I like Tim's suggestion - "talk to more strangers, ignore rules, take risks, and be more of your weird self." I think he's acknowledging that we have a conforming self that we lean toward but I can relate to the concept of expanding that normal to provide a place for our weird side. It's that non-conforming side that we're more inclined to suppress.
How right he is. However, maybe there's a zone where we have choice, and a zone where we're really a lemon tree and trying to be anything else is foolhardy. Maybe part of being human is understanding where our zone of choice is.
In h.s. a good friend would lament, "Lord don't make me normal." Then we'd all laugh. Anyway, I loved the Garrison Keiler reference . That opening line always made me laugh too. Good post, Joyce!
I think about this topic a lot. As much as I like saying "be weird! Lean into your oddness!" and so on - I don't think I'm THAT weird, or that anyone else is either. I think we're all very roughly in the same part of the bell curve of weirdness. It's a very exceptional person who is so weird by default that they immediately stand out. If you're having to work to uncover your voice, and most of us do (I spent at least ten years at it), you're not really that weird.
I think where I agree with Tim is the difference between being weird and actually using what weirdness you have. It seems like we all operate under two needs, which seem contradictory at first glance: we want to be special in some way, and we want to feel part of something greater. And if you accept that you're mostly kinda normal and/or unexceptional, you can feel part of the communities you exist within, because we're all mostly "average" in that sense. But! If you can be unusually proactive in treating your life as an unfolding experiment, and open to curiosity and new things and new experiences and new friendships, you can be "special" in what you do.
(This can be a bit of a slippery slope into hustle-culture thinking: I Am The Best Because I Work Longer Hours Than You Losers. But it really means that we're treating our weirdnesses as skills, something that can be learned and improved and refine and honed, rather than innate abilities, Something We Were Born To Do, which is where people get a bit over-full of themselves and disappear up their own egos, or other people feel like they're destined to lose because they weren't "born weird", and so on.
I like Tim's suggestion - "talk to more strangers, ignore rules, take risks, and be more of your weird self." I think he's acknowledging that we have a conforming self that we lean toward but I can relate to the concept of expanding that normal to provide a place for our weird side. It's that non-conforming side that we're more inclined to suppress.
yes!
I have always thought of myself as average looking as in not beautiful but not ugly either
I shared your first quote, about the orange tree, with my husband, he reminded me, "The orange tree doesn't have a choice."
Excellent point.
How right he is. However, maybe there's a zone where we have choice, and a zone where we're really a lemon tree and trying to be anything else is foolhardy. Maybe part of being human is understanding where our zone of choice is.
In h.s. a good friend would lament, "Lord don't make me normal." Then we'd all laugh. Anyway, I loved the Garrison Keiler reference . That opening line always made me laugh too. Good post, Joyce!
I think about this topic a lot. As much as I like saying "be weird! Lean into your oddness!" and so on - I don't think I'm THAT weird, or that anyone else is either. I think we're all very roughly in the same part of the bell curve of weirdness. It's a very exceptional person who is so weird by default that they immediately stand out. If you're having to work to uncover your voice, and most of us do (I spent at least ten years at it), you're not really that weird.
I think where I agree with Tim is the difference between being weird and actually using what weirdness you have. It seems like we all operate under two needs, which seem contradictory at first glance: we want to be special in some way, and we want to feel part of something greater. And if you accept that you're mostly kinda normal and/or unexceptional, you can feel part of the communities you exist within, because we're all mostly "average" in that sense. But! If you can be unusually proactive in treating your life as an unfolding experiment, and open to curiosity and new things and new experiences and new friendships, you can be "special" in what you do.
(This can be a bit of a slippery slope into hustle-culture thinking: I Am The Best Because I Work Longer Hours Than You Losers. But it really means that we're treating our weirdnesses as skills, something that can be learned and improved and refine and honed, rather than innate abilities, Something We Were Born To Do, which is where people get a bit over-full of themselves and disappear up their own egos, or other people feel like they're destined to lose because they weren't "born weird", and so on.
Mark Manson also had some interesting thoughts on averageness: https://markmanson.net/being-average
"we want to be special in some way, and we want to feel part of something greater." - I think that's a fair assessment.
Thanks, Mike ... this is a fascinating topic and I appreciate your input and will check out Mark's take on it.