Confessions Of A Peculiar Person

I’ve come to realize my calling in life is to be weird, so other people can feel better about their own weird. Honestly, it’s the one thing that comes most naturally to me. I saw a buzz feed article about weird things people do, and one of them was eating their food in order from least desirable to most desirable. It was only then I realized that perhaps not every child delicately ate the crust around the edges of their sandwich first to save the gooey inside as dessert…?

While I have since learned to take big bites, small talk remains a struggle. Often in large groups who have mastered the art of small talk, I sit and listen, resisting the urge to drop conversational bombs. As it turns out, when people are laughing about the Monday blues, they don’t want to dive into a reflection on how the Gregorian calendar defies natural patterns, or wonder what life was like before capitalism invented the concept of time as something that could be bought and sold rather than a simple state of existence.

No no, I’ve learned my lesson. Now, I just smile and say “haha ugh I am so feeling those Sunday scaries,” and then look away, unsure of what to say next. But I have also realized, if I get sucked into deep conversations for too long, my brain wags heavy. Being around masters of small talk has helped lighten my mental load of deep thoughts and lean into the delights of everyday life.

And I wonder if the differences between masters of small talk and those who struggle is just part of what makes a community an adaptable ecosystem. Comedian Mike Vecchione has a theory that successful marriages are the ones where one person is boring, and the other is crazy. I have a theory that anybody can be crazy when put in the right situation.

The other day, I presented some of these thoughts while doing standup comedy, and I polled the room: are you crabbier when you are sleep deprived, or when you are food deprived? The room was equally split in half, supporting my theory that there are two types of people - the snackers and the nappers. Some of the most successful couples have one of each. In a situation of singular deprivation, at least there is one person to hold down the fort while the other goes crazy. Personally, I’m the friend that always brings snacks. I can survive off limited sleep for days, but if I go two hours without food I can’t think straight. My ABS system is Always Be Snacking.

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As I get older, I see biographies of people who are doing things I admire, and I feel like everybody who achieved great things had inclinations of greatness from an early age, and I feel like I’ve missed my window to do anything of meaning with my life. Once, I had a friend tell me “Liz, I love hanging out with you because you’re so awkward. It makes me feel ok being awkward.” And I realized, if being weird is my life’s calling, I actually am a child prodigy of weird.

Crust curation aside, I was also homeschooled K-12 and spent my childhood milking goats, adorned in a long homesteader dress and headcovering that would make the modern trad wife movement proud. In those days, homesteading wasn’t cool, so public outings drew a lot of stares. My dad had said we were called by the Lord to be a peculiar people - at least I was able to live up to one of his expectations.

Fast forward to the part where I opted out of betrothal and went to college and got a degree in education. My very first day in grade school was as a Special Education teacher. And I realized that while I could shed my headcovering, I couldn’t shed my weird. They sent me all the kids who didn’t want to sit still, and I thought “lady, neither do I.” I had spent my childhood running around on the farm, and it boggled my mind that movement was only acceptable as a form of recreation. Movement used to just be part of everyday life. For me, it was baling hay and chasing escaped farm animals. For my ancestors, it was hunting food, or trying not to become food. Now, we spend ten minutes driving around trying to find the closest parking stall so we don’t have to walk five minutes to the gym to get on the treadmill. Imagine how much more motivating it would be if your strava said “Congratulations, you ran six miles AND escaped a pack of velociraptors!"

And what would have happened if the early homosapiens had punished their children that didn’t want to sit still? I imagine the dad grimacing as he shakes a bone admonishingly:

“Neanderthal Junior, why are you always running around hunting and gathering? What is wrong with you? Why can’t you just sit still in the cave and look at petroglyphs like your brother Todd? He’s been staring at that outline of a woolly mammoth for three hours. Have a gold star, Todd.”

Speaking of neanderthals, a recent study found genes associated with autism in their brains. These genes are associated with stronger visual processing, nerding out on details, and pattern recognition but weaker activity in networks tied to social interaction. Maybe neanderthals also hated small talk and wanted to just get things done. The cool thing is how these newer studies can help us understand these traits and how they were helpful as a natural feature, not a flaw.

