Mental Health
It’s Time to Start Looking at Your Weirdness as a Strength
Casting off ‘weird’ stereotypes and embracing the process
“Hi, I’m Cat. I’m weird.”
That probably wasn’t the best opening line to use when introducing myself to my fellow fifth-graders, but it was the one I chose — I was damn proud of my weirdness. I may have considered it my best quality. Although admittedly, I was no deviant or debutante. I was a rule-follower, as normal and vanilla as they come. I still am.
Certainly, I have my quirks. Who doesn’t? I’m fascinated by death and tidepools. I ask out-of-the-blue questions to avoid small talk. I enjoy horror movies, indie art, bright clothing, folklore, and socio-political issues. As much as I wish it wasn’t true, none of that makes me unique.
Around this time last year, I received an unofficial award for being the ‘most loquacious’ (or weird) in my shared student apartment. I wasn’t sure what the designation meant… so, someone I lived with thought I was weird, but in a good way? I shrugged the title off. But it continued to buzz around my brain, an insect crawling in one ear and out the other.
Someone thought I was weird.
Had I done something to automatically introduce myself as weird? Did other people in my life consider me unbearably odd? Was I presenting myself as quirky, or just plain awkward? And if so, why?
Weird is in. Weird with a capital ‘W’ and Lovecraftian tones are having a moment in art and literature. Having a hobby or hyper-fixation is interesting. Emo-core, mushrooms, and cosplay are thriving. It’s cool to be quirky. It’s desirable to be awkward yet relatable. It’s cool to visit tourist traps and come back with an ethically-sourced taxidermy pufferfish or to bar hop across Los Angeles and order grasshopper tacos. It’s hip to order toys for the bedroom or to become an expert in a random niche that you can share online. Now, more than ever, people are sharing different angles of their personalities, and they are celebrated for it.
… So why isn’t actually being weird cool?
Right about now we need to define what it means to be weird. On one hand, weird describes the uncanny, the supernatural. It’s dreaming about an event before it happens. It’s Doctor Strange or the Weird Sisters in Shakespeare's Macbeth.
On the other hand, weird could also mean ‘bizarre,’ — think Weird Al Yankovich or your hairless cat who just sprouted a whole new coat of winter fur. We can say that we feel ‘weird’ or ‘off,’ that is, not ourselves. Weird can also mean odd, awkward, and alienated. There are multiple levels of ‘weirdness,’ multiple meanings that might be used to categorize… or ostracize.
What makes a person weird?
Author Olga Khazan found herself so caught up in the details of what makes a person weird that she wrote a book about Americans’ experience living as outsiders in their communities. One major factor that helps predict ‘weirdness’ is whether your community is made up of tight or loose cultures.
Khazan explains that “tight cultures are those in which social norms are strict and formal, and the punishments for breaking them are severe. In tight cultures, people are more in step with one another, but loose cultures permit a wider range of behaviors.”
Her theory explains why individuals living in rural areas, which depend on careful planning to ensure successful crops, might nurture a tighter culture than say, a city bustling with hopeful artists. That’s not to say that one culture is better than the other — but it does explain why it might be more difficult to fit into a culture that doesn’t have a lot of room for self-expression.
That changes a bit in the online space. According to another author, Tom Vanderbilt, “We like to sort things into categories to help us filter information more efficiently about the world.” We have algorithms that know more about ourselves than we might admit. Yet these algorithms often get our preferences wrong.
For example, Vanderbilt admits that when Netflix adds genre-bending movies like Napoleon Dynamite or The Big Lebowski to its lineup, this can throw these algorithms that seem to know us so well for a loop. What exactly about these odd films did viewers like? One disadvantage of weird art or individuals is that we don’t know how to classify them. This in itself throws algorithms and the human brains on which they are based for a spin.
The same thing happens when we witness someone behaving outside of what we’d normally expect. Are you a person who doesn’t make eye contact? Weird. Make too much eye contact? Weird. Do you talk too loud or mention niche interests? Weird. So individuals that are hypersensitive to eye contact or are already socially awkward start at a disadvantage because they don’t act in a way that others have accepted as ‘normal.’
There are gendered stereotypes within the ‘weird’ designation. On one hand, men can be labeled as geeks, goths, or fall into the Nice Guy trope. Weirdness isn’t exclusive to gender. There are also ‘good’ and ‘bad’ stereotypes surrounding female weirdness, and not all of these make the odd characters in media ideal role models.
Women fall under five main ‘weird girl’ tropes: the goth, the smartass, the basket case, the space cadet, and the awkward misfit. A goth stereotype in the movie Beetlejuice, Lydia Deetz “has a flair for melodrama, and a gothic fascination with death, making her the perfect friend for the ghosts who live in her new home… underlining that the weird girl’s superpower is perceiving and opening up to what most people completely overlook.”
The weird goth might have her family’s support, or she may be unhinged. It’s relevant to note that these stereotypes continue to follow real, live goths offscreen and that you should never judge a book by its cover, no matter how individuals present themselves.
The smartass stereotype by contrast can hurl back witty insults as a way to avoid comments sent her way. She’s jaded and withdrawn because she’s been hurt in the past, but that defense only goes so far.
A chaotic basket case is weird in a way that demands attention. Take for example the self-described basket case Alison Reynolds in The Breakfast Club. She tells lies to get the attention she misses at home but later walks out of detention in the arms of the jock, with a brand new makeover. She’s weird because she doesn’t quite fit the model needed for positive attention in high school. And so she changes, becomes less weird. “And this resolution underlines one of the worst narrative clichés about the weird girl,” argues The Take, “That her ‘happy ending’ is to be normalized, even saved.”
