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[annieover]

When you are an outsider child, people are constantly telling you that you are strange, weird, gross, scary, unattractive.  If you are lucky, by your teens you have learned to avoid people who don't appreciate weirdness. You do it consciously in your teens, seeking out "kindred spirits", protecting and nurturing yourself by closing off avenues of

Comments

[livsmama]

Oh, honey, I am sorry that happened. I am still consciously seeking out kindred spirits!

[annieover]

Oh, nothing truly horrid happened. I just started thinking about it because Hen was being odd (because he hasn't learned to hide his "odd" and I love and encourage his eccentricity). He asked me if I'd ever coughed while I was drinking and made my drink fly all over the place. Of course, I have and there is a notorious food spitting incident that some of my dearest friends still tease me about. But when I recently described this incident to a relatively new acquaintance, she looked at me aghast and said that was one of the most disgusting things she had ever heard. It only slightly uncomfortable, but a little warning light went off to tell me to be extra careful about what I did/said/revealed to this person in the future

[livsmama]

I know this feeling with my children as well.

[karenleigh]

amen.

[annieover]

I thought you might understand that.

[a_kosmos]

I'm sorry. I hate it when people are callous or condescending.

FWIW, I don't think that any of those things are unusual. I'm not a big fan of spiders, but my husband always laughs (kindly) about my relationship with the garden snails.

[annieover]

Oh, don't be sorry. This is mainly a philosophical entry. I'm not feeling bad today at all. I'm just thinking about this issue and the dynamics of being someone who doesn't want to conform to arbitrary social norms.

[gryphonwing]

This was remarkably affirming to read, for me.

I've reached the spot where I stop trying to protect myself, mostly, and other people mostly stop trying to change me - or they tell me I'm weird and I don't care, because I am, and they'll get used to it or they'll go away...

Good insight, though.

And if your kids are anything like you - anything like me - they wouldn't give up the strange, beautiful patterns of sunlight and shadow, or the odd beauty of a spider, for any amount of social acceptance.

[annieover]

Yeah, because I now know that there are people who share my value system, I'm not as easily wounded by people who think I'm "twisted" as I was when I was a kid. Unfortunately, the bad side of that is that sometimes I feel sorry for people who can't or won't see the world the way that I do. And that's condescending. The best approach for me is to just see it as alternative lifestyle choices, but it's hard not to judge when others are judgemental.

[annieover]

I guess this is my point. Most of the time I don't hang out with people who set a high value on being normal, so I sometimes forget that there are a lot of people who don't like "strange". Kind of like how luminousx tends to hang out with smart people, so his perception of his own intelligence gets skewed. My perception of behavior that is considered socially acceptable gets skewed because I tend to avoid people who are freaked out by eccentricity. Then I start to think that the world is more tolerant than it was when I was a child until my kid goes to school and gets teased for wearing his Frank Sinatra fedora.

[annieover]

I don't think much of the "you're strange" came from my parents. My mother didn't exactly encourage it, but she definitely allowed it. She even made my clothes for me because I disliked the clothing in the stores. But at school, it was brutal. Relatives and other adults also liked to sometimes make commentary. For instance, I can remember more than one occasion where the fact that I stopped some adult female from stomping on a spider and insisted on taking the spider outside was met with way more hostility than made sense to me.