Embracing the Weird on Weird Pride Day
March 4th marked the first ever Weird Pride Day, which was used by wonderful, weird people around the world as a marker to embrace their magnificent weirdliness, and talk about what it means to them.
While I’ve definitely been called weird fairly frequently by various people since I can remember, they haven’t always done me the favor of telling me why I’m weird, so it’s hard to know where to start embracing it. There are certain things where my weirdness seems to have been easily classifiable, so I guess I can start there.
Gender non-conformity is probably the earliest classification of weird that I remember. At some point as a child I became aware that actually I wasn’t supposed to compete against boys to my full ability. It was weird if I was stronger, or faster, which I often was. Later, it was weird that I had thick eyebrows and visible hair over my upper lip, and it was weird that I didn’t shave off all my body hair. I was told that I wasn’t feminine, that I was somewhere between a boy and a girl. Somehow, it was even weird for me to burp??? Of course, a lot of this is pure sexism, but it at least seeded the idea that gender cannot be used to box us in. Now, some people argue that my polycystic ovarian syndrome should define me as intersex. I think of gender as more like a hungry cat: fluid, adapting to fit the people in it, because we define gender, every one of us. That’s freeing, knowing that only I can define myself. I am a woman, but I prefer that people use they/them pronouns because I would prefer that people did not bring along all of their very wrong, mostly harmful ideas about what being a woman means. It’s exhausting having to explain that, for example, yes I do actually burp, or no I do not hear the relentless whispering of evolution to shave my legs. I find myself happiest in friendships and relationships with people who don’t fit into the assigned cis-heteronormative boxes.
And then there’s the whole generally socially awkward thing, which I suppose can be summed up as not really understanding what is expected of me or why I should be doing that. For example, when I was very little I really loved to draw, but at school they would never put my pictures up on the walls with the others. That made me really sad, because I really loved to draw! Luckily, my dad kept reams of drawings by me and my brother, so now I am able to see the artwork that my school refused to put up on their walls. Pages and pages of spaghetti-limbed monsters with long, sharp teeth revealed in terrifyingly large gaping maws bordered by scribble-dark eyes and very angry eyebrows, sometimes tumbling down stairs but mostly just floating weightlessly among each other in blank space, usually explained with some crudely scrawled label, e.g. “MUMMY SAYS NO” (a classic). Eventually I did figure out that I was supposed to be drawing simple stick figures and houses and that looming, Stepford sun, always smiling blankly, and probably did that a couple of times just to prove that I could, but I think even then I realized that it was more fun, more interesting, and more reflective to do things a bit differently.
I kept drawing, probably every day for the next 15 years. In the margins of the notebooks in which I was supposed to be making, you know, notes; on tables; on my skin; on my clothes; on my walls; on pages, and pages, and pages, and pages. Looking back, it was often meditative. I didn’t understand why people I didn’t even really know would come up to me at school just to call me weird, or why my oldest friend didn’t invite me to her birthday party, or why my friend and I weren’t allowed to play with the girls we’d known since we were 5 unless we stopped being “weird”. All I knew was that I was doing something wrong, and it made people not want to be around me. Maybe it was the elaborate games of make-believe/musical theater? A bit too loud, a bit too out there? Was I doing something with my face? I guess I still don’t know.
I turned further and further in on myself, and depression coiled around me. But I kept drawing, and painting, sewing, sculpting, squishing, forming, creating. I started writing music, poetry, stories. At that time of certainty that I was just not as I should be, creating art became and continues to be one of my major anchors. I hid away in the art room and music practice rooms at lunchtimes, wrote anonymous poems and hid them between desks, and started to express myself more completely. I made new friends, a few silly delinquents with strong passions and undeniable presence of self. I wrote a lot of sad songs. My clothes got weirder and more covered in paint. I sewed patches of rubber onto my jeans and wore handcuffs and swimming goggles as everyday fashion. Lots of tie-dye. A goth phase. An alter ego. I studiously redesigned my handwriting based off the liner notes to the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s One Hot Minute album. Very colorful hair. Quiet, but colorful.
