Dear readers,

In this week’s Press Pass, I introduced our newest editor, Carina Pacheco. As I said in that newsletter, when Carina applied to work here, I was struck by her writing voice, the lens through which she sees the world, and her interest in the intersection of culture and politics. To me, she offered something distinct from the rest of the team. Today, I’m thrilled to share her debut Tangle essay, which is adapted from a piece she published in her newsletter.

— Isaac

I recently read a piece by the inimitable Kat Rosenfield examining the overuse of the word “normalize,” a largely online phenomenon that begs onlookers to validate or otherwise destigmatize things that would typically be considered unusual or unattractive or downright rude. 

For example: Normalize chewing with your mouth open, normalize going “no-contact” with family, normalize never texting back. 

Asking others to normalize something actually implies that said thing is, in fact, weird. “Normalizing” is a pre-emptive hedge against judgment or rejection. By insisting people normalize, say, owning 10 dogs, you’re just acknowledging that owning that many animals is weird. Because if it weren’t weird, you wouldn’t be calling for a chorus of affirmation to feel secure in your decision. Are you with me? 

Rosenfield makes an excellent point: This phenomenon stunts individuality, because eccentricities stop being eccentric if they’re “normalized.” When stylistic oddities like mismatched clothes or patchworked furniture become routinely accepted, the result is a strange catch-22 — a monoculture of “eccentric” aesthetics, where everyone is independently trying to look eccentric and creative but ends up looking the same as the other guy. I remember one summer when every trendy girl in New York was wearing cowboy boots or ballet flats with athletic shorts and a button-down collared shirt. You just had to be there. It was not normal, but they tried to make it so. 

Once something is normalized, it’s socially and publicly validated, and can no longer be wrong or weird — instead, it becomes wrong or weird to judge the normalized phenomenon. So now, not only can weird things not be considered weird, but it’s morally wrong to pass judgment on something that was previously understood as bizarre or undesirable, for no other reason than someone’s need to feel validated in their peculiarities. Are you still with me? 

Calls to normalize have long been reasonable pushes for progress from tiny academic circles — like efforts to normalize breastfeeding in public in the 1990s and 2000s. But in the 2010s and 2020s, the idea exploded as an attempt to normalize just about everything — a trend I’m comfortable placing at the feet of millennials and Gen Z. What started as a silly fad to commiserate or bond over little quirks has quickly devolved into a compulsive need to overshare and overvalidate every experience, characteristic, or predilection — especially unconventional ones, and especially those tied to personal insecurity. My generation (the Zoomers) has long been inundated with demands to normalize everything from buying coffee every day to skipping class (and now, as adults, work) for “mental health reasons” and cutting someone off at the first sight of difficulty. 

Take dating, for example: When a friend tells you about a bad first date, rarely do you encourage them to consider whether they are really incompatible with the other person or whether they have room to improve their dating etiquette. Instead, you affirm the face-saving conclusion that the other person was a jerk — never that your friend may have talked with their mouth full or forgotten to ask a single question — and they should never see them again. At the first sign of discomfort or conflict, normalizing reactions by declaring them “self-care” allows a person to justify almost any action, immediately disengage, and refuse to accept any personal accountability.  

I shudder to think of the mud that so many good, necessary emotions have been dragged through to get to the altar of normalization, chief among them shame and embarrassment. They are, as Rosenfield says, “essential ingredients to a functioning society.” They form the bedrock of the shared norms and values that keep society functional. Varying degrees of risk-taking and independent decision-making — and failure — are essential to establishing character and creating the foundation of self-trust and resilience that everyone needs to truly grow. Because who wins at the end of the movie (or in real life)? Not the conformist. The hero can’t grow into his or her role without taking risks and learning hard lessons.

Shame, embarrassment, humiliation, and stigma are all deeply entrenched in the human experience — but more importantly, they’re inevitable. We’ve all had some not-so-pleasant experiences with these feelings. I know I have. But we don’t have a God-given right to feel comfortable all the time. Trying to make ourselves feel better by avoiding, suppressing, ignoring, or altogether annihilating our discomforts does nothing but mask our insecurities and make us more miserable in the long run. 

I struggled with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in college, and I had phases where I was hard pressed to leave my house (much less get on a train or plane or sit in a car) because the obsessions and intrusive thoughts that played over and over in my mind brought on unbearable discomfort and tears and panic attacks. I’d visualize car crashes, plane hijackings, or train bombings on a loop. I’d foresee family or friends getting in horrible accidents. I’d picture any man sitting near me getting up to strangle, stab, or shoot me — or worse.