Philadelphia Weekly

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There always comes a time when we want to be normal, to inhabit a world where squabbles about who hits the snooze button or how long something stays fresh without being refrigerated are natural and reassuring occurrences, regular as the tide.

I try to recapture this sense of normalcy when I visit my parents. "I'm telling you," my mother will say, "I wash at least three pair of your father's socks a day..." which prompts my father to throw his hands in the air and say, "She can't add and subtract! Who wears more than one pair of socks a day?" It's a fruitless argument, but after all those years of storms, isn't it almost with glee that they bicker about sock usage?

As with most adults, my childhood memories are tainted by inaccurate, overwrought tragedy. A first nosebleed becomes a massive injury--blood spurting everywhere, a scene from Raging Bull.

Spankings, which happened rarely, now take on a Jane Eyre patina, my father dragging me into some thorny backyard and tearing a switch from a tree.

Likewise, normalcy doesn't make a big appearance in my remembrance of childhood-things past. I recall it mainly as a reprieve from what now seems like a home positively besieged by the volatility of illness.

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I was normal through high school, but by college, it became a struggle.

One day, I remember having to go into a basement to get a slab of beef from a freezer for a dinner party. As I descended the stairs, I felt an encroaching panic that was inappropriate given the bright spring day and my laughing friends waiting at the stairwell's entrance.

But with each step, the noisier the basement became, its light bulb swinging ever more wildly on its wire; the freezer surging, then overflowing, with blood. I ran up the stairs into the sunny day empty-handed. Though this kind of thing happened with increasing frequency and intensity, I concealed it.

Later, in graduate school, the symptoms were harder to hide.

My car, for instance, was dirty. And it wasn't just dirty. It was like when you see a movie about a serial killer: The mess in the apartment--with the telltale newsprint cutouts--isn't just postadolescent squalor or bachelor slop, it's sick.

We know this because the director tells us so, using greenish filters, or distorted, dirty piles of things that don't match, things that were collected inadvertently by someone whose frantic, chaotic mind can't fit the pieces of a life together. Such were my environs--disturbing and sickening. The car, the apartment, sometimes my clothes--they told the story of a person you didn't want to get too close to because you knew, just by looking, something was wrong.

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These days, I present a normal appearance. The things that are not normal about me can be justified, on a good day, by words like "bohemian," "eccentric," "artsy." Both my apartment and office glimmer with apparent normality--albeit of the messy, cluttered kind.

Still, everyone has their secret places.

Looking around, I know what's normal and what's not. No one else can make these distinctions. The important thing is not that the distinctions exist--because they always will--but that others don't see them.

I get lots of letters from people who insist they'll never recover, never be truly, deeply normal. That may be; I know I won't. But you don't have to recover completely to appear normal; you simply have to get better at dissembling.

The other day, for instance, I saw a car go into reverse and lurch toward me. I froze, petrified. Then I realized: It had been a hallucination. I told no one--and in a way, that meant it hadn't happened.

If I find myself crying as I fall asleep because I can't stop thinking about suicide, I don't take solace in my boyfriend's arms--I turn the other way, and the tears become less urgent.