I've never liked things a normal amount

Searching for a post about Heated Rivalry on threads yesterday, I came across a bio that read “I’ve never liked things a normal amount in my life”. It’s a refrain I see a lot on social media particularly, in bios or comments sections or as throwaway posts. And as someone who is anywhere between enthusiastic and obsessed about something at any given point, it is d e e p l y relatable.

I wrote about the way I fall hard for stuff, quickly, a couple of years ago here (at the time, this was inspired by Community):

What I mean is that the speed at which this new thing has integrated and become a central part of my life has become something akin to warp. That I have gone from watching no TV to doing nothing but watching TV after the work day is over - and that demarcation is only because my partner works a ‘proper’ job which renders him unable to watch before at least 6.30pm. That I’ve gotten so invested in the characters that I’ve googled selective synopses because I simply can’t wait to watch it unfold in real (10 years late) time, which then leaves me stuck with the knowledge but unable to share it because my partner doesn’t want the spoilers (selfish!).

And whilst this may sound OTT, it’s a totally normal course of action for me when I love something. It’s a pretty simple process, with only 2 stages: initial discovery, and then total immersion.

Though I haven’t been able to see what all the Heated Rivalry fuss is about yet (damn UK release dates!), I’ve loved watching it envelope my social media. So many people speaking about something with immense love, deep gratitude, and reverence has been nothing short of wonderful, especially a proudly queer love story.

But really, what is a normal amount?

At the back end of last year, I read “Am I Normal?” by Sarah Chaney. It charts how “normal” as a word originally meant a right angle, was then made to be descriptive, and was then quickly made prescriptive:

As the subtitle for the book, The 200-Year Search for Normal People (and Why They Don’t Exist), suggests: “normal” is made up, but the consequences very much aren’t.

(As a side note, this paragraph could have been directly written to me, if you swap “selective state school in a wealthy part of southern England” to “charitable private school in an economically downturned part of north east England”):

Over the years, as I read more about the history of medicine and science, about colonialism and gender, about queer theory and the social model of disability, my notion of the normal gradually became a little less self-indulgent, a little less insular. I realised that, despite my experiences and anxiety, I was privileged. By luck of birth, I had grown up closer to the Western so-called norm than many people, even if I had felt far from normal at a selective state school in a wealthy part of southern England.

Which, again, leads me to question: what is a normal amount to love things? From the descriptive point of view, the frequency with which I see people say they’re incapable of loving things a normal amount makes me think that it’s actually quite common. Instead, I think this feeling of abnormality comes from the well-worn (but frankly boring) narrative which we’ve been fed, that to like things is embarrassing: a sign of failure, of frivolity, of weakness.

Even as someone who’s been writing on enthusiasm for nearly a decade now, this has still only really just dawned on me: that this idea of liking things an abnormal amount is probably untrue. Not to sound all Principal Skinner about it, but what if it’s not that I’m weird in that I like things more than most people? What if it’s that we’re all just pretending we don’t like things as much as we do, because we’ve been made to feel like we can’t?

Some evidence for this is that there being a “normal” amount to like things is usually applied along gendered lines. Very rarely have I seen a man either be told that they, or self-identify as, loving something an abnormal amount (at least something “traditionally male”): they get tattoos of their club football badge and series funding for hobbies frequently, and the world doesn’t bat an eyelid.

So, next time you fall in love with something, and you fall in hard: try not to feel bad. Welcome it. Embrace it.

My entire life, I’ve liked things a normal amount: and that amount is loads, thank you very much.