1.Weird
I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone that I was occasionally called weird as a kid. When I told my aunt I was a bit upset about it she said:
Oh no no! Weird means you have the courage to be yourself. It means you’re avant-garde.
Avant-garde! My insides squealed at the thought that I might be avant-garde. I rolled the word over in my mind for days and said it to my self in a posh accent: Oh Rachel, she’s avaaant-gauuurd.
Another time I was feeling beaten down for my terrible spelling and just generally being the dumbest in the class. My mum exclaimed:
Oh no no! We don’t see spelling. We see beauty. Some people don’t see beauty! They’re the ones you should feel sorry for.
I never worried much about my spelling after that. Anyone who pretended they couldn’t get my meaning were just indulging in feeling superior even though they probably didn’t see beauty. The poor things.
Above: Me at about 12 years old.
2.Weird Like You
Of course, being weird is one of the things we all have in common.
Feeling like you don’t belong is a universal human experience. And like all difficulties there are unexpected lessons we could lean into:
When we don’t “fit in” we get to understand who we are a little better by knowing who we are not.
When we confide in others about the ways we feel like an outsider it often engenders the kind of true human connection we’ve been seeking all along. You feel seen for who you truly are, not for who you are pretending to be.
Dr. Brené Brown is the one who recently made this complex möbius strip of belonging an accessible idea to all of us:
“Belonging is being part of something bigger than yourself. But it's also the courage to stand alone, and to belong to yourself above all else.”
Knowing who you are is challenging. Belonging to yourself above all else feels like the Mt Everest of personal development. (There are literal dead bodies strewn along the route up Mt Everest.) Belonging to yourself may be the only way to be whole, and yet it often requires formidable courage.
Above: A mash up of M. C. Escher’s sketch of a möbius strip with Dr. Brene Brown’s wisdom on belonging.
3.Becoming Oneself
Perhaps an easier way of thinking about being oneself is becoming oneself. This way, rather than wrestling with a finite question: who am I? It’s understanding an evolving reality: who am I becoming?
About half of the people I have a Map Session with are wrestling with variations of this question. Unsurprisingly everyone from Yo Yo Ma to Oprah have offered up profound answers. However, there is a wonderful new entrant to the discourse on becoming oneself, Rick Rubin.
Swoon.
I have spent at least five hours listening to podcasts of Rubin talking about creativity in the past week as he promotes his new book The Creative Act: A Way of Being.
Rubin admits that defining one’s true self may be impossible. To encompass our multitudes Rubin conjures up a prism.
In a prism, a single beam of light enters and is broken into an array of colors. The self, too, is a prism. Neutral events enter, and are transformed into a spectrum of feelings, thoughts and sensations. All this information is processed distinctively by each aspect of self, refracting light in its own way, and emitting different shades of art.
According to Rubin the biggest contribution I can make is being uniquely myself (without being too fussy about which aspect of myself I’m channeling) through my work. To which I want to reply, “but Rick, I just want to be you”.
4.Final Note
Being weird is universal. However there are many people who have been labeled weird as an act of prejudice and exclusion. To those people I want to acknowledge the extraordinary courage and hardships it takes to be yourself when you are not like the people around you. You are the stars that burn the brightest.
One of your recent best posts. Love love it! Also how long did it take you to design that graphic of you and Rick Rubin? LOL