“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” – Albert Camus.
You know, I want to be a normal girl. I want to be involved in the ordinary, common things that the people around me enjoy. Watching sports, eating ice cream, going to the bar for a drink (even though, admittedly, I’d be drinking water rather than beer).
I want a normal life, grounded in everyday, relatable realities. I don’t want to live some obscure, tucked-away existence, like a mystic removed from the world, inhabiting another plane. I don’t want rarefied interests or a Bohemian lifestyle. I don’t want to be locked away in an ivory tower; nor do I want to wander the desert, pursuing the ascetical path of perfection. I want simple; I want normal; I want human.
I want to take my car to get an oil change and then string up Christmas lights – without all the while contemplating the metaphysical significance of what I’m doing. I want to invite people over for dinner and laugh with them about silly, unimportant things. I want to wash dishes afterward and stay up late learning how to play poker and swear in Italian. I want to get married and have kids and spend my afternoons going to little-league softball games and soccer matches and meetings of the PTA. I want to brew a cup of hot tea and make up a bed for someone who’s sick. I want to go to church without feeling panicked – and without worrying that I don’t know what’s True, or that I need to sort out the questions of existence before the hour is up, or that I have to join the convent (or do some other thing I really don’t want to do) in order to please God.
The things I desire are actually really simple. I just happen to be a complicated person, which makes the simplicity of my desires seem impossible sometimes.
But here I am, wanting to be simple – wanting to lead a simple life – and at the same time not wanting to renounce the things that make me, me.
It’s not impossible, right? But even if it is – well, I guess I will have to take refuge in the belief that, with God, “nothing shall be impossible.”