You're Weird
illustration by Brad Jones for Outer Voice
It’s not like it’s the first time you’ve ever heard it. If I had a dollar for every time somebody’s said it to me, I’d be writing this from my home in Fiji … or at least not on a seven-year-old laptop.
But here’s the thing. Weird is wonderful.
Weird is magical. Literally. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as, “having the power to control the fate or destiny of human beings,” and traces the etymology to the Scots’ name for the Fates, later famously used by Shakespeare for the three witches in Macbeth. It was Shelley, in Laon and Cythna, who first used it under the OED’s second definition as, “partaking of or suggestive of the supernatural; of a mysterious or unearthly character.”
In other words, weird siblings, we’re spooky.
It’s not difficult to deconstruct how a word meant to describe the magical and unearthly became a pejorative term for those who don’t fit in.
From childhood, we’re trained to be the same as everybody else. We’re marketed to in an effort to homogenize us and our tastes. If we all want the same things, we all think the same way and we all work toward the same goals — namely giving our money to powerful people so they can retain their power.
CJ Casciotta, in his book Get Weird: Discover the Surprising Secret to Making a Difference, recounts watching a young girl in a bookstore coloring in a coloring book as her mother watched. The girl, as if struck by sudden inspiration, began furiously coloring outside the lines, at which point her mother said, “Well, now you’ve ruined it.”
These are the defining moments of our weird lives. We, like the young girl, learn that we’re weird, and we begin to decide whether we’ll obediently stick within the lines or live outside them, in our own weirdness.
Our parents, families, those who raise us, are instrumental here. Another weirdist (I think I just made that up), Olga Khazan and author of Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World, notes that successful weird people often have supportive families. But, she also observes that many of us don’t have that luxury. In a Vox article, she said, “The people I met who didn’t have strong support systems, however, tended to create them, either by making lots of friends or, in a few extreme cases, by becoming their own support systems.”
We feel alone, as weird people. But, I’ve learned over and over with Outer Voice, no work is created in a vacuum and no person succeeds by themselves. We need weird communities. We need to reach out to each other (even us introverts), we need to form weird coalitions. Roving gangs of weirdos coming together to make beautiful stuff and celebrate each other’s beautiful weirdness.
Being weird is hard. But it’s fruitful. We approach problems differently. We drive breakthroughs. Shelley Carson coined a term for how creative people think: “cognitive disinhibition.” She says this is “the failure to ignore information that is irrelevant to current goals or to survival.” It means we absorb more and notice more at once, tune into everything around us, and synthesize that into something new. We notice information that the more pragmatic person might find irrelevant — be that color, texture, smell, tone of voice, sensed anxiety, or cultural connections — and apply it in innovative ways. (It’s also apparently a trait we share with psychosis-prone people, but it’s always something.)
This is where we provide inestimable value in business and work settings. It’s also where we must be hyper-vigilant about how we’re valued and how we may be exploited.
I heard Casciotta speak at a Creative Mornings event a couple of years ago, and he shared a perspective-shifting observation about, of all things, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The classic outsider-makes-good story. Catchier than the Ugly Duckling, and far more marketable than Cyrano de Bergerac.
Casciotta observed that Rudolph is finally valued only when his unique trait is useful to the group. As he puts it in his book, “Rudolph is a weirdo whose value is entirely predicated on his perceived usefulness.”
The moment our differences are useful, the exclusion ceases and we are invited into the group. It’s a fact of evolution and of capitalism. It may, for now, be inescapable, but we can be aware of it. If nothing else, it’s good to remember when you’re setting your rates or pricing your work.
Love your weirdness. Own it, and apply it.
Own your weirdness with yourself.
Your refusal to fit in, to paint “classic” topics, to write “single-worthy” songs, to take “normal” pictures or be a “standard type” for conventional theatre and film is what makes your work gorgeously your own and worthwhile.
Own your weirdness with your audience.
Share your weirdness with your audience — your foibles, your mistakes, your uncertainty. It doesn’t make you look weak. It makes you look human. And, by strange coincidence, your audience is made up of humans. They probably feel a lot of the same things.
Own your weirdness with those (currently) in power positions.
There are funding institutions, gallerists, dealers, curators, casting directors, industry executives, producers and countless others who will tell you they value your weirdness… but only to a certain point. As Cecil Baldwin pointed out in our conversation, “I just got very burnt out where they were like ‘we want someone who's gay but not too gay. We want someone who is nerdy but not too nerdy. We want someone who is intelligent but not too intelligent … you just need to be yourself, but just not quite yourself. You need to be a more commercially viable version of yourself.’”
You get to decide when to say no and how to present yourself to gatekeepers. They guard entry into spaces with set ideas about what “good work” is. They believe they’re arbiters of taste, but in reality they’re often using their gates to prop up dying ideas, uncomfortable secrets and irrelevant work.
Their gates aren’t the only entry points, and the onus is now upon them to adapt or fall into irrelevance.
Own the challenges of being weird in a world striving to be “normal.”
No artist I’ve met makes their living solely on creating their art and doing exactly what they want to do all the time. They have side hustles, day jobs, teaching gigs and more. They make compromises in order to make their art.
In many of those situations, we’re not allowed to own our full weirdness. We don’t have the luxury of presenting ourselves the way we are or talking about issues important to us in the manner we would prefer. Some people aren’t comfortable being out in their workplace. It’s a world where people are tokenized, discriminated against, bullied, mansplained to and feel like financial hostages. Remember that.
Remember it as a boss. Remember it as a friend. Empower your weird friends. Support them, and hold space for them. Remember that we don’t live our friends’ lives or dictate their boundaries.
We don’t always have the luxury of being our full selves, at least not in an outward form, as much as I wish that weren’t true. That’s why it’s all the more important that we honor it, savor it and let it flourish in our work, our relationships and our communities.
Weird is magical. It’s utterly human. You’re complicated, angry, euphoric, sexy, creative and capable of more than you may imagine.
You’re weird, and weird is wonderful.
Find the books at an independent bookseller! When you use these links, you support independent bookshops and me.
Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World by Olga Khazan
Get Weird: Discover the Surprising Secret to Making a Difference by CJ Casciotta
