Embrace Your Weirdness
The hardest thing in the world to do is to be yourself.
In a world clamoring to be heard, crying to be seen, and hurting to be recognized, the hardest to do is to be yourself.
It is easier to hide in a crowd, hidden and safe from their prying eyes.
To be a unique character, to stand out from the masses, means to flaunt our eccentricities and quirks for the whole world to see. Our idiosyncrasies can be cumbersome, at times, a burden.
It hurts to be different. It’s hard to be weird, to run against the flow of what is normal and safe.
Being normal isn’t safe for those who have embraced their weirdness. It’s a prison.
Everyone, at their core, is weird. But for one reason or another, our inherent weirdness shame and frightens us.
And it shouldn’t.
Enter Edgar Allan Poe and his weirdness and “lack of moral principle.”
Edgar Allan Poe was not accepted by his peers or literary critics.
Ralph Waldo Emmerson called Poe a jingle man, and Walt Whitman questioned Poe’s artistic and literary morals. Whitman found Poe “almost without the first sign of moral principle.”
Even though Poe never strayed from his weirdness, he still wanted the approval of his peers. More than anything, he needed the public to accept his poetry and novels.
Poe was the first American author to live on his writings alone. That commitment wasn’t enough. He never made enough money to support himself. Poe died an alcoholic, desperate, and penniless.
Decades after his death, his work fueled a literary revolution. He inspired writers such as Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, H.G. Wells, and hundreds more. Almost two hundred years after his death, his poetry and prose are woven into American culture.
Poe was the first American author to write short stories, and he created the detective genre. Most of the horror and fantasy genres were influenced by Poe. Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut cite Poe as an inspiration.
Embracing our weirdness is what makes you, you. Accepting the quirky and eccentric part of you is the first step to self-mastery.
Though Edgar Allan Poe wrote the way he wanted, he didn’t truly accept his weirdness. He craved public validation of his poetry and prose. It came but only decades after his death.
Self-acceptance doesn’t need the approval of others.
What is self-mastery
Self-mastery is understanding and controlling your thoughts, emotions, and actions.
It needs a specific type of understanding for it to be acquired. It requires knowing who you are and, just as importantly, who you are not.
And the first step is to embrace your weirdness.
Try to find an example of someone who did not accept what made them different and became successful. You cannot.
Elon Musk is Elon Musk because of what makes him different. Good or bad, right or wrong, he embraces that truth.
Though he has an astonishing intellect, that is not what sets him apart and successful. There are more intelligent people than him. Justine Musk wrote what makes Elon different is his maniacal focus.
“Extreme success results from an extreme personality and comes at the cost of many other things,” Ms. Musk wrote. “Extreme success is different from what I suppose you could just consider ‘success.’ These people tend to be freaks and misfits who were forced to experience the world in an unusually challenging way,” she added, noting, “Other people consider them to be somewhat insane.”
She said only one ingredient was required for extreme success:
Be obsessed. Be obsessed. Be obsessed.
Extreme successes become extreme successes because they embrace their weirdness and do not care if the world accepts them. They often made the world bow to their will, as Elon Musk did with Twitter.
The blue pill vs. the red pill
In the Matrix, Neo is offered a choice of a blue pill which would keep his current reality, or as Morpheus said, “…the story ends, and you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.”
Or Neo could take a red pill, stay in Wonderland and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Embracing your weirdness is taking the red pill. Doing that is challenging, uncomfortable, and not safe.
Most people take the blue pill and decide to live in the reality of their Matrix. Safe, comfortable, and average. They want normal and run from being themselves.
But when you decide to take the red pill, to be different and intense, that’s when you live the wonderful, sometimes scary and painful, authentic version of who you are.
In other words, embracing your quirks, weirdness, eccentricities, foibles, oddities, and peculiarities starts a little thing called loving yourself.
That’s when self-mastery starts.
“how you love yourself is how you teach others to love you” ― Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey
Sometimes our families screw us over
I understand the need to conform to everyone else’s rules and be safe.
When I was nine or ten, my brothers and sister thought I was weird. I was weird. I got into fights, daydreamed, ran naked into the mud, and climbed houses, trees, and telephone poles. I believed in UFOs, witches, and ghosts and that my real family was a wandering group of gypsies who sold me for some extra cash.
The problem was that my family could not stand my weirdness. I was too different and not enough like them. I was too intense, they said.
I stayed weird for as long as I could. But when you’re alone, it becomes easier to morph into other people’s standards and fears, and then one day, you don’t recognize the person in the mirror.
This willingness to conform to other people’s opinions of me continued until I was 27 years old and my daughter was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor.
My family wanted me to continue working for the family business and let my wife handle all the medical challenges.
I chose another path. I quit to care for my daughter, be there if she died, and find the best doctors in the world to help her.
My family’s path would have killed my daughter. My choices saved her.
When I was in my forties, my older brother told me I was the most intense person he had ever met. He said it wasn’t a compliment. I disagree. It was the best thing anyone had ever said to me.
I learned a lesson from my family. Conformity kills.
Take the red pill.
Accept the painful, beautiful, sometimes ugly truth of who you are.
Embrace your weirdness, be intense, be obsessed, and walk the path of self-mastery.
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