What the 'normals' do

I have a friend whose life has run a track similar, but not identical, to mine.

She's about my age, never married, no kids. She doesn't do relationship stuff well. She suffers from panic and anxiety attacks. She has a clutter problem, and her house is usually a mess.

'If we were normal,' she sometimes says, 'we wouldn't be sitting here in this coffee shop right now. We'd be home with our significant others, sitting in front of the fireplace or TV and drinking a glass of wine.'

Yeah, maybe.

Or maybe we'd be sitting at the kitchen table with our significant others looking at the mortgage coupon, the home equity loan payment, the lease payments due on our SUV's, the kids' orthodontist bills, plus various utility bills and credit card statements, and wondering how we're going to cover them all – or if we'd just walk away from the house and move everyone into some crappy apartment somewhere.

Or maybe we'd be fighting and arguing about it.

Or maybe we'd be stressing out about the latest round of layoffs at our cubicle jobs and comparing notes to figure out which of us would be first to be unemployed.

Or maybe we'd be at some Crown Heights cocktail party surrounded by people we loathed, jabbering about golf and OU football and Martha Stewart, because we had to make and nurture these connections for career or social status purposes.

This is far from a perfect life, but I don't have any illusions about the grass being greener on the other side of Shartel Avenue. It's all just tradeoffs.