Weird is Wonderful

Celebrate your weirdness. It's part of what makes you a wonderfully unique individual!

Spillover effect of having done many ‘crazy faces’ group pictures with YTS.

Last December YTS (the Yamato Taiko School) organized a get together to celebrate its 10th anniversary. We’d play our songs for friends and family, we’d chat and share drinks together in BYOF&D¹ style, and there’d be a short free workshop so our guests could get a sense of what we’re all so enthusiastic about.²

In the weeks leading up to the celebration various self-organized WhatsApp groups exploded. Messages bounced back and forth with everyone joining in to share whether they were coming or not and who they were bringing, to show their support, to contribute ideas to cover the cost of the venue, what drinks they’d be bringing, and much, much more.

Drinking from the fire hose doesn’t even come close to describing it.

My neurodivergent brain doesn’t do groups or chit-chat very well, so I have these groups set up with ‘silent’ as their ringtone.³

I also keep them archived. This way, I keep the distraction of notifications to a minimum.⁴ While the “archive” has a far too prominent place in the phone app, my neurodivergent brain has tuned it out and now I often don’t even notice the “archived chats with new messages” count.

In the midst of the message deluge in the YTS groups, I noticed a question:

It struck me because of the insecurity oozing from it. The question was obviously not “Is it weird?” but “Will they think I’m weird?”⁵

The responses that had already come in illustrate the supportive community we have in YTS:

I don’t usually join in these exchanges, but I felt compelled to add my 2 cents to this one. Because I’ve known the poster for almost as long as I’ve been with YTS and because I’ve been, and often still am, just as insecure.

That last sentence carries untold meaning for me.

All my life, I’ve felt “a little weird”, different, not like others.

It’s driven me to hide/mask who I am, to do my utmost to fit in.

It’s inspired my deep-dive into psychology — my quest to understand what ‘normal’⁶ people do. How they think, feel, and behave. To know what’s ‘appropriate’ or 'expected’, and get better at ‘doing normal’.

My neurodivergent diagnoses (yes, plural) at… 60 gave me an explanation for my wonderful weirdness. While I welcomed the light it shone on how my life had panned out and still is panning out, it did feel a bit like “mustard after the meal”⁷.

That’s because I’d already started to push back against the pressure to act ‘normal’ many years earlier. Pressure exacerbated by the emotional dysregulation (EU) / rejection sensitive dysphoria (US) — a manifestation of my neurodivergent brain.

I don’t remember when, why, or how exactly but at some point, I accepted that I am different and that it’s far too exhausting to pretend otherwise. And confusing. The line between me and my mask blurred a little too much for comfort.

Shortly after, I took to describing myself as “een beetje vreemd, maar wel lekker.” It’s a Dutch phrase from an old Rivella ad and very apt. It translates to “A bit strange, but quite yummy.”

Pushing back against the internal and external pressure to fit in, is bloody hard work, by the way. It’s a work in progress and by no means complete.

Old tapes — messages or beliefs, if you like — and insecurities pipe up like clockwork.

Like saliva triggered by the bell announcing food in Pavlov’s dogs, they can hijack my thinking and emotions. Depending on my overall mental and emotional state, my being held hostage by those old beliefs could last for days, weeks, and even months.

Over the years, I’ve learned to swallow the spit.

It’s allowed me to reduce the hijack duration to hours, minutes, sometimes seconds.

“Weird is Wonderful” is the succinct mantra that helped and helps me with it. It perfectly summarizes a plethora of reframes that preceded it.

It also beautifully expresses my belief that ‘normal’ and ‘average’ people don’t exist. We’re all wonderfully unique and uniquely wonderful.

What mantra do you employ to vanquish the pressure to fit in, to silence your insecurities?

Live long and prosper!

Marjan

1. BYOF&D: Bring Your Own Food & Drink.

2. Yes, I’ve stopped going to classes. For me, 10 years is an extraordinary long time to stick with any hobby. Most hobbies have a 5-year shelf life at most. But, while I stopped going to classes, I still like taiko drumming and highly recommend it. The Yamato style, especially.

3. Thanks, Ina. Ina revealed the features to me that make this possible. That groups can have a different default ringtone from the default for individuals. And that there’s a ‘silent’ ringtone. Life saver!

4. On top of that, the count on the archive shows the number of groups with new messages. So, when a single group explodes, I keep seeing a “1” regardless of the total number new messages.

5. You can take this as an illustration of the fear of what others will think of you. I think that’s not what you actually fear in these situations. More on that in a future sidenote. Feel free to let me know if you’d be interested in reading it.

6. Normal people don’t exist. Neither do average people. Both ‘normal’ and ‘average’ are constructs employed by psychologists/psychiatrists, governments, insurance companies, and the like. It’s an attempt to find order in the chaos of individual uniqueness. To keep their work, products, services, and the rules they create around them, manageable.

7. Dutch expression for receiving/finding something when you no longer need it.