Ordinary is what you are used to

The phrase "Ordinary is what you are used to" is spoken by Aunt Lydia during the narrator's training at the Rachel and Leah Re-education Center, and it functions as a core tenet of Gilead's psychological conditioning. The statement immediately follows the narrator's first encounter with the bodies of hanged men on the Wall, a moment of visceral horror that Aunt Lydia's maxim is designed to neutralize. The full quotation, as the narrator recalls it, is: "Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary." This is not merely a description of psychological adaptation but a prescriptive command: the regime actively works to make its atrocities habitual, thereby stripping them of their power to shock or provoke resistance.

The Mechanism of Habituation

Aunt Lydia's teaching is a deliberate strategy of social control, exploiting the human capacity to adapt to any environment. The narrator reflects on this process throughout the novel, noting how quickly she and the other Handmaids have internalized the new order. She observes, for instance, that it has "taken so little time to change our minds" about the modesty of dress, finding the short skirts of Japanese tourists to be "undressed" and "repellent." This demonstrates the success of the regime's conditioning: what was once normal becomes alien, and what was once shocking becomes ordinary. The narrator also applies this logic to herself, thinking, "We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it." This "work" of ignoring is the active process of making the unbearable bearable, a survival mechanism that the regime exploits to maintain its power.

The Narrator's Resistance and Complicity

The narrator is acutely aware of the danger of this habituation. She fears becoming numb, of losing the ability to distinguish between the red of the tulips in Serena Joy's garden and the red of the blood on a hanged man's hood. She forces herself to make these distinctions, to see each object as "valid and really there," in order to maintain her sanity and her sense of reality. Yet she also recognizes her own complicity in the process. She admits that she has become "used to" the bells that mark the passage of time, the routine of shopping, and even the Ceremony itself. This internal conflict—between the need to adapt in order to survive and the fear of losing her former self—is a central drama of the novel. The phrase "Ordinary is what you are used to" thus becomes a site of struggle, a reminder of the regime's power and a warning of the cost of surrender.

Thematic Significance

The maxim "Ordinary is what you are used to" is a chilling illustration of how totalitarian regimes operate not only through overt force but through the subtle erosion of moral and perceptual norms. It aligns with the novel's broader exploration of the manipulation of language and memory. By controlling what is considered "ordinary," Gilead controls what is considered acceptable, possible, and even real. The narrator's act of telling her story is itself a form of resistance against this enforced ordinariness, a refusal to let the horrors of her experience become merely routine. The phrase, therefore, is not just a piece of propaganda but a key to understanding the psychological landscape of the novel, where the greatest threat is not physical violence alone, but the slow, quiet death of the soul that comes from learning to live with the unbearable.