The Perks of Being Odd

There's a moment, sandwiched between the time you enter high school, and the years you spend at college, where you finally become comfortable with yourself, with who you are.

For me, this confidence emerged right around junior year, and continued to grow in strength throughout the remaining portion of my high school years. Some mighty strange things happened during my second semester of senior year, folks. I unleashed the weird upon the entirety of my classmates like you would not believe.

And in that moment, I embraced the truth: I was odd.



There's this song by Arcade Fire that goes:

Is anything as strange as a normal person? Is anyone as cruel as a normal person? Waiting after school for you they want to know if you, if you're normal too. Well, are you? Are you?

And it's practically begging to be the next anthem for high school outcasts worldwide. The so called odd people, the ones that aren't "normal."

What's weird is that when you're in high school, everyone is trying to be something that they're not, or something that they think they have to be. For this reason, I had a wrong self image of myself during my high school years.

I went through my teens thinking I was weird, because that's what everyone else told me I was. Then I got to college, and saw that there were others who had the same penchant for writing and creating (and laughing!) as I did. And anyone who had tried to stifle that joy was the one with the real issues.



While no one was overtly mean to me in high school, there was a lot of tension. Maybe it was my own insecurity that projected this kind of hierarchy in my head. Now I see that there's really no such thing as a popular person, or a normal person. We're all just kids trying to grow up during the awkward pains of our adolescent years. And while some of us choose to put on a pretty face and pretend that everything is fine, perfectly normal, I'd rather be odd.