Normal Gets You Nowhere Read online

  And so it was that around age forty even I started to envy the so-called normals out there. In fact, I became a little obsessed with normalcy. I wondered what it would be like to fall asleep at night in a home where there was a man to keep me safe. Or to have more time off to walk around the city with Ava or to go for bike rides. I wanted to find out if the relatively easier lives that the people around me seemed to have were as pleasant as they looked. So I started to try to emulate them. I insisted on going out to dinner with nonwork friends. I tried to be open to dating. I went to Home Depot and Michael’s craft store. I considered scrapbooking (I eventually decided against it because it seemed like it would take $800 to get my scrapbook going and, frankly, that’s a Margiela shirt). Believe it or not, I even strung my whole loft in bright Martha Stewart and Lily Pulitzer tissue paper flowers I put together with Ava; this was the décor for our Easter dinner!

  And I didn’t stop there. I took a chunk of the money I’d earned on MTV and announced to my employees that we should all start exercising. Then I bought each and every person at People’s Revolution a $500 bicycle and christened us the Grand Street Sports Club. We had baskets and bells; we were even featured in the New York Times for our riding prowess! I also denounced grocery stores; instead, you could find me throughout the week with the rest of New York City’s domestic mavens at the farmer’s market, buying good organic produce.

  My country house at the time shared a beach on a lake with several other families. I’d always avoided going there during prime sunbathing hours, because I hate group sports. In fact, the words “moms” and “bathing suits” used in the same sentence had always been enough to send me on a rocket to another planet. Instead, I’d go to the lake around eight for an evening sidestroke or early in the morning before anyone else woke up. It had always seemed like my worst nightmare to cart my coolers and beach reads and sunblock down the wooded path at ten on the dot and spend the whole day drinking Sprites and eating cheese balls with everyone else. But in the spirit of normalcy, I even gave this a whirl. And you know what? It was painful. I had nothing in common with these people and nothing to discuss with them. I’d never seen Mad Men or The Office; I’d never been to Atlantis or Cancun. In fact, I felt like I was visiting from another planet.

  Although a lot of the other things I tried in the name of normalcy were fun and worthwhile, I ultimately just couldn’t get in the groove. This sane and normal life—the same one being lived, give or take a few details, by hundreds of thousands of professional women and mothers in New York—seemed kind of repetitive and animalistic. Get up, exercise, work, eat organic salad greens, drink wine, maybe have sex, go to sleep, and get up and do it all over again. My formerly abnormal life had had its share of repetition too, but at least the grueling work I did was pushing me forward, not keeping me moored in vaguely contented stasis. I couldn’t say the same about dodging crazy cab drivers on my morning bicycle ride. Not that there’s anything wrong with riding a bike per se or even sunning yourself on the beach—it’s just that I was doing these things for everyone else’s reasons, not my own. These weren’t my preferred activities. And they quickly started to seem like a huge waste of time. I didn’t feel replenished or exhilarated; I felt exhausted, emotionally and financially. Where was this all going?

  In hindsight, my awkward quest for normalcy was one of the most humorous explorations I’ve taken in my life as well as one of the least rewarding. The truth is, not only does normal get you nowhere; normal doesn’t do anything for you, or at least it didn’t for me. I’d already known the feeling of winning through self-esteem and hard work, and it was much more invigorating than winning the race to conform to everyone else’s life plan or the feeling of having held hands, drunk wine, and watched a movie. Don’t get me wrong. That kind of thing can be nourishing at certain moments, but it’s hard to be effective at changing the world or yourself when you’re eating heavy meals at seven thirty every night—I mean, this is probably why France, a magical country, hasn’t managed to catapult itself back to being a real world power!

  A lot of people say they want to be special, but they don’t want to do the work or to occasionally eat crow in order to grow. This was obviously what had set me questing after normalcy in the first place. I hadn’t done any drugs or even really drunk in sixteen years; I’d become a champion worker and an accomplished meditator. I was clearly trying my best to go all the way on this karmayogic path I’d chosen. And at times it seemed overrated, or at least like it was making me miss out on things. And it was, The Mother herself warned people off the path of spirituality—she said it was not for the meek. Few people ever manage to commit totally to the Divine, becoming a swami or a prophet, and few commit to darkness either, becoming a Jeffrey Dahmer or a Charles Manson. Most of us dance between the two, with one foot on either side, for our entire lives. These forces are both incredibly powerful and, on the surface, attractive; as one side starts to consume us, we grab the other as a way to balance ourselves. This is what’s normal.

  Ultimately, I would like “normal” to become equated with “boring.” Let’s throw “successful” in there too. Instead, let’s use words like “conscious,” “collaborative,” and “creative” (and of course “charming,” “charismatic,” and “compassionate”). In my early forties, having strived for years to accomplish many of the things I wanted in my life, from creating a business to raising a daughter, I found myself wondering what was left to do, and be. The answer, I now know, is to be of service to others. Compassion and true Universal Motherhood start with consciousness—with awakening to what’s going on all around us in this world and summoning our courage and creativity to change it.

  If normal gets you nowhere, consciousness will get you fucking everywhere, from Bali to Paris to your very own bloque. I hope to see you there.

  Notes

  1. Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001).

  2. Glendon, A World Made New.

  3. Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: Da Capo, 1961).

  4. Roosevelt, Autobiography.

  5. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/cicero-friendship.html (retrieved 12/28/10).

  About the Author

  KELLY CUTRONE is the CEO and founder of People’s Revolution, the New York Times bestselling author of If You Have to Cry, Go Outside, a television personality, and mother to eight-year-old Ava. Visit the author online at www.twitter.com/peoplesrev.

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  Copyright

  The extract on pages 79–84 is from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from the US Department of State (http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2008/108544.htm) adopted and proclaimed by General Assembly resolution 217 A (III) on 10 December 1948.

  NORMAL GETS YOU NOWHERE. Copyright © 2011 by Power of the Word Productions, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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  ISBN 978–0–06–205979–6

  EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780062059802

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