I became aware that even within that friendship group, sometimes I was still too weird. But mostly in a too quiet, awkward way. I often felt that I wasn’t delivering on some unknown element of social transaction. Imagine you’ve never before encountered a knock knock joke, and someone just comes up to you and says, “Knock, knock.” What do you do? Almost certainly not respond, “Who’s there?”, right? That’s what I felt like, all the time. Constantly saying, “Hello!” or some other inexplicably wrong response. Or mostly just not saying anything at all, which I’ve been told on several occasions is deeply unsettling.
But you know where I was never too weird? The Internet.
I have always had an easier time communicating online than face-to-face, partly because I can avoid that look that tells me I’m botching the script, and partly because everybody could be exactly who they wanted to be. I started off on newsgroups and compuserve, then IRC and livejournal, and eventually the major megaplatforms. I occasionally adopted an alien alter ego with a fairly specific backstory, which was accepted or encouraged. In the early days of my internet exploration, I met some of the most wonderfully weird people I know, including some of my most treasured lasting friendships. I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to say that everyone was there for the same reason, which was that making friends IRL was kind of a bummer for all of us. Being weird was our glue. A lot of socially awkward, autistic, LGBTQI, non-conforming, thoughtful, subversive, mentally ill weirdos finding out that we were not actually alone.
These days, I accept that I’m socially awkward. When I’m performing live, I tell myself that being socially awkward is my “thing”. I still live with depression, anxiety, and PTSD, and sometimes that makes things hard or overwhelming, but self-knowledge and the rejection of shame help a lot. I recognize that it feels good to me to show appreciation for others, regardless of whether they feel the same. I recognize that trying to be thoughtful, considerate, or kind, feels better to me than trying to be witty or cool. I recognize that sometimes I am energized by others, sometimes the opposite. I recognize that my mental health is improved by maintaining a fluid combination of time in nature, projects projects projects, creativity, social time, treats, trying new stuff, doing things that help strangers, and eating lots of vegetables.
So what other weirdness am I proud of? I am told that I have a greater fondness for spreadsheets than most, and I am confident that that is true. I host a weekly radio show, and the whole thing is basically run on spreadsheets. I have a spreadsheet of recently released tracks that I especially liked listening to, which I sort by various parameters like location and style. I also have a massive workbook of bands, recording studios, artists, and media outlets. I also have a nice spreadsheet of California native plants and the native moths that they support, for gardening purposes. I also use spreadsheets extensively for my work in restoration ecology. These fall under the “projects projects projects” section of my mental health menu scheme, and the self-knowledge that I have a terrible memory so must write things down in a searchable, sortable format. I have lost sleep over all of these spreadsheets, losing track of time and getting absorbed in research and the promise of informative quantities of data. I am convinced that spreadsheets improve my life a lot.
I’m also really into moths. Really, really. Like, it would make me really, really happy to spend every day for the rest of my life identifying and counting moths. I’m getting excited right now thinking about how valuable their specificity could be to environmental indication, how many species are yet to be discovered, and also how lovely and fluffy they are. I am the asshole who you will send a moth meme to because you know I love moths, and then I’ll identify the species of the moth in the meme. I seriously want to build a walk-in moth trap in my garden. Someone please fund my PhD in moth counting, I beg of you.
And I suppose I could make a list of some of the other things that are a little bit weird about me that I reject any shame for (like that I hear music in my head all the time; that my joints are too stretchy and often dysfunctional; that I love movies with mutant animals and helicopters used as projectile weapons more than any other genre; that I compulsively scratch my scalp; that creating extremely detailed trip itineraries complete with color-coded google maps is one of my great joys; that I develop extremely strong emotional connections to inanimate objects; that I love to identify and learn the latin names of animal species; that I have three nationalities; etc.), but the crux is the same. Self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and self-expression are important for everyone, not just for one’s own sense of well-being, but also because whenever we catch a glimpse of the huge variety of ways to be a person, it makes it easier for all of us to know and accept ourselves.