Accepting The Weirdness

I was a weird kid.

My teeth were all messed up, so I wore a head gear for about eight years. Once, my dentist asked if I wanted to change the color of it. “Of course”, I said. “Yes, bring me that bright orange!”. And there I was, a little girl going to school with an upgraded head gear, showing off some bright orange metal.

After a few days, I realize how much of a mistake that was.

For some reason, I’ve always choose the thing that the other girls weren’t choosing. If they got the black headband, I’d go to the store intending to buy the same exact thing… But then I’d see a nice little silver version of it. And I’d go for the other one, ending up being the only one with the silver headband.

My head was just wired in a different way, and, spoiler alert: it wasn’t considered cool.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t the moment of the essay where I say that I now realize that all of this made me see how special I am. It never felt like that and I don’t think it will ever feel like that.

It’s not a “special” kind of thing. It’s a “different” kind of thing. And you try telling a 13-year-old that being different is cool, ok? Try telling her that all this uniqueness is actually great. The source of a lot of her anxieties is actually something great — and who cares about the boys?.

I guess I realized early on that I had a little weirdo inside me. Throughout the years, I’ve done my best to blend into the crowd (Taking off the head gear helped a lot!). Here are some lessons I learned about trying to not be different:

1. Pretend you don’t care about the things you really (really!) care about! It’s never cool to care! (Oh, please, don’t do extra homework for the classes you like… That’s a really bad strategy!)
2. If you can’t not care, you have to care very little.
3. While growing up, start saying some curse words. This will distract them. You’ll see.
4. Take people’s feedback on your weirdness into consideration.
5. Learn to be occasionally superficial.
6. Try to shield yourself from all the things in the world you want to fix, but can’t.
7. Keep the public emotions down to a minimum.

You see how exhausting it is to not be me? It’s a lot of work.

That’s why I’ve been trying to accept the weirdness that have always been in my life. My weird life choices have brought me here, so they’re probably not that bad. But they are a current source of anxiety.

I really deeply wish I could just go for the head gear in the normal metal color and the regular black headband. But I can’t. I have to care passionately about a lot of stuff . I have to do extra homework (even at work!). I have to be with people in meaningful 1:1 times. I have to absorb everything around me, embrace it and just try to figure out how I am supposed to deal with it.

It’s just me. And it’s time to be me.