NORMAL

Greek mythology tells a story of a rather shifty guy called Procrustes (which literally means "He who stretches".)
Procrustes ran a roadside B & B whose house speciality was what he advertised as "a very unique guest bed". Theseus, who happened to be passing through the district one evening, asked Procrustes what was so special about this bed. Procrustes boasted "It's length exactly matches whoever lies in it."
It turned out that Procrustes, like you and me, had a thing about people fitting his opinions of what is ideal, and got his jollies by stretching short people on a rack until they fitted the bed, and lopping bits of legs off people who were too tall. (Needless to say, before the night was out, Theseus gave him the opportunity to get a taste of his own medicine.)

I have a problem with terms like "ideal", "average" and "normal". They strike me as cute, artificial mathematical and psychological niceties that bear no practical relevance whatsoever to the realities of human difference.
An "average, normal" person does not exist.

Principles, laws, moralities, doctrines, and theories started out as the observed averages of someone's experiences in an attempt to find some sort of structure and  order in the chaos of profusion we call Existence. But somewhere along the way, the observations turned into rules, which we now expect each other, other realities and ourselves (except sometimes) to conform to.

The main problem I see with an imperative to Conformity is that
The driving influence of evolution is Non-conformity;
It is the exceptions to the normal, the breakers of moulds, the up-heavers of the earth's crust
That trigger and fuel the processes of growth and renewal.
Without them, life begins to stagnate and die.
Conformity kills.
Somehow each of us is struggling to find a balance in our lives
Between two opposing urges -- Conformity and Origin-ality --
Which both arise from the most primal of all urges,
The will to survive.

As I see the what-is of this,
The Average and the Particular rarely, if ever, fit in every respect --
Not without some stretching and/or pruning.
In a quest for efficiency and control
We reach for conformity,
And get monoculture,
Which, being totally artificial, brings its own set of problems.
Mono-culture is un-natural.
Normality is a comforting fiction.

Procrustes' guests never came back for seconds;
Why do we?