Normal does not exist. What does exist are normativity and commonality.
Common experiences are ones that a lot of people have. The vast majority of humans have skin, so having skin is common. The more often that something happens in a given population, the more common it is.
Normative experiences are ones that are believed to be very common or universal within a given culture. If it’s believed that everyone is either male or female, then being a binary gender is normative for that culture.
Normative experiences are relative. What’s normative for one group might be wildly uncommon and strange to another; norms are selected by social groups and carried into their culture. There is no “absolute norm” to judge by. What’s normative for Baptist Christians may not be normative for Shaivist Hindus. What’s normative for the plural community might be wildly non-normative in the general population.
Common experiences depend on the population. There’s slightly more absolutism to “common” over “normative”; while a normative experience is set as such by a culture, a common experience is based on frequency within a group. It’s not socially selected like norms tend to be. Even then, it depends on the group you’re surveying. What’s common in the LGBTQ+ community might be rare in the general population.
The group you’re comparing a set of experiences to matters. Trying to create an “absolute normal” to compare experiences to is a bizarre effort; there are so many groups of people with opposing norms and experiences that finding the traits of some perfectly average person for the entire globe would be a massive effort.
In my experience, asking whether something is “normal” misses the actual question someone intends to ask. The actual question tends to look more like this:
- Is this experience common for this group of people?
- Do other people share my experiences?
- Would I face social consequences if I share my experiences with this group of people?
- Should I be worried about my experiences? Do I need to seek help or support?
- Am I valid for having this experience?
Average experiences differ from normal. An average experience is the sum of the most common experiences for a population. If most people in a group have brown hair and chew gum, then the average person for that group is a brown-haired person who chews gum.
While not everyone is average, by definition, most people are.
See also: Expectations, You Do Not Need to Be Valid