The space cadet is perhaps the most feminist and least problematic ‘weird girl,’ because she refuses to care about what other people think of her oddness. She uses it as a strength, and this makes her powerful. But if the character fails to own her weirdness, she might become an awkward misfit — which is where a lot of individuals who are not empowered in their weirdness seem to fall in real life.
Without empowerment, the ‘weird’ stereotype — across all gender representations — can become bitter. That’s when one’s own weirdness feels less like an exception, and more like a burden.
It feels inescapable.
So, how do weird individuals become empowered?
Niche interests have crept into the mainstream, making it less likely that an individual with a passion for insects or an alternative style will be labeled ‘weird’ for how they present themselves. But many people still have to contend with racism, sexism, or run-of-the-mill ostracization every day. Sadly, there’s no one recipe for becoming accepted in your community. And not all ostracization is created equal. None of it is fair.
Can being weird be a good thing? How do individuals who feel different from their communities survive their situation? Khazan explains that a supportive family or found family can be priceless for helping individuals establish a firm identity.
“A supportive family is not, I realize, like a psychological trick you can simply try out,” Khazan admits. “You either have one or you don’t. The people I met who didn’t have strong support systems, however, tended to create them… or, in a few extreme cases, by becoming their own support systems. They did this by talking to themselves more assuredly about whatever it was that made them stick out — like their lack of a spouse, or money, or whatever it was they were expected to have.”
In a similar vein, being weird isn’t something you can try on once and forget about. It requires more confidence than bitterness, more communication than paranoia. Quite often, it’s a full-time job.
My own weird and wild journey
I’ve always been told that being weird is a good thing. I was a nerd, and I spent my high school years struggling to make conversation with acquaintances because I just couldn’t get the hang of small talk. Right around the same time that nerd glasses became a fashion trend, I decided I was okay with being weird.
But sometimes instead of just accepting it, I revel in it.
I make my weirdness my personality, or I use it to explain away the parts of myself I’d rather not change. Sometimes I wonder if I gave myself a mental illness because I was so fascinated by brains that didn’t work like mine, with brains that could function without remorse or minds that made the viewer hallucinate. But it doesn’t work that way. There’s nothing weird about mental illness.
One risk of romanticizing mental illness is that it becomes harder to draw the line between reality and fiction. You start to label all of your quirks red flags, signs that something is wrong. Once you start to pathologize your character flaws, it becomes difficult to stop. That in itself becomes a problem, a fear your brain can’t place in a tidy little box.
And yet, we try to fit into boxes, and that is the paradox of weirdness today. The message seems to be that if you are weird, be weird. But only so long as you find your niche and excel in your oddity. It seems we are not allowed to be weird on our own.
Another message about weirdness that I receive is that weirdness is acceptable — even preferable — only when I am buying something. Weirdness is sanctioned within consumerism. But the hallmarks of being weird are not things you can buy. You have to work hard to be a witch, a cosplay artist, a taxidermist, an expert in anything. You have to make grasshopper tacos or bake penis bread often enough for it to be something YOU do, not just something you have done before.
I do not wish to give the impression that I believe myself weirder than the average Los Angelino. For me being weird is living with anxiety. It’s worrying about who is comfortable at the dinner table and what I can say that might possibly be interesting to others. It’s always worrying about the things that don’t matter until that worry affects those that do.
Perhaps I can be a space cadet. If I can keep my weirdness within socially acceptable bounds, perhaps I might successfully blend in. I can be ‘quirky’ without being an ‘awkward misfit.’
I know that this mindset is neither healthy nor helpful.
Perhaps the things that make me most weird are the things that connect me with other people. After all, aren’t we all a little odd?
Obsessed with this newfound research on weirdness, I tried to explain what makes weird stereotypes and social awkwardness so frustrating when it’s clear that confidence is the key to embracing your inner oddball.
“Some people are just so full of warmth, and others cheer for them. No one thinks they’re weird. Well, no one thinks they’re weird in a bad way. And even though I know that they hide their problems behind their charisma and smile, I can’t seem to do the same.”
“You can’t be perfect at everything.”
“Why not?”
It certainly feels like we live in a world where it pays to appear perfect at everything. But looking at the different types of weirdness, I cannot name one thing, one silver bullet that can help us weirdos manage our idiosyncrasies in a world defined by stereotypes and outside judgment. We just have to own our weirdness and cultivate our acceptance of others.
We have to be unabashedly, unapologetically weird.
Super easy, right??
It might help, no matter what stage you are in life, to consider how things that used to feel weird are no longer quite so grating. In high school I was super weird — I spent most of my day studying. I would spend my mornings and lunch breaks cramming. I switched friend groups five or six times. I ran cross country, sometimes jogging with a group of teammates for over an hour without speaking a word. I. Felt. So. Alone. And now? Now I overshare facts about fish with random strangers, every chance I get. My level of weirdness has not decreased, not one bit. But it changed.
It may also help to know that one meaning of the word ‘weird’ comes from the Old English ‘wyrd,’ which means ‘fate’ or ‘destiny.’ It denotes becoming, a moving forward.
So yes, we need to embrace our weirdness — but that process nearly always means moving past the initial awkward stages of landing a new job or learning better social skills, or deciding to spend every weekend looking for mushrooms. It’s a continuation of our awkwardness into something that we might eventually learn to be proud of.
So please, let’s be undoubtedly, unironically weird. Your fate depends on it.
