At some point in childhood, I began to think of normality as a place other people lived.
Not because their lives looked perfect. I was a child; I did not have a theory of family systems or emotional safety. I had something much simpler.
I had eyes.
I noticed small things.
A meal that remained only a meal. A room that did not suddenly change because someone entered it. Children who could be careless in the way children are supposed to be careless.
One of the memories that stayed with me is almost embarrassingly ordinary: fresh bread, butter, a quiet morning.
Nothing dramatic happened.
That was precisely why I remembered it.
For a little while, breakfast required no interpretation.
The intelligence nobody notices
Children living with unpredictability often become remarkably sensitive to atmosphere.
You learn temperature, tone and timing. You notice the fraction of a second before a conversation changes. You become very good at deciding whether this is a moment to speak, to help, to joke, or to become small enough not to add anything to the room.
From the outside, that can look like maturity.
Sometimes it is simply early practice.
The difficult part is that the practice does not politely disappear when childhood ends.
You may leave the house, the people, even the country, and still carry an invisible set of instructions with you.
Do not need too much. Do not make things harder. Stay alert. Be useful. Keep moving.
Rules learned early can become so familiar that they stop feeling like rules. They begin to feel like personality.
When competence becomes a disguise
There is nothing wrong with being capable.
I am rather fond of capability. It gets things done, keeps appointments, finds missing documents and remembers what everyone else has forgotten.
Very efficient.
Not always very restful.
For some of us, competence becomes a costume so convincing that even we forget there is a person underneath it.
The person underneath may be tired. She may want help. She may dislike something she has agreed to for years. She may have opinions that are inconvenient, needs that are poorly timed, or a completely unreasonable desire to spend an afternoon doing absolutely nothing useful.
Scandalous, I know.
But adulthood, for me, became less about proving that I could carry everything and more about noticing what I had been carrying automatically.
The question that changed more than the answers
For a long time, the obvious question seemed to be: What happened?
Later, another question became more interesting:
What did I learn to believe because it happened?
That question reaches further.
It asks why peace can sometimes feel less familiar than tension. Why asking can feel more difficult than giving. Why being needed may feel safer than simply being loved. Why a person can know, intellectually, that a situation is over while some part of her still behaves as if she has to prepare for it.
I do not think we become free by pretending the past no longer matters.
I think we become freer when we can see its fingerprints without mistaking them for destiny.
That distinction changed a great deal for me.
Why the book is made of small moments
I Just Wanted to Be Normal is not written as a psychological case study.
Life was never that obedient.
Memory does not return in tidy categories. It returns as a smell, a chair, a piece of bread, a gesture, a sentence someone said once and forgot while you carried it for decades.
That is how I wanted to write.
Not to explain every person. Not to turn the past into a courtroom. Not to make every painful thing meaningful just because it happened.
I wanted to leave room for contradiction: love beside disappointment, humour beside fear, tenderness beside damage, and ordinary moments beside the ones that changed everything.
Because that is how real families are remembered.
And perhaps that is why memoir can reach beyond the person who wrote it.
The details are mine.
The feelings are not always mine alone.
What I was really looking for
When I was young, I thought I wanted the life other people seemed to have.
Now I think I wanted something quieter.
The right to stop scanning every room. The right to have a need without apologising for its existence. The right to let silence be silence instead of evidence. The right to belong to my own life without constantly preparing for someone else’s reaction to it.
And maybe, every now and then, the right for breakfast to be just breakfast.
If any of this feels familiar
You do not need to have lived my childhood for some of these patterns to make sense to you.
That is the strange intimacy of memoir: one person tells the truth as precisely as she can, and somewhere else a reader recognises a piece of herself.
I Just Wanted to Be Normal is my memoir of the first eighteen years of my life, told through the memories that refused to disappear.
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