I’m writing this in my home office, wearing my bathrobe. I am currently placed under a stay-at-home order, which requires me to stay in my house unless I need to travel for very specific reasons, like shopping or health needs. It also means I no longer have to keep to office dress codes. Besides my husband and neighbour, I haven’t spent physical time with anyone in more than a month. I speak with my parents over video chat, and call other family members over Facebook Messenger. I stay abreast of friends’ lives thanks to their many regular updates on social media. I do most of my shopping online. I spend a fraction of my day outside.

How abnormal! And yet even before Covid-19 hit, I often sat writing in my home office, staying connected with my family and friends via various technologies, shopping online. The stay-at-home order may be new, but I can’t pretend that social distancing is unprecedented. Our technologies and social media have been distancing us from each other for years.

Of course, I am one of the lucky ones. Around us, local economies are faltering. Healthcare systems are strained. People continue to unexpectedly lose their loved ones, and regret that they couldn’t be with them in their final moments.

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This has led many of us to wonder about normality: when will things “return to normal,” and what will a “new normal” look like? As one article discussing the disruptions Covid-19 has brought to Life As We Know It puts it, “It’s tempting to wonder when things will return to normal, but the fact is that they won’t – not the old normal anyway. But we can achieve a new kind of normality, even if this brave new world differs in fundamental ways.”

By this standard, the old normal is the one in which our healthcare systems and governments are not prepared to deal with things like Covid-19; the new normal, in contrast, is mostly like the old normal, except in this one we are prepared for global pandemics.

The new normal, in other words, changes what was wrong but keeps what was right with the old normal. But if the old normal was wrong, then why did we call it normal? Similarly, if the new normal is different from the old one, how can we pretend we’re still dealing with “normal”?

What does “normal” really mean, anyway?

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The word “normal” appears straightforward enough. But like many of our words, as soon as we begin thinking about it, it starts to fall apart at the seams.

Take, for instance, the first entry in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary definition of normal: “conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern”, as in “He had a normal childhood”. In the same vein, the entry continues, the word means “according with, constituting, or not deviating from a norm, rule, or principle.”