When I refer to "the new normal", I'm not talking about societal norms, or things that affect the world at large. It's a personal thing. Your personal norm is constantly evolving, and if you stop to think about it, once you become an adult, it changes so quickly that new things are normal in the blink of an eye.
For instance, this past Sunday I was at my parents house with my sister celebrating Mother's Day. After dinner, as I'm sitting in the front room, I looked at my mom and said; "It's weird that I don't live here anymore." And really, it is. For 20 years I lived in the same house, with the same people, and same daily routine. And now I don't. Now, it's not weird that I'm a 26 year old grown man that moved into his own house. It's weird that all of the sudden this was my life and it feels like I didn't even need to do anything to make the transition. It felt strange for maybe a week and then bang, that's life deal with it. That's how life goes, I guess. You kind of just jump into a thing that's already happening and you're forced to go with the flow or you're just going to make this difficult for yourself.
The concept of this rapid transition to normal is something that I never really thought about until I became what I call "a real grown-up". You're a grown-up once you're past college age and are in the workforce full time. But once you live on your own, you're a "real grown up". You have responsibility. I've lived on my own for just shy of a year, but if feels like it's been decades. And that's because of how rapid new becomes normal. I didn't have to cut the grass, weed whack, make sure my dryer vent was clear etc when I lived at home. I could get drunk on Friday and sleep 'til noon on Saturday and it wouldn't make a lick of difference in how I viewed my weekend. Now if I waste that much of a Saturday sleeping, I'm depressed about the lack of things I got done over the weekend. Weird. But that's my life now. I'm totally fine with that, but again, it wasn't like that a short time ago, and now it is.
New normalcy isn't limited to the way you live your life. As an adult, who you live your life with changes just as rapidly as how you live it. I still see and hang out with pretty much all of my childhood/adolescent friends, but not as often. Once you enter your mid-to late 20's, people get married and have serious girlfriends or boyfriends so that takes a big toll on your frequency of hang outs. Couple that with work, and not sharing every similar interest and you pare down your regular hang out buds quite significantly. Fortunately, I have interests where a sense of community and/or brotherhood is considered very important. Through these things I've been able to make friends that are now really important to me, that a year ago I didn't even know existed. That brings me back to the overall point. In all aspects of adult life, things change so rapidly that you barely even notice them changing.
These aren't bitches or gripes. They're observations I wanted to put down on paper. If you read this, thanks.
