How Are you? I’m Weird, Thanks.
The other day my neighbor Haley greeted me by the garbage cans, and said “How are you?” I never am quite sure what to say when people ask this question. I puff out the usual “I am doing good!” like along with it, I am sending out something that needed to be expelled from my lungs, a piece of dust, a tickle. I cover my placeholder response quickly with a “And how are you?” which usually leads to a fine summary of what has been the latest for them. They never seem to notice that I have not replied.
Haley is enjoyable, and I would have shared something if I could have come to it fast enough. I flashed on my day: turkey and broccoli for lunch, a slow commute from an afternoon meeting, a new pair of Ugg boots. Which of those did she want to hear about? Which of those do I want to offer as conversation? None of them seemed significant enough to hold their own hue, to be a full enough color to make it onto the palette of our dialog.
I sighed inwardly.
After we parted ways, I took a reflective moment just before I judged myself as having apathetic social skills. All the things I could have said to Haley came spilling forward. I have thousands of things I want to share. I am just afraid that she, or you, will think I am weird.
And not just weird, but too weird.
Hiding the way I see and experience the world leaves me quiet, shuttered, my frame held back as if to avoid a collision. These ways of being that I don’t speak of have come to be censored and adored, like lightning bugs in a glass jar that, neglected on the back porch, shrivel and die all the while their true home is just in view. The original delight deeply saddened by an inadvertent and neglected over-containing.
What I could have told Haley was that on Thursday, I had an expanse of free time in the evening that seemed so full of opportunity that I intentionally drank a cup of tea, so I would intentionally be too awake to notice the clock at 11 PM, relishing the pure utter joy of nothing-to-do. I dabbled some texts with friends, wrote in my journal, watched videos about Friesian horses and how planets are formed. The next morning I knew I would be sleep deprived, extending my rapture; the predicted lethargy allowed me to wend zombie like through the day, wasting no good bright energy on the dreary errands of adulthood. I felt like I had outsmarted life.
If Haley was still listening I would continue that I had finally solved my Swarovski ring issue. The ring glistened in the light but rubbed against my fingers like a cornhusk. The ring wasn’t grand enough to sell on eBay, so on a card I wrote: “This Is For You” and rolled it up like a stiff paper finger and put it in the ring. I left the lot on a picnic table at the park. I’d speak excitedly to Haley now, my voice slightly higher and breathless, expounding that the ring may be a sign to a man to propose to his girlfriend, or deep reassurance to a young girl that the universe still cares about her, even when she was feeling all was lost.
In conclusion, Haley would hear that I often want to melt into a tree, and the other day I did just that. I marveled at the delight of having no bones and no joints, but just one solid trunk with the pulsing of water and sap running in me a like a stimulating tickle. And, I’d add, that I am better than fine because, as a tree, I didn’t mind those raccoons making a den of the hollow in my crook, which is no better for me as a tree, but I enjoy the feeling of warm babies in my keep. All living things have a joy to them.
There you go Haley, a few fireflies out of my jar.
I can delve into my past and figure out how this over-censoring of my quirkiness developed. My memory serves me stories from a young age, the black sheep of the family, feeling like I was awkwardly bouncing up while everyone else bounced down. I didn’t quite get the rhythm of being human. This was compounded by a family that I refer to as “white and uptight.” We definitely did not let it all hang out. Not an emotion, not a belt out of it’s loop, no television before dinner. And while I rejected most of that and went to art school, upon graduation and a year of curious and varied jobs, I realized I better make an attempt to mature and support myself. How to do that? I did what I witnessed, got a masters degree in therapy, and morphed into what I believed to be polite professionalism, eager to fit in, compliant. Gently but constantly compensating for my internal vividness, I would side step my urges for red shoes, and keep my striped shirts confined to horizontal, one color, against white. Slowly the art moved out of my counseling, slowly my thinking lost its creativity.
Even if I had attempted to pull my weirdness out of it’s cocoon, I don’t recall any role models in my professional life that could have eased the transition. No crazy aunt or eccentric brother, no quirky boss or unusually curious boyfriend that could have pointed me back to myself. In fact, in our culture, weird women in their youth are almost always depicted wearing black with piercings, tattoos, and some unusual hair, or fairies with magical properties that don’t speak. As we age, we can choose from purpled haired woman with clunky jewelry and oversized glasses, or witches that live near the edge of the woods, on the fringe of society, gathering the eyes of newts.
So in conversations and partnerships I filtered out what I shared, marginalizing my most creative bits, producing an unnecessary ennui in conversations, that I held against others. Something like “I am impatient with you for not talking about the things I care about most because I never told you how I really am.” Sounds a lot like a teenager.
