Day 140 (A Hundred & Forty) of 365 days
It is okay to be weird. Being “normal” is too boring. What is normal anyway? Throughout history, the best and brightest among us, the great creators and innovators, have been those willing to stand out and risk being perceived as weird. When I allow you to be you, and you allow me to be me, without judgment or criticism of each other, we are free to harness and grow the strength of our respective differences. Everybody is weird and therefore nobody is.
It is okay to laugh at your jokes — even when nobody else finds them funny. When you start to laugh everyone else will start to. It’s okay to hate the music on the radio. Who wants to hear the same 5 songs played over and over again anyway?
When you first meet me, it’s likely that I either have a long talk with you or feel introverted. If I’m excited, or in a good mood, I express myself by shaking my shoulders or doing a little body roll. It’s weird, but I’m sure it leaves an impression. What stands out gets remembered.
Imagine this: a perfect person. And by perfect, I mean literally perfect. She (or he) always wears the coolest clothes. She/he aces every class, no matter how difficult. She/he is talented at every sport, activity, or hobby you can imagine. She/he never says the wrong thing. Basically, this perfect person has no flaws. Great, right? Wrong. Because this person always wears the coolest clothes, they are not creative because they can’t think outside the box and design a completely unique style that defines who they are. Because this person gets a perfect grade on every single homework assignment, they never learn from their mistakes (because there are no mistakes to learn from!), and the joy of discovering something new is absent from their lives. Because this person has no flaws, this person is boring.
Some of your own weirdnesses, depending on what they are and how they manifest themselves, may play a critical role in whether or not you can or will be happy at a particular place. But because we often appear normal to ourselves, it’s often difficult to identify what makes us weirdos. But if you can identify those things about yourself, and find a place where your colleagues, who will hopefully also be your friends, accept those things about you, you’ll probably find yourself living and working in a very happy place, for a very long time.
Our quirks, our unique traits, our weirdness makes us who we are. Each of us is completely individual, totally different from the person next to you, and the person next to him, and the person next to her.
If we weren’t weird, we’d be boring.
