Defining "Normal"

 

I hope that you are doing well and taking care of yourselves and your mental health!

Third-year of university is hacking away at my sanity and it has been keeping me booked and busy, buuuuut you are in for a treat as I have a guest post submitted by ‘In My Elements’ a new blogger who discusses what it is like to be in her shoes.

Make sure to show love on this post and share your own views on the matter, we would love to hear them 😊

I AM- IN MY ELEMENTS

I AM A…

·        South-Asian

·        Woman

·        Living in Britain

PART I- THE ‘NORMAL’ VS THE ‘ABNORMAL’

“She’s Indian, but she’s like us”

What you’re reading above is a statement made about me, by a Caucasian guy, that he said to his Caucasian friend. He then proceeded to recount this to me during that “I’ve told my friends about you” conversation.

Now, at the time, we were on the phone so he heard me laugh away the comment but he didn’t witness the furrowing of my brows when I understood that this comment didn’t sit right with me - I just couldn’t figure out why at the time. It’s important to note, that he did not say this maliciously or with ill-intent, in fact in a poll on unconscious bias, The Guardian found that “Half of black, Asian and minority ethnic respondents in the poll said they believed people sometimes did not realise they were treating them differently because of their ethnicity”, showing just how common this can be.

For quite a while this hung around me and made me ponder over the challenges of interracial dating and relationships, and how we may bring our unconscious bias into them – but that’s a topic for another time.

Now bear with me on this train of thought, but after some thinking, in my opinion, the sole wrongness at the centre of this statement is that this man, unknowingly showed me that his definition of “normal” is white. What shocked me even more at this discovery, was, so was mine. For such a long time.

Growing up, my family were proud of our rich cultural heritage and would blast Panjabi music on the summer night car rides and I’d be in the back, curling into myself and my shame, telling my mum to turn the volume down. That’s right. Turn the volume DOWN. To Bhangra. Turn Bhangra down. Truly, issa madness.

However, although now, at 20 my confidence and pride in being Panjabi allows me to reminisce and think of this self-consciousness as such a foolish feeling, at the time, that’s exactly what it was – a feeling. An emotional response that was more complex than being a self-conscious teen, there was the underlying self -hatred and the dying need and want to be normal; the dying want and need to be more white.

PART II- NORMALISE ‘THE ABNORMAL’

Throughout life, at almost every age, we all want to fit in, “The need for acceptance is a basic human instinct” (Joanna Cannon). Growing up outside of your country of origin, this can mean rejecting the parts of your culture that make you different (which can be most of it) in order to fit in with the majority, to be normal. This encourages our perception of white people being the standard of normality that we judge our differences against. In The Guardians poll on unconscious bias “One in five [minority ethnics] said they had felt the need to alter their voice and appearance in the last year because of their ethnicity”.  We change ourselves, right down to the very way we use our voices, to be less brown, less black, less ethnic.

However, globalisation now, more than ever, encourages us to embrace and learn of our differences. To be so secure in ourselves, that we don’t need to see a reflection of ourselves in everybody else to validate our own existence. We can be different, and that is normal. The fact that some cultures have arranged marriages, men wear skirts, women elongate their earlobes – it's different but it doesn’t mean its abnormal. We are all socialised differently, have different ways of celebrating births and weddings, dealing with death, mourning, illness – how many of us drink 7UP as an unofficial medication when we’re not feeling well?

Joanna Cannon (a psychiatrist with a degree from Leicester Medical School) writes “we reject those who highlight our differences, because those differences question are own choices and our own sense of belonging that we’ve been working on since the playground”. The challenge for ourselves going forward in a society, especially in diverse Britain, where multiculturalism is so evident, is to second guess that insecurity ingrained within our own identity, in which we need others to be like us and us to be like others. Instead, let’s be confident individuals capable of learning of different cultures and norms and embrace questioning ourselves in the fact that maybe, there is something to learn from one another, rather than to fear.

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Thank you so much for reading my second ever guest post! It was such a pleasure having ‘In My Elements’ write for my blog. I remember asking if she could “pretty please” write a post for IAMLENGA knowing that our passions and values align. I hope you’ve enjoyed this post as much as I enjoyed reading it, and I hope that you’ve taken something from this, (even if it’s just not to ‘turn down’ your identity to make others feel more comfortable).

 

But ultimately, we just want you to know what we know, you know!

 

Signed,

IAMLENGA

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