Mia Mercado - Weird but Normal: Essays on the Awkward, Uncomfortable, Surprisingly Regular Parts of Being Human

For you, mostly,

and a little bit

for me

Contents

Cover

THIS IS WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT

PLEASE DONT SKIM

OKAY YOURE SKIPPING IT ENTIRELY

NEVERMIND

I spend a lot of my time wondering what it would be like to feel normal all the time. To wake up, refreshed, after exactly eight hours of sleep and walk through life feeling confident and self-assured. To breathe in the new day and think, I bet everyone I encounter will want to hear what I have to say.

Never stopping to wonder, Maybe my third-grade teacher hated me and I didnt know? To fall asleep so, so easily, never worrying about the dumb thing I said earlier that day or the dumb thing I might say tomorrow or the dumb thing I said in Sunday school a decade ago.

I dont think anyone feels completely normal all of the time, but I do feel like Ive spent much of my life being highly embarrassed by my body, my brain, and my whole entire self. I am wildly comfortable with being uncomfortable in my own skin. Ive tried to wax, pluck, cleanse, ignore, self-care, ironically joke about, and self-deprecatingly tweet the discomfort away, and wow, can you believe it, the feeling of not feeling normal has never actually left me.

This is not to ignore the many cis, straight, able-bodied privileges I have been afforded. I know checking ones privilege has become an empty rallying cry for anyone who wants to talk about the intersection of the personal and the political. Often, I wonder whether Im different enough to have any

authority on the subject of feeling strange. If my face passes as white when my summer tan fades. If my brain passes as healthy when I dont talk about my depression. But it would be a lie to ignore the ways in which Im constantly reminded Im different. Being out of place feels as normal to me as the air we all breathe.

My discomfort with those differences has led me to preemptively tell everyone all the ways in which I assume Im strange. (Would Defense Mechanism be a good name for an emo band?) Ive thought, Maybe if I tokenize my half-Asian self in this wholly white room, one of the multiple Megans will not do it to me. Or, Perhaps I can fill my Twitter feed with these deeply negative feelings and each Like will give me one (1) serotonin.

But, oops surprise, talking about hating yourself does not a personality make.

It isnt a fun, quirky brand of comedy. Its just really draining. And ultimately, sad.

So, Im trying this thing where I acknowledge the parts of myself that make me feel weird without quantifying them as bad. Because, oops surprise again, a lot of the parts of ourselves we assume to be strange are actually really common. Despite the dozens of bottles Ive bought since 2001, I cannot be the only person keeping Nair in the hair-removal business.

Because I have eyes and ears and a Wi-Fi connection, I know I am not the only one screaming for the world to love them while also tweeting things like

lol @ that feeling when ur just a big trash dump!!!

These parts of ourselves are often internalized and intentionally hidden.

Theyre associated with shame, guilt, and panic dreams where Sarah from Catholic confirmation class tells everyone, Mia thinks premarital sex is bad, but jokes on her because she is years out from seeing even one single penis!

If we talked about these awkward parts more, wed realize many of the things we think make us weird are astonishingly normal.

While were obsessing about things that are actually quite ordinary, there are lots of legitimately strange things we should be directing our time, tweets, and energy toward. Weird things weve come to culturally accept as normal, like expecting women to wear uncomfortable shoes that make them taller

but not so tall as to scare straight men; how we shave some body hair while conditioning others; and the fact that we light a cake on fire and sing to it to celebrate being alive. Sometimes all I want to do is rip off my BOGO heels and scream, WHAT IS EVEN GOING ON HERE?

There are rituals, specifically those of womanhood, that I follow blindly,

only pausing briefly to contemplate why I think I need a $25 candle that smells like an ocean that doesnt exist. Going on a Target run makes me feel seen on a spiritual level, and I have, more than once, eaten Halo Top ice cream and called it self-care. I am not above admittedly absurd, ritualistic ways of living. I am deeply in the trenches of them, holding my breath and trying to make eye contact with someone else down here who shares my discomfort with the whole situation.

I know I dont have all or perhaps any of the answers when it comes to feeling normal in our weird human flesh. I dont know all the steps to freeing either the nipple or my increasing number of nipple hairs, but I do know that I cant keep up with all the tweezing, tittering, trimming, and shrinking socially required to be a normal human woman in this weird-ass world.

Im fucking tired. At the end of the day, sometimes I just want to laugh.

Or half-smile. Or do one of those appreciatory silently-blow-air-out-of-my-nose-but-not-really-laugh laughs. Maybe we can all exhale a little together.

These are stories about our outward-facing selves. The face we put onwhen we leave the house. The assumptions people make when they seethat face. As much as Id like to mask the ways in which I feel strange oruncomfortable or out of place, the world is going to see me however theysee me. These are stories about peoples assumptions about me becauseIm half-Asian, half-white, from the Midwest, female, raciallyambiguous, violently beautiful, aggressively charismatic, humble.

These are stories about how Ive hidden behind the people Ivepretended to be and the people Im expected to be, how I often feel Imperforming normality rather than just living it. Theyre about the factthat these are all standard practices of being a person.

Everyone starts out strange. As children, were all just tiny, little weirdos testing the limits of what is normal, acceptable behavior and what makes our parents blush or swear in public. But I wasnt a strange child, you say, actively blocking out memories where you shoved bundled up socks down your pants or played a made-up game called Dead Girl where the whole premise was that you were a girl who was dead. I promise you, all children are fucking weird.

When I was little but not little enough for it to be cute (nine or ten-ish), I used to play a game called Orphans with my sister and cousins who were all five to seven years younger than me. The game went like this: we were orphans trying to escape an orphanage. Thats it. That was the whole game. I think I saw Annie once and let it become my entire personality for most of elementary school.

When playing the classic game Orphans, you start by making up orphan names and identities. I, the oldest and therefore bossiest/bitchiest of the group, took to writing down each of our names and personas in a notebook.