I was nine years old, sitting in the school cafeteria during lunch having some meaningless kid conversation with another kid when they abruptly asked me a question that would lodge itself in my brain for years.
“Why are you so strange?” he said.
Not with cruelty, not with mockery, just genuine confusion, like he’d been trying to figure out a puzzle and finally decided to just ask. I remember being completely thrown off by it, not because it hurt my feelings, but because I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
“Strange? .. Huh? .. What do you mean? .. Strange how?”
I didn’t know I was strange. I didn’t know what strange even meant in this context. Strange compared to what or who? I was just suddenly aware that apparently I was operating on some frequency that other kids could detect but I couldn’t hear, and this kid wanted to understand why. The problem was I couldn’t answer him because I didn’t understand the question. It was like being told you’re doing something wrong without anyone explaining how you’re doing it wrong or what right would even look like.
That moment crystallized something I’d probably been sensing but hadn’t been able to name. I was different in ways I couldn’t articulate, and other kids could see it even if I couldn’t. The realization wasn’t just uncomfortable, it was existentially destabilizing. Because if I was weird and didn’t know how or why, how was I supposed to fix it? How do you solve a problem you can’t even properly define?
So I did what any desperate kid would do. I became obsessed with trying to be normal.
I started watching other kids the way an anthropologist studies a foreign culture. I paid attention to how they talked, what they talked about, how they moved through space, what made them laugh. I watched television shows and movies and tried to incorporate things the characters said or did, thinking that if I could just mimic the right behaviors, I’d crack the code. I memorized phrases, tried on different speech patterns, pretended to like things other kids liked even when I found them boring or incomprehensible. I was running a field study on human behavior while simultaneously being a participant in it, constantly monitoring my own performance to see if I was getting it right.
The irony is that the harder I tried, the worse it got.
I was desperate for people to like me, so I tried to make them laugh. I tried to be as helpful as possible, to be useful, to be someone they’d want and needed to keep around. But there’s something about social desperation that other kids intuit like a sixth sense. The need itself becomes visible, and visibility of need in someone who isn’t in obvious socially acceptable distress is repellent. Especially to those who are just naturally flowing through their social interactions without really thinking about it. They weren’t rejecting me because I wasn’t funny enough or helpful enough. They were rejecting the desperation radiating off me, the obvious performance of someone who wanted connection so badly that every interaction became an audition for friendship.
People would get bored or annoyed. They’d ignore me or eventually tell me to go away or ask something like “why are you still here?”. I remember being called a loser and told to fuck off many times as well as being treated in a manner so uncivil that I’d “fuck off” on my own without being explicitly told to.
The phrase “wear out your welcome” comes to mind. I’d wear out my welcome even in situations where I thought I’d been helpful or entertaining. I was auditioning for friendship using the tools of entertainment and utility, not understanding that those things might make you temporarily amusing or useful but don’t actually build the kind of deeper connection I wanted. I wasn’t trying to be the class clown who occasionally made people laugh. I was trying to build actual friendships, and I was using completely the wrong tools for the job.
And then there was the weight issue, which added another layer of complication to the social math I was trying to do. I was overweight, and a lot of kids seemed grossed out by that or at least made fun of me for it constantly or were downright cruel and abusive. I could study other kids and mimic their speech patterns perfectly, but I couldn’t performance my way out of a body that other kids had already decided was wrong. Some variables in the equation couldn’t be changed through behavioral modification alone, which meant the problem I was trying to solve was actually unsolvable from the start. But I didn’t understand that yet. I just kept trying different approaches. Kept refining the performance and thinking that if I could just get it right, everything would click into place.
The whole thing was exhausting in ways that kids who were just naturally social or at least not cripplingly neurotic like me never experienced. They weren’t thinking about their performance because they weren’t performing. They were just being. I was never just being. I was always two steps removed from every interaction, monitoring my own behavior, wondering if I was coming across as normal or if I was revealing the weirdness underneath. It was like living in a state of constant self-surveillance, and by the time I reached high school, I was close to not caring at all.
At sixteen, I dropped out. There were multiple reasons, but one of them was simply that I was tired. Tired of putting on a mask and costume every single day and of the performance that never worked. Tired of trying to solve a problem that I’d finally started to recognize was unsolvable because I was trying to change something fundamental about how I was wired. The cost-benefit analysis didn’t work anymore. The returns were nonexistent and the mask was too heavy.
I retreated. I’m naturally shy anyway, but after dropping out I became even more withdrawn. I stopped trying to connect with people and instead surrendered to my obsession with hip-hop, engrossing myself in music as well as other pop culture. I escaped into that world, not necessarily because it healed me or helped me find myself or any of that therapeutic language, but because it was a place where I didn’t have to monitor my own behavior constantly. I could just consume culture that spoke to me without it requiring me to speak back in a particular way. I could just exist without performing, without wondering if I was getting it right, without seeing the boredom or annoyance creep into someone’s face as I wore out yet another welcome I didn’t even know I’d been granted.
People are performing to various degrees, I understand that now. Social interaction requires some level of conscious adjustment to context and audience. But most people seem to do it so naturally that they’re barely aware of it. For them, it’s not a performance, it’s just calibration. For me, it was always a performance, always deliberate and exhausting. And at some point I just decided to opt out.
I know people think I’m weird. I couldn’t care less. I have a “fuck you” attitude about it now that sixteen-year-old me was just starting to develop. The whole question of “how to be a human” turned out to be not particularly interesting once I stopped trying to answer it. I guess I am human, technically, but I don’t spend any time thinking about what that means or whether I’m doing it right. I just exist on whatever frequency I exist on, and if that’s strange to other people then so be it. That’s their observation to make and wonder about if they choose, not my problem to solve.
There’s no redemptive arc here, no moment where I learned to love myself or embrace my authentic self or found my tribe or any of that bullshit. I just stopped doing the thing that didn’t work, and then I stopped thinking about why it didn’t work, and now I don’t think about it at all unless someone asks me why I’m so strange and then I’d probably just laugh and say one of the voices in my head just told me a hilarious joke but they made me promise not to tell it to anyone cause it’s only meant for us to share and no one else to ever know about.
So what’s going on with you?