But as a teacher, my job was to change the features of children that didn’t fit the system. In one of my graduate classes, a professor told us if a parent is resistant to testing or medication, we could give the child Mountain Dew and observe if it calmed them down. Another mentor told me one of the students needed to be medicated. He rarely sat still for more than a few minutes, and his writing was all over the place, chaotic scribbles. But when I let him disregard the standard writing prompt and write about his favorite monster trucks, he read me back a story full of vivid details, his eyes flashing. One day he came into the classroom, eyes glazed like a donut. He sat down and wrote a few sentences replying to the standard prompt of the day, handwriting as neat as could be but lacking the previous imagination. Other teachers celebrated his new medication as a success. For some reason, I felt sick.

It wasn't just the crushing of their brains that disturbed me, it was the crushing of their souls. A third grader, who I will call Matthew, was one of the most creative children I worked with. His pictorial responses to prompts had incredible original humor and wit, but when he went to write letters, they came out backwards.

Creative responses to writing prompts from my eight-year old student.

When I sat in the IEP meeting with his care team and parents, the mom would cry and the dad felt frustrated because their child was doing so poorly in school. But everyone was looking at the arbitrary letters that said A for you are worthy, and D for you are a failure, because his skillset didn’t match the ones prioritized by the system.

He was promised a trip to a battleship museum if he achieved 80% on his spelling test. Matthew studied hard, tracing shapes and singing the songs until he wrote each word correctly. But when the test started, he began breathing heavily, his fingers shaking with trepidation. Everything he had practiced went out the window. I am not sure who was more heartbroken by his grade, me or him. I wanted to give him an A for his brilliant mind. I was frustrated at the system that was forcing me to take a duck out of the water to climb trees until he was mediocre at everything. His achievements were being measured by a ruler that had been created for a different type of brain.

I wondered how my own brain and self worth would have fared in a traditional school. I spent hours running around the farm, and could be quite scattered. I’m still a bit scattered to this day, not unlike being a magician playing tricks on myself. My knack for making my car keys disappear prompted the addition of an apple air tag. Instead of ‘pick a card, any card,’ it’s ‘pick a browser tab, any tab,’ because at any given time I have 46 of them open. The other day I went to open a private google document and saw a colored cursor blinking in my document and panicked. “Who is in my private document?” It was then I realized it was me in the three other instances of it that I already had opened. But once I find something I’m interested in, I can spend hours locked into a deep dive. As a child, this manifested as reading an entire book from cover to cover in one sitting, often opting to skip core necessities like food or the bathroom rather than break my focus.

“Why is everybody suddenly neurodivergent?” my friend asked the other day. Both of us knew people suddenly announcing they were “AUDHD,” a combination of Autism and ADHD. For some, this label seems to come with a sigh of relief, like “thank god, this explains why I’m like this.” And I can appreciate the ways that building tools for my students taught me how to build tools for my own brain.

My only concern about the increasing neurodivergent labels is the framing of these differences as a disadvantage. Autism Spectrum Disorder. Attention Defecit Hyperactivity Disorder.

What if it wasn’t about understanding what’s wrong with your brain, but what is right? And then equipping ourselves with tools to become our best version of the person we were made to be?

We live in a society that has looked at the rainbow of brains and said “Ok, red and blue are the only “normal” colors.” And so we created educational systems and work systems that are built for those types of brains. But if your brain is yellow, you feel weird and depressed and anxious because you don’t know why you are so terrible at fitting into systems that were built for red brains.

In a Cambridge study, it found that dyslexic minds have heightened abilities in other areas necessary for exploration and problem solving. These findings were presented through the lens of “Complimentary Cognition,” a theory that our brains evolved with varying strengths that improve human adaptability through collaboration. In other words, we need to be different, together.

What if the labels were more of a system like “Congratulations! You have a yellow brain, that’s wonderful and has so many great things to add to the world. Here are the tips for how to be the best yellow you can be and blend with the needs of the other colors to create a complimentary rainbow.” What if labels for brains were more like a hex color code for your unique combination of colors?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but weirdness is in the brain of the cultural architect. We need the snack people to wake the nappers up when the velociraptors are coming, and the sleepy people invented brunch for the snackers. And with the rise of AI, perhaps this is a good time to look at making it ok to move again. In a time when everything is being turned on its head, how can we build new systems that nurture an adaptable human ecosystem?