Safely Weird
Musing by Mercy Williams
I am one of those people who you can tag as ‘safely weird’. That is to say, while most people can recognize and acknowledge the fact that we have certain strange attributes or interests- or both-, the fact of our strangeness doesn’t seem to interfere too much with other aspects of our life. It doesn’t meddle too much with family, or other interpersonal relationships that exist outside the home; dating and marriage, social, academic and career wise relationships, or religion etc. The worst case scenario may be a constant reminder from friends and family to “…take your head out of the clouds and back to reality.”
However, this doesn’t mean we do not reach those points where there is an imbalance and we seem to be more inclined to our peculiarities beyond all other things.
For some of us, these times are the hardest because the imbalance bridges a sort of gap between the realities that exist within us and those that exist outside of us. It is in these moments, that we struggle to act as though we are content with living strictly by the cultures and ideologies we have been surrounded by all our lives. We must dissociate ourselves from any thoughts that would render us vulnerable. And by vulnerable I mean being too different in such a way that makes you easy bait for ‘Conformist Lords and Ladies’.
So for many of us who are ‘safely weird’, we must rely on the bits of us that allow us to see life through the lenses of the ‘normal’ folk who have walked this earth before us and have decided that their versions of the stories of the universe must be the most accurate ones.
Our security relies on the fact that when the teacher tells you to look into the sky and write what you see, you must scribble down, very traditionally, the sun, the clouds, the birds and if it happens at the moment, a passing aeroplane. You are not permitted to write that when your eyes rise above the horizon, you see and feel things that even you cannot explain- which sometimes is dreadful and other times it is euphoric. That now that you are looking up to the sky, you are hearing the sounds that will make up your next masterpiece, or seeing the abstractions that you will translate unto a canvas(virtual or physical), and that you are reading stories that you have to share with the rest of the world.
That in short, you are communicating with the universe in ways beyond what is known as ‘normal’.
You do not write all these because the moment you do, you cease to be viewed and treated as one of the rest in a crowd. So for some of us, we write down, very traditionally and with grief in our hearts, that all we see when we look up are the sun, the clouds, the birds, and if it happens at the moment, a passing aeroplane.
For some of us, the fact that we are saying half truths bites so much into us that with time, we grow weary of the entire pretense. And being ‘safely weird’ is like being lukewarm- you’re neither here nor there. Some ‘safely weird’ folk eventually come out as being WEIRD in all it’s glory, and society has no choice but to accept them that way. In less dramatic scenarios, we skillfully incorporate our threads of so called absurdity into the things we do. We call them art. And in like manner, society comes to terms with the fact that we are who we are. For the least of us, those who would rather remain in the middle, I can’t say for sure how their story ends. But my predictions are that, they either die in their grief of being unable to express themselves, or run completely bunkers in the process- I really can’t tell.
So if you think you can relate to all I just explained, then you can be sure there’s legion of us out there in the world- dropping bits of our-magnificent-selves everywhere we go.