While I may not have shared my inner life, I did continue to be pleasantly amused by it privately. I enjoyed my intuition and dream life both which have provided me with guidance, albeit circuitous at times, but reliable and revelatory. I was faint and misty when I walked in nature among all the living creatures that make there way there - a tree, a rock, a raccoon - all equally a friend and part of my conversation that happened both aloud and silent, like people who switch languages mid-sentence and never even notice. I wore purple leggings and pink boots at night and anonymously stuffed dollar bills into the flower pots on my neighbors porches, or left inspiring notes in the back halls of restaurants. I marveled that trillions of people driving the roads, in any country and any language, stayed between the yellow and white lines. Infinite cooperation.
Eventually though, my interior life and my public persona began to rub against each other, pushing, cracking, daring each other to crumble. My inner pixie was no longer responding to mental chastising to stay in her corner, and my heart was aching to be seen. I noticed I kept a slight distance from others, arms length, so no one could know that I was a jar with a lid containing itself. I wanted to feel closer to people, I wanted to be with them fully, but I couldn’t if I was continuously counting and monitoring my ‘normal units’ amidst conversations.
It made sense to bring this to my life coach, Amy Hruby. I shared with her, near tears, that I just feel so weird and am afraid to show it. To this she said: “You know Leigh, I think we spend most of are adult life getting back to being weird.”
I laughed…perhaps this is true for others as well? All the efforting of not being me was such a sad and unfortunate solution to a problem that didn’t have to exist.
Of course we want to get back to being weird! We spend so much time creating the lines of our life but secretly or eventually, we long to color outside them. We long to be Harold and his purple crayon. And if you think about it, Harold’s purple crayon overlaps with the power of intention and play. Play becomes creation and creation can look weird.
Enter the article by Joe Procopio “Entrepreneurs Are So Damn Weird” published on Medium. He writes that on most of his intro calls with entrepreneurs he ends up in a “Weirdness Check,” where the person will apologize for some way of being they feel is out of the ordinary, unprofessional, immature, or weird. Joe states that what they tell him is often the thing that makes him like them more. He adds that weirdness is not just a baseline for an entrepreneur but a “sought after asset.”
That article had me cycle back on someone who made a rousing impression on me several years ago, Goldie Chan. She lead an evening workshop in LA sharing about her PR company Soft Robots, a creative branding agency. Her website reviews repeat over and over how professional she is. Yet she was spirited, amused by her recent success and had bright green hair. It was neat and well cut, but vivid green… and still is. She was living what I craved, who I wanted to be: professional but with courageous playfulness.
In the poem by Jenny Johnson titled “Warning” she describes how when she gets older she is going to wear purple and do several other odd things. In her book Hagitude, Sharon Blackie tells of Baba Yaga, a female archetype (old crone) in Slavic mythology, saying of her weirdness, “I laugh a long time into a bucket until it laughs back with a spit, breathe as a stone at the bottom of a creek and many other things I do not say.” The fact weirdness was in poems and books, that Goldie Chan has green hair and entrepreneurs are better off weird, prompted me to at last unscrew the lid on my jar, add some water and awaken some blossoming eccentricities.
The first thing I noticed was that I laughed a lot more. Sometimes at my own jokes – I was more willing to be amused. I made bolder comments to my clients and spoke openly about what I saw. I found I could do this without attachment. I was launching an idea but not selling it, so if the concept never resonated, it didn’t take me out at the knees. It was even more fun inviting color and texture back into my wardrobe – yes, red sneakers, a vintage, bright blue, and fuzzy sweater, a pink kimono. I even drew Chagall like flying dogs and sheep on my driveway with sidewalk chalk and pastels.
We are all weird or want to be.
It’s only a matter of how willing we are to express it. And I don’t mean weirdness as a provocative political commentary, but the things we have been doing all our lives, like seeing musical notes in layers in our heads, being able to whisper to squirrels, know how many pills in a jar without counting, or all the other weird things we google at night that open the portals of our brain tickling it with new information. These expressions could be considered a generous gift to the people we circulate with. It gives them permission to include their uniqueness, to be respected and reveled in what they bring up from their fox hole vs. what they have seemed lazily mimicked forward.
Imagine the new energies available.
As I was finishing up this article, I took a break to walk my dog. Passing through the condo complex Donny, a potter and designer who I have always enjoyed due to the ever changing assortment of items on his front porch, invited me to join his party, lively chatter outside, dancing inside. Before I replied he leaned forward and asked “Remind me of your name again?” Stretching out with just his pointer finger, as if by touching mine my name would appear between us. I touched back and said “Leigh.” His gesture was unexpected, simple, and delightfully weird.
A firefly released in the night.
