weird pride

[boxofdelights]

This is the neighbor who's weird and shy
She'll say hello but she won't meet your eye
She wants to be friendly but doesn't know how
"Hello" is as much as her fears will allow.

This is the neighbor who's shy and weird
He keeps his garden like he keeps his beard
"But I can't see your face!" his mother would cry
He likes it that way. He can't explain why.

I love the idea of Weird Pride Day, but every time I thought about writing something for it, I choked at the idea of putting "weird" and "pride" together.

In Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us, Claude Steele mentions that identity formation happens in response to an identity-based threat. For example, when he was a little boy growing up in Chicago, the moment that he knew he was black was when someone explained that he could only use the swimming pool on Wednesday, because he was black. He must have known it before then, but that was when it became a salient part of his identity.

I spent my childhood at a school that didn't tolerate bullying, so I didn't really know that I was weird. I remember a teacher telling me that it was okay for me to be a square peg, that I didn't need to cut myself down to fit into the round holes. I understood the metaphor, but I didn't understand why she was saying that to me. I mean, I knew that I was different, but other people were different from each other too, so I didn't feel singled out by that.

When I was twelve my mother volunteered me to be a camp counselor at the public school district's summer program for children with mental disabilities. The summer program was held at Lahser High School, which was on a lake where the campers could go wading or swimming. I was not a lifeguard but I could swim, so I would be allowed to take a camper out in a canoe, as long as we were both wearing lifejackets and at least one counselor in the group was a lifeguard. At orientation, the school district's head swimming teacher was going over canoe safety with the counselors. I was in the group, listening attentively, when she pointed at me and said, "Is she a counselor, or a camper?" She was talking to another staffer, but her voice had been trained to be heard across a noisy crowded swimming pool, so everyone heard her.

I don't know what I was doing wrong; I have learned since then that my normal stillness and silence is unnerving. You are supposed to make little gestures with your face and body, sometimes even with your voice, in time with the speaker, to show that you are listening. These gestures have to be very very small: if they're too big, you seem weird, but if they are absent, you're even weirder. Just staring is creepy. Even creepier, I tended to stare at people's mouths when they were talking to me. I still do, when I don't think not to.

I was a painfully shy child even before puberty hit me like a brick

house, so I had had to give myself a talking-to before I could go out in my bathing suit. "Everyone will be wearing a bathing suit. No one will be looking at you in particular." But now everyone was looking at me in particular, wondering, "Is she one of the campers?" So I spontaneously combusted and fell into a deep pit that suddenly opened up beneath me. And crystallized my identity as A Big Weirdo.

Comments

[loligo]

I don't think I knew you went to school there! I met several other alums in my dorm freshman year.

[boxofdelights]

I didn't graduate. I was at Roeper from nursery school to 8th grade, then spent a very strange year, while my parents were splitting up, that started at a boarding school in Maine and ended up with the nuns, then graduated from Lahser.

I credit Roeper with a lot of my ability to be a good person and form good relationships.