Being weird.

I was brought up in the notion that being different is good, that being weird in some ways implies being superior. This is probably a sort of defensive rhetoric that people use to console themselves. But it gave me an acute sense of respect for originality, for deviating from norms, and also a feeling that I too should be respected for my own deviations.

In the real world however, deviation is not respected but by a few stuffy intellectuals here and there -probably also more out of self defense than anything else. What gets respect, what is admired is always things that fit well within the norms, that even in relative originality still contain a large conventional part, or are an expression of an already generally felt sentiment.

One can really only be either weird or popular. And I would probably be a much happier person if I would just accept that and stop having any kind of expectations of recognition, let alone success. Success is not for the weird. And I just don’t have it in me to be normal. Miss-educated, I’m sure. Or born in the wrong age, whatever.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t see how my work and words relate to their context, how they perhaps influenced things, or at least were ahead of their time. I should just not expect anybody else to recognize this, let alone find any value in it.

Because there isn’t much, I think. My parents greatly exaggerated the superiority of originality or being different, and overestimated its importance. It’s much more important, and even influential, to live within one’s own time, to expand on ideas that are shared by many. Anything else is just yelling in the desert. Pointless.

I can’t stop yelling. But I can stop expecting people to actually hear me. After all, I don’t really need them, do I?

I wish they would stop the dominant rhetoric of originality being desirable, the encouragement to “think different”, to have ideas “out of the box”. It’s all a lie. People cannot comprehend the extraordinary. Per definition. Only the ordinary is comprehensible.