Awesome Friend, Meet Awesome Friend!
When two well-established parts of your life collide, the results can be unpredictable.
When two well-established parts of your life collide, the results can be unpredictable.
“People who are grieving walk with death, every waking moment. When the rest of us dread that we’ll somehow remind them of death’s existence, we are missing their reality.”
[Image credit: quickmeme.com]
I just saw the most amazing TED talk called Coming Out of Your Closet by Ash Beckham. It’s only 11 minutes long, but it’s really profound, so I hope you’ll take the time to watch it.
In it, she talks about the closets in which we all occasionally find ourselves. Closets are not just for people who are afraid to admit they’re gay. We all have them. If you are carrying around a secret that’s eating you up inside, or if you are avoiding having a really hard conversation with someone, then you are in a closet, too.
You don’t have to be struggling with your orientation to feel as if you are alone in the dark. You might not want to admit that you want a divorce. Or you may have to tell someone you have a terminal illness, or you have to confess that you’ve just lost your job and may therefore lose your house. We all have our hard truths that need to be spoken.
Recently I had to come clean to my family and friends that I had lost my entire life savings, what little of it there was, in a really stupid investment. I had been carrying around that stress and anxiety for a couple of years. I didn’t want to tell anyone because I felt like such a complete and utter fool. I didn’t want the people I love to think less of me, or get angry at me for going against their advice. But one day I woke up and I couldn’t carry the burden alone anymore. And you know what? Each confessional phone call was easier than the last, because every single person I spoke to was supportive. And just like that, it felt like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. It was such a relief that I almost became nauseous from the abrupt halt of the adrenaline that had been impacting my health for years. It was honestly the best thing I have done in a long time.
Closets seem safe and quiet and cozy, but as Ash Beckham says, they’re no place for you to live. I encourage you to come out and play.
All my life I have surrounded myself with people who don’t quite fit in. My best friend calls it my propensity for adopting three-legged dogs. I suspect that it started out because of my low self-esteem in childhood. I didn’t think I could possibly be liked by the popular crowd, whom I perceived to be vastly superior to me. But over time I learned that the truly quality people, the interesting ones, the ones with back stories to overcome, were the misfits. Adversity builds character, after all.
If I noticed someone being picked on by the in-crowd simply for being different, or because, like the sharks that they were, they smelled blood in the water, I was drawn to that person. The socially awkward, the physically deformed, the out of style, the desperately poor, or the just plain odd…those were my kind of people.
Those of us who zig when we should be zagging, I suspect, value friendship most of all. We know that making the extra effort reaps great rewards. Misfits don’t pressure you to be anything other than who you are. They aren’t judging you, or expecting you to fit into some rigidly defined box. It must be exhausting to be popular and spend so much of your time and energy trying to remain so. I’ve come to realize that it’s the popular people who are really the ones who are desperate to fit in. By not fitting in, I’ve made some friends for life, and I’ll always be grateful for that.
Conformity is the worst kind of insult to one’s spirit. I learned that the hard way. Someone whose opinion I valued greatly once told me I was going to go to hell because my religious beliefs were not identical to hers. That really devastated me for a while. But then one day I finally grasped the fact that I wouldn’t want to go to her version of heaven. Any place where none of my friends would be welcome, and where everyone has to be exactly the same, would be a boring place indeed, and no place I would want to be.
So let your freak flag fly. Bask in your bizarreness. No doubt I’ll like you all the more for it. And so will all the best people.