Welcome to the world of CJ Paul, an intelligent, enigmatic, young professional, balancing a budding career as an engineer, ever-changing life as a husband and father and the foreboding demons of addiction and mental illness. When CJ steps into a recording studio and puts his lips to the mic, he looks just like any other Black millennial male seeking to make something out of nothing by putting it on wax. But this is not a mixtape and CJ is not a musician. This is a podcast and CJ is the host. CJ guides us through the journey of his mind and his struggles as a Black man trying to become normal; whatever that means. In this brief glimpse into a past life that gives us the man we’re looking at right now, CJ recounts the night after one bad decision leads to a string of events that changed his life forever. “Normalized” is an intimate look at the complexities of manhood, childhood trauma, and how mental instability can lead to detrimental decisions that will either kill you or make a cautionary tale out of you while seeking to discover the answer to the question, “What does it mean to be ‘normal’?”