Weird

I grew up in a small rural place with mostly white people. I am mixed, and I learned quickly that I wasn’t like other kids. Because of how I looked, because my dad was Black and my mom was white, because they were from a city, and because, frankly, our family didn’t have a lot, and it showed.

Like my dad, I was good at making friends and fitting in despite being different—maybe because of both our personalities and an instinct for survival. But I didn’t feel like part of things, so in 6th grade I decided to stop trying so hard and just be different—and not just be different, but, fuck it, be weird. 

I owe this choice in part to my friend Grace. She was athletic and blonde, her parents were tax accountants, and they had a nice, big, very clean house. So there was nothing obviously unusual about her or her family. In fact, they seemed the pinnacle of what was acceptable, and in fact, more acceptable than most people I knew–by the standards of our town at least.

But Grace was angry. Almost all the time. She had a restlessness about her that seemed to make her want to shake things up and fuck things up. Everything was too boring for her. Nothing to do but watch White Men Can’t Jump and Pet Sematary and go to the factory outlet mall and play basketball in the playground after school. We could go rolling skating again, but we always did that. No, there needed to be something new, something different, something from out of this world.

I thought why not? This place is boring. And I don’t feel like I’m from this planet anyway.

So Grace and I became inseparable and acted relentlessly, unapologetically weird. We insisted to everyone that we were from outer space. She was from Mars (appropriately). I chose Uranus because I thought it was the weirdest of the planets.

We sang Pump Up the Jam (Technotronic), Two Princes (Spin Doctors), and Jump (Kriss Kross) continually to annoy people. We also made up nonsensical raps and songs for that purpose. We made a lot of prank calls. (This was before caller ID.) We went up to random strangers and asked rude questions to see what they would do.

We were kind of performance artists, although I didn’t know it at the time. (I didn’t know what a performance artist was.) We wanted attention, yes, but more than that we wanted to disrupt the status quo. Provide a pop of color in a washed out town.

So yeah, different is good. (Sorry–’90s Arby’s reference.) Yes, everyone is special and unique. But I’ve always taken weird to mean something distasteful. At worst, a neighbor who might be a serial killer. (“That guy’s weird, stay away from his house.”) At best, someone no one wants to hang out with for whatever reason.

So was it really fair to say that Grace and I were weird? We never harmed anyone, and we actually had a lot of friends–to be honest, we could have been considered among the cool kids at that time.

Well, here’s the thing. Weird doesn’t just mean odd or strange, or someone who might kill you with an ax, it means relating to or caused by the supernatural. It means magical.

So Grace and I were definitely weird. We wore our weirdness–our magic–like armor, like crowns, like magnificent spacesuits that gave us the ability to survive in an airless environment where we didn’t belong–that wasn’t even our planet.

Grace and I lost touch after that year. I don’t know for sure why she was so angry. I knew that her stepdad was a jerk and that her brothers and sisters lived far away and that her mom did whatever her stepdad wanted.

So it seemed like she was pretty alone.

Maybe things got better for her after 6th grade and she didn’t have to be so angry. Maybe she became normal. Maybe she became acceptable.

For myself, without the right clothes, the right hair, the right skin, the right house, I continued to lean into my weirdness. I knew that this was a way to find freedom–a way to breathe. 

I didn’t know that I was doing magic.