The Making of a Healthy Deviant: Choosing a Healthy Life in an Unhealthy World
Choosing a healthy life in an unhealthy world can provoke unexpected complications
—
Deviant: n. One that differs from a norm, especially a person whose
behavior and attitudes differ from accepted social standards.
— American Heritage Dictionary, 4th Ed.
For a lot of my life, I tried hard to pass for normal, to go along with what society told me would make me worthy, good, desirable. That didn’t go so well.
It’s not like I wasn’t warned. Throughout my childhood, both my sociologist dad and my hippie mom tried hard to convince me — albeit unsuccessfully — that ‘normal’ was overrated.
Pretty much from the time I could talk, they seized every opportunity to point out the foibles, flaws and inherent nuttiness of conventional mass culture. They encouraged me to see its artifice, its blandness, its prejudice, and its unabashedly materialistic bent. In a thousand different ways, my parents (both unusual people in their own right) urged me to discover my authentic self, to dance to my own drum, to be my own person.
To me, that seemed like a spectacularly bad idea. Because from what I could see, achieving normalcy was the price of
