Why be normal? That was a bumper sticker you’d see on the back of VW Rabbits in the early 1980s. But my mom, P’Tricia, knew that wasn’t even the right question. There’s no such thing as normal, she told me, over and over. The heteronormative nuclear family wasn’t “normal,” in her eyes. It was toxic. Just because her behavior and ideas seemed bizarre to certain people, that didn’t make her abnormal. It made her wise enough to see beyond the status quo.

I believed her, though I had to take many of her ideas and theories with large grains of salt. On some level, I knew she was right. This idea of a normal family or a normal life as represented on Leave it to Beaver was simply fiction.

As her mental health collapsed and her worldview became more detached from what I knew as reality, I had to find my own way to reject the status quo.

My deprogramming started early. In addition to frequent lectures from P’Tricia on the dangers of normalcy, I had a vinyl copy of Free to Be, You and Me which we had stolen from the library. Is it stealing if you just neglect to return it? Probably. But I think she did eventually pay off the late fines, so in a sense we bought it.

If you are a GenX American with liberal-leaning parents, you are likely to have fond memories of this collection of songs and skits. The title track envisioned a world where horses run free, and you and me are free to be…you and me.

While I’m still unsure if just letting all the horses out is a good idea, I took some important lessons about gender roles from the record. Did you know that babies are born with career aspirations and that they can communicate with each other? That’s how we discover that before she knows what equipment she’s got, a girl may dream of being a fireman, or the president. Too bad she has to find out that she’s a girl.

Alan Alda revealed that boys can play with dolls and it’s mean to try to force them into toxic masculinity as a toddler. I learned that it’s alright to cry (even if you’re a boy!) and that if you rely too much on feminine wiles you may get eaten by a tiger.

The basic message was that the gender roles of the status quo were harmful and did not have to apply to me unless I let them. By the time I was a teen, I was leaning hard into androgyny and black eye makeup to signify that I was not falling into the normalcy trap.

It wasn’t much of a leap to go from questioning the patriarchal status quo to questioning capitalism. As the first generation of women who were expected to be breadwinners equally with men, I was taking a hard look at which economic levers I could reach by the time I was in my twenties. All of them looked like bullshit to me, given the already obvious harm done by the American dream of infinite profit and GDP growth.

The stock market is a casino on a global scale. We’ve lost the ability to see money as a worthless token of exchange and come to revere it as an end in itself. To be ambitious in this casino economy would mean throwing out my values. So, I had to throw out my values, one by one.

First I gave up autonomy. For a paycheck that barely covered my rent, I gave my hours to a retail chain. A cool retail chain, but still. My time belonged to MTS, Inc. for a couple of years. I showed up on time and fulfilled my duties, even when they entailed standing behind a register watching movies for hours.

Then, I gave up my creativity. For an office job at a cool publisher in a dingy basement, I gave up on the idea that I could make it as a graphic artist. Maybe that was a lack of self-confidence, but it also felt obvious that any attempt to do art for money would feel hollow and just…wrong.

Eventually, I even gave up on working at “cool” counterculture companies, because it turns out they don’t pay that well. I resigned myself to a dull bookkeeping job at a marine electronics shop, where I at least got to hang out with wacky Norwegians and made a dollar more per hour.

Not going to college for professional reasons was a choice. I felt that was the normal path, and I wanted to stay far away from normal. When I eventually did go back to do a BA (so I could apply for better jobs), it was a humanities degree. I was still stubbornly clinging to the idea that MBAs were for bozos. I still believe that, though I’ve met some lovely people with MBAs.

Around the second or third time I got laid off, I began to get panicky. I had already compromised as many values as I could in order to play this game of capitalism, and it wasn’t working. I was financially tenuous and only semi-employable. I needed a career, not another job. I needed the status quo to embrace me, even if I couldn’t quite embrace it.

I lucked into a job at a startup funded by a petulant billionaire. Not caring about money for decades had taken its toll on my finances, and it was time to start being motivated to make more money and fund that 401K. I wasn’t getting any younger, but I was getting incrementally more financially viable.

Two more layoffs and one public library job later, I finally landed in corporate America. I was hired by a midsize software company that was almost immediately acquired by a Big Tech company, and now I’m sitting here watching RSUs vest and wondering where all this money came from. I’m not rich, at all. Compared to many peers, I’m barely scraping by. Compared to others I’m living in opulence.

I live in a house I own, in a heteronormative nuclear couple, with only one exotic pet, and a healthy paycheck. I work out almost every day and cook meals from kits that are delivered weekly. I take walks, listen to podcasts, and avoid alcohol. I go to bed at 9 p.m., even on the weekends.

My life doesn’t necessarily look like the status quo. I never had kids, I don’t have an advanced degree, and my career is a patchwork, not a path. But I have found my own normal, and I think that’s something I have needed. Why be normal? Because normal is calm. Normal is the solid ground under your feet, where you can plant a different kind of future.