Dear Normal: Were you really that great in the first place?

Dear Normal,

Everyone wants you back. It seems every day of this late-stage pandemic era is marked with someone wistfully talking about Normal: going back to you, starting new with you. It’s all about norms and normalcy. All about you.

As for me, I’m not so interested in Normal. I defer to Taylor Swift: We are never, ever, ever getting back together.

It felt normal to want Normal back at first. Last year, in those first months, daydreaming of you was a constant daily escape from all of the endless dire possibilities. I wanted my life back. I wanted the control.

Complaining about commuting or being too busy was the norm in the B.C. (before COVID) era. But in those early days, the mundane was what we craved. Packing into a subway car, grabbing an unplanned drink with a friend, hugging parents, striking up a conversation with a stranger.

And yet all of those Normal desires felt entirely unfathomable. Would we ever be able to go to a crowded space? If we could, would we want to? The answer then felt like a definite no, especially with mortality and death constantly wailing in our ears. The fear of the unknown was like a weighted blanket, but one that provided no comfort or warmth.

It was then that I craved my Normal most.

It wasn't just me. Over the last year, our obsession with normalcy has shown up on Google, with the highest spike in searches around mid-April 2020, when it seemed we might have been able to resume life as we once knew it.

Searching for normal went up again around the start of the school year in September and around the holidays in late November. But as the search trends show, these desires for normalcy ebb and flow, constantly fading and morphing.

The collective yearning for normalcy was panic-inducing early on, around the time President Donald...