One of my kids, when she was about 7, started a weirdo club with her best friend. I have to say, this was thrilling to me.
Being unique – and even a little off centre, is something to celebrate- and the fact that they cultivated and even documented it in little club books, with weird club rituals, and manic laughter that made the two of them sound like drugged up hyenas, was the greatest.
Fitting in, assimilating, norming, and blending in is often pushed and reinforced in us. Many educators adore it, society tries to squish us into holes we can’t fit in, and our oldest friends even might try to tell us who we are, even if we are other or more than they think.
When we divorce, or are children of divorce, we can feel freakish as if we are the ‘only’ or the ‘first’ in our group of friends to stick out like sore and solitary thumbs. We want to blend in for a while at first, fading into the backdrop of sameness.
We can want to be just like you until we miss being just like us and then we have to get back to us.
More and more in life, I realize I am drawn to the idiosyncratic, the quirky and the remarkably different, in the people I know. I am also territorial and fond of those traits in myself. In fact, blending in and getting swallowed up creates a feeling of panic in me if it goes on for too long. I find myself needing to get back to me.
So, save the call this week from my Doctor’s office stating that I after my annual tests I am “perfectly normal” and the comment on those first dates ‘ wow you are so normal” (ummm,maybe from a distance) which are both surprisingly great to hear in different ways(first because it means I am healthy and the second because they confirm that you are not crackers), I clutch my lifetime membership to the weirdo club close to my heart.
And so should you.