What My Daughter Taught Me About Being Weird

The other day my four-year-old daugh­ter Lucy was skim­ming down the side­walk with her kick scooter.

Nor­mal.

She was grip­ping the han­dle­bar with one hand and hold­ing an open umbrella with the other. While wear­ing a bike hel­met and snow boots. On a sunny, seventy-three degree day.

Weird.

It’s so weird that I’d bet any­thing that of the six bil­lion plus peo­ple in the world, not one other per­son was doing and wear­ing the exact same thing. That’s as weird as it gets.

It was also a great big life lesson.

You see, in Lucy’s head, there was noth­ing weird about it. She was in the moment, free of pre­tense, and free of shame. She was liv­ing life the way it was meant to be lived.

Oh how I wish I could be that free again.

In fact, we all were, in the begin­ning. But even­tu­ally some­one sees us liv­ing our bliss, decides it’s weird, and shames us. We get made fun of in the school­yard, on the bus, or across the diner table. For the first time, it occurs to us that some of the things we do might be looked upon with con­tempt by another person.

From then on, we start pay­ing atten­tion. We start notic­ing what’s “in” and what’s not. We take heed of the the things that could get us ridiculed, sin­gled out, and shamed. And we stop doing those things. We smooth out the rough edges and start hid­ing our weird­ness. And one by one, lit­tle parts of us die.

It’s quite pos­si­bly the great­est tragedy of our lives, as we end up spend­ing most of it con­form­ing to the world around us, all to avoid that feel­ing of shame ever again.

Once in a while, you’ll see an elderly per­son who quit buy­ing in. They’re livin’ la vida loca, care­free and with­out reser­va­tion. On the sur­face, it’s easy to write them off as pos­si­bly expe­ri­enc­ing early-stage demen­tia. But if you look closer, you’d see that they have all their wits about them. They’ve just decided it was too expen­sive to pay atten­tion to what every­one else thought, so they stopped try­ing to hide their weirdness.

They dis­cov­ered that peo­ple only have the power to shame us if we give it to them.

Well I don’t want to wait till I’m sev­enty to embrace that truth. I want to live my life like Lucy: free, in the moment, and glo­ri­ously weird.

Won’t you join me?

by Jason Kotecki

Jason Kotecki is an artist, author, and pro­fes­sional speaker. Jason and his wife Kim (a for­mer kinder­garten teacher) make it their mis­sion in life to fight Adul­ti­tis and help peo­ple use strate­gies from child­hood to design lives with less stress and more fun. Stop by www.KimandJason.com for more tips for escap­ing adulthood.

Jason Kotecki

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