Don’t Be Afraid to Be Different
Be true to yourself
“A fruit salad is delicious precisely because each fruit maintains its own flavor.” ~ Sean Covey.
People were not meant to look exactly the same or talk exactly the same or do every single thing the same way.
We are allowed to be unique. I’m not sure when or why this feeling started, the desperate yearning to fit in with each other.
Being different can be such a blessing!
“If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.” ~ Maya Angelou.
My youngest is in middle school, though. Even if you don’t have children, you likely remember well the middle school years. There’s something about that age, just on the cusp of your teens, where being unique feels like it’s a dirty thing to do.
My daughter is amazing. She’s clever. She has a quirky sense of humor. She is beautiful and loves to the depths of her (and hates just as deeply if you make her mad). She’s my little firecracker. She doesn’t want to wear girly clothes. She likes to be comfortable most days, even if the new (squeezy and stiff) jeans are what is “in.” She has the voice of an angel and the mind of an inventor.
She is so beautifully complicated and unique and special. Because she is her. There is no other person in the world exactly like her, and that is such a wonderful thing.
To me.
But when you are eleven, it is often the bane of your existence. She has a personality type that is not common in girls. So, she sometimes struggles to fit in with her peers. I wish she could embrace the fact that she doesn’t need to fit in. She is amazing just the way she is.
But when I say to embrace her uniqueness, all she hears is that she’s weird.
“The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself.” ~ Rita Mae.
As an adult, I don’t even mind being called weird. I consider that word to be a badge of honor. I am definitely weird.
If other people voice it, that means I’m being true to myself. I don’t fit in with the norm. I’m okay with that. (Most days.)
But dear Heavens, eleven-year-old me did not feel the same way. So, I understand the churning in this child’s gut that forces her to mold herself to try to be what other people think she should be.
I just wish I could fast-forward her to the point in her life where she will be capable of not caring if she is different.
My oldest (now eighteen) also went through this extreme horror show of feeling the need to fit in during her middle school years.
Middle school is where all hopes and dreams and uniqueness go to die. I hate middle school with a passion. I don’t want this child to grow any faster than she is because it already seems like she went from five to eleven overnight, but . . . I will not be sad when this aspect of this chapter is finished.
I wish every little boy and girl out there (well, I guess medium-sized ones) could know how wonderful it is to just be unapologetically you.
Let it loose, you little weirdos! 😉