcharts, whispering this is how a body should be; anything else is

failure. But who wrote those ranges? Who decided whose body counted as baseline? Who chose what

students would learn to be "normal?"

When a clinician says, “your labs are normal,” what they often mean is “you look like the average of

someone who is not you.” When they say, “return to normal,” what they really mean is “return to a state

I am more comfortable with.” But maybe comfort was never the goal. Maybe honesty is.

Because disability is not simply a medical condition. It is a political identity shaped by stairs without

ramps, forms without braille, appointments without patience. The problem was never the body. It was

the infrastructure built for "normal" (whatever that means).

If health equity means anything, it means abandoning “normal” as the destination. It means shifting

from normalization to personalization, from cure to care, from conformity to autonomy. It means

admitting that we are not experts in someone else’s lived experience: We are guests. Our job is not to

correct them to a template, but to collaborate toward a life that works for them.

High-quality care is not just dosage calculations and clinical terminology. It’s cultural humility. It’s

learning to communicate in ways that aren’t taught in textbooks, through picture boards, silence, eye

movements, or the presence of a trusted support person. It’s knowing that if a patient uses a

wheelchair, the problem isn’t their mobility — it’s the exam table that doesn’t lower and the

inaccessible route into the building.

The systems we inherit are not neutral. They were built around an imagined “ideal patient,” and

everyone outside that outline is left negotiating for access. We can’t fix that with kindness alone. It takes

policy. It takes ramps. It takes hiring disabled staff. It takes refusing to let “typical” stand in for “worthy.”

It takes effort. Effort to open our eyes, to understand, to ask.

So let us stop dragging people toward a shore labeled normal. Let us cut the fishing line. Let us wade

into deeper waters where bodies are not compared, only witnessed. Let us build a healthcare system

that doesn’t ask, “How do we get you back to normal?” but instead asks, “What does thriving look like

for you — and how do we build it together?”

As a provider, that is what I will do. I will not assume my perspective, that my instinctive “normal” is

desirable or the goal. I will ask. I will open my mind, and I will listen. I will not be a provider handing out

iron supplements to every low hematocrit; I will understand each patient’s unique situation and respond

accordingly, personally, not uniformly. Normal was never the goal. Dignity is.

By Adriana Rhodes