Growing up, I got an award for top kid flautist in the state, or some such thing. I played Annie, the lead, in the school musical. I danced, I modeled, I marched in the band. I hated all of it.
The prevailing child-rearing philosophy held that success equaled happiness, so my mother found many activities at which I could excel and enrolled me. I trudged along, assuming happiness would arrive one day when I was grown and could make my own decisions. Sure, I rebelled in small ways, as kids do, but mostly I did as I was told. I had no idea who I really was or what I actually wanted out of life. Then, one day, a teacher put me on the spot in drama class and told me to improvise something.
I did an impression of my best friend Christy that got people roaring. “Do me! Do me!” my classmates pleaded, so I did impressions of each and every one of them. Nobody was offended — they loved it. I had been watching them, pinpointing their unique traits, doing these bits in my head, for ages. After that, humor became my way to both make friends and mock the silly activities I was compelled to join. With humor, momentary flashes of happiness illuminated my world.
Impressions of my own eccentric mother were my specialty. Living with her wasn't easy, but mocking her to the great amusement of friends and family helped me get through. In my angriest and most frustrated moments I thought: at least I'm getting material out of this.
The first independent decision of my life
Upon my graduation from high school, my parents agreed that a lucrative career would be the path to my happiness, so I went to nursing school, then on to graduate school for nursing anesthesia: a high-paying career in great demand. I hated that, too. The day I graduated, I made the first independent decision of my life: whatever I was going to do, it wouldn't be nursing anesthesia. This was a career about putting people to sleep — and I wanted them to stay awake and listen to my jokes.
Like a lot of “people persons,” I went into sales instead, and with my qualifications I was immediately employed in pharmaceuticals. In training I learned something about myself: I found real joy in collecting data and drawing conclusions. Unfortunately, once I started working, I discovered — like a lot of women in sales — that no matter how well I knew the data, I was really just selling myself.
Supervisors told me to wear short skirts and high heels to land clients. Whether people got the right chemotherapy drugs apparently depended on what I wore, not how much data I had memorized. A client's dirty joke, a hand on my thigh, an invitation to “continue the conversation” in a hotel room — all considered part of the job. I laughed it off. My impressions of our dirty-minded clients got my fellow saleswomen roaring.
I tried to walk the tightrope familiar to many women — to seem like a team player and not a prude, while also respecting my own boundaries. It didn't make me happy, but the money flowed like a river. Assuming, as most do, that security and love would do the trick, I married a great guy, moved to an affluent suburb, and had three amazing kids. Now that I “had it all,” I expected to feel that elusive thing called true happiness. I didn't. I wasn't depressed or profoundly suffering — but having worked so hard to get here, I was surprised that happiness wasn't my automatic reward.
The happiness notebook
I traveled constantly for work, and I made friends on planes. Over the years I developed a habit: I asked my seatmates whether they were happy. When they said yes, I asked what, exactly, made them so. I kept a notebook of their answers and charted statistics on my accidental research subjects.
Despite every meme insisting that friends and family are the key, I didn't find happiness more prevalent among the married or the single, the popular or the friendless, the parents or the childless, the poor or the wealthy. The truth was, I met very few people who claimed to be truly happy at all — so gathering useful data took years. During those years my own job, marriage, health and parenting brought weeks and years of real distress. I could no longer laugh everything off. Grown-up problems demanded grown-up strategies, and I hoped the notebook would one day provide them.
No patterns emerged — until I realized the difference was the thing they all had in common. My happy research subjects were all different: from the norm, and from one another.
Those leading unconventional lives, those with “dark secrets,” even those whose unusual lifestyles isolated them from friends and family — those were the happy people. The people who simply did not care what anyone thought of them were truly satisfied with their lives.
No wonder I wasn't happy. I wasn't like them — not with my need to please a critical mother, a distant husband, insulting clients and complacent supervisors. My health was failing, and the traditional medical model hadn't solved anything. Joking about the harassment had kept the money rolling in, but it hadn't touched the anger underneath.
Sick of Normal
As an adult, just as in high school, I had rebelled a little along the way — spoken out a little, tried a few medical alternatives. But now it was time to go full-bore alternative. I was sick. I was tired. And I was sick-and-tired. Most of all, I was Sick of Normal.
I resolved to reexamine every aspect of my life and consider ways to do things differently — relationships, healing, work, all of it — in pursuit of that elusive thing called happiness.
Where the story went next — a 2026 postscript
When I wrote those words in 2020, I couldn't have told you where the resolution would lead. It led through functional medicine and a PhD in nutrigenomics; through years of illness that turned out to be Lyme disease, and the alternative path that carried me out of it; through the jungles of South and Central America, Southeast Asia and Africa; and finally to iboga — the medicine that showed me the unresolved trauma underneath my illness, and became my life's work.
The pursuit of the unconventional has a home now. It's called Revela Retreats — and if you've read this far, some part of you may be sick of normal too.
Dr. Tracy Scott
Founder & Shaman · Revela Retreats