I’m a Weirdo and You are Too

I love science fiction movies, books, and television shows. I can seriously quote you some Star Trek or Star Wars at the drop of a hat.

I like making up silly songs that don’t make sense. Dancing around the kitchen with my dog is one of my favorite pastimes. I make wildly inappropriate jokes to my friends that, thankfully, they get and laugh at. At one point I wanted to make my partner a top hat for his, ahem, member because I thought it should star in it’s own Broadway review. I make faces in almost every picture people take of me. I love sticking my tongue out and mooning people. I’m the sort of wacka-doodle that makes up my own words and laughs like a maniac at the absurdity of it. And I most definitely laugh at all my own jokes – often so hard that it makes me cry!

And why the hell not? Why not be weird, goofy, and embrace your inner child?

Unfortunately, our society tries to strangle this out of us. It tries to tell us that showing someone our butt after one too many glasses of wine makes us a bad person or makes us somehow unacceptable. That having one too many pictures making silly faces means that we’re never going to be taken seriously. That our penchant for science fiction should be a dirty little secret instead of a badge of honor.

But I have a question for you – who the hell made up these arbitrary rules about what’s acceptable anyway? Who decided that we have to live our lives a certain way to get by? Why do we spend even one day of our lives focused on trying to fit in when we are so gorgeously, outrageously, unique exactly as we are?

See, I’m a weirdo. But I guarantee that you are too. We’re all weirdos in one way or another. We all have little peccadillos that make us our own flavor of fabulous.

So why do we hide it? Why do we hide away our unique voice and trade it in for the bland certainty of acceptance?

We were conditioned at one point in our lives to prioritize acceptance over all else. We learned from our parents, our teachers, and even our peers that we would never be accepted if we kept being so goofy, so we started prioritizing “fitting in” before just about anything else. I’m looking at you in middle school. You were the bane of so many existences. And yet, we carry the awful lessons we learned there through our lives. Most of us decided somewhere around middle school that we had to shut up our fabulous silliness to fit into the status quo. And we decided that fitting in was more important than just about anything. We decided that we had to shove the weirdo inside of us, deep into the closet so that we could make other people comfortable.

The great irony is that we don’t make other people more comfortable this way. Instead, we all walk through life like zombies. We’re walking through a khaki-colored world when we’d all prefer to be wearing capes and tutus.

We’ve lost something important that speaks to the core of our existence. We’ve lost the ability to let loose, to have fun, to be silly, and to just let ourselves BE ourselves.

We need more brave souls who are willing to go out and be wacky, be silly, and embarrass themselves in the name of authenticity. We need more people who are willing to play and be vibrant. We need more passion in our expression of our deepest selves.

So my challenge to everyone is to be more you. To be more fabulously, outrageously you. The next time you have an impulse to skip across the street instead of walking – do it. The next time you want to dance in the rain – DO IT! Stop censoring yourself. Stop muzzling that fabulous glow inside your soul. And start being authentically YOU. Start embracing your inner weirdo! Let’s do it together.