Embrace Your Weird

Most of my life I have been told that I’m weird. It occurred to me to ask, when did weird become a bad thing? I grew up with parents who never discouraged my weirdness so I just accepted it and never thought negatively about it. In fact, when I was in high school I had bumper stickers from Hot Topic that said, “normal is boring” and “when I grow up I wanna be like me”. I still feel this way; most of the time, but I still have to remind myself often that being weird is one of my greatest assets as a person and as a professional creative. I’d like to share with you why your weird is your best tool as a creative. Like any other tool, you have to learn how to embrace it and use it.

There is something that happens to us when we are going through adolescence that really frames who we think we are or who we think we should be. Some of us longed for acceptance and went out of our way to prove ourselves in order to be popular. I was the opposite, I genuinely hated being called “normal”. I began taking being weird as a compliment when 99% of the time it was probably meant to insult me. Whichever category you fell into, sometimes we stay in those places in a lot of ways and never embrace the things that make us unique-even as creatives.

Something that I came to realize is something that I think most adults have still yet to grasp: that people are attracted to your weirdness.