Weird people are the best.  As a grad student in psychology and an academic advisor of a couple thousand psychology majors, I'm quite accustomed to weird.  Psychology majors tend to be weirder than most...we always say "research is me-search" and given that the topic of psychology research is generally abnormality in human thought and behavior..yeah...we see a lot of that in our students.

While I am now comfortable sitting in the weird, this was not always the case.  As I've shared before, I like order and predictability.  I prefer coloring in the lines, following the rules, complying with social convention, and using my manners over making waves and standing out.  That's my shtick, and I like people who do the same.  They're predictable and easy to be friends with because they don't challenge me or make me feel uncomfortable.  Weird people however, weird people do weird things.  They are unpredictable, they take chances, they speak out of turn, and they have atypical social skills.  Weird people make me profoundly uncomfortable.

So how did I, despite my fear of abnormality and obvious dislike of discomfort, become a person who embraces weirdness and weird people?  I made myself do it.  I made myself sit with it.  Sit with the awkward, the out of place, the profoundly uncomfortable.  Actually, I can't say that I made myself do that, it's more like I was forced to do it.  In my daily life surrounded by entirely abnormal amounts of abnormal, I had no choice but to interact with people who put me on edge and made me wonder what was going to happen next.  And when I was forced to tolerate the discomfort of not knowing what was going on, and not being in control, I realized how AMAZING weird people are.

Weird people are the ones who say the things we're thinking.  They go out of their way to be friendly (most of the time overly-friendly) unlike the "normal" people out there.  They have the most fascinating interests, life experiences, and hobbies.  Weird people make me think when I talk to them.  They make me wonder why I believe and like the things that I do, which I would otherwise take for granted.

Best of all?  Best of all is that weird people always leave me wondering if they were even that weird to being with.  Actually, I usually end up wondering if it's me that's the weird one.

It's funny how tolerating discomfort can be so rewarding.  Who would have thought?

Keep on thinking,
Josie