I want to take you back to what might be a scary place…a place you’ve exiled in your pool of memories, a place called… grade school.

I want you to let your brain flood with the images and memories of your 4th grade self. To take a moment to remember how it felt. Do you remember how you felt about yourself during that time? Do you remember what your social standing was? Did you ever feel like you were just…weird?

I was the weird kid. At age 11, I  preferred bright yellow hand-me-down overalls to… whatever was cool. I wore my hair in two long braided pleats, as if the crooked bangs cut by my Mother weren’t enough

Of course being a weird kid went much deeper than second hand clothes (and even deeper than the obsessive rock-collecting, zelda-playing and drawings of people I wanted to be).

The weirdness stemmed deep, it seemed I was on the outside of my school, my  family. I can remember hating crowd participation, never wanting to do the chicken dance. The weird kid is alien, seeing cultural norms and socially accepted behavior but choosing not to participate.

On the first day of 4th grade, I immediately went to my friends from the previous year. As we walked around the balance beam all they could talk about was how they had started shaving their legs over the summer and how cool they were.

I walked away, knowing that this was something I was not interested in.

I think a strong sense of self is the common thread among weird kids, which is such a valuable and elusive quality of character. It is what many of us spend our adult lives trying to delicately maintain or achieve. So why do so many of us push away the weird kid inside of us and the memories of the world they inhabited?

As an adult, it makes sense that at times we’d repress the inner-weird-kid, in the work place and other social situations letting the weird inner-child just take over could result in blank stares, murmurs and exile all over again. But listening to the weird kid doesn’t mean letting that aspect of your personality take over, those of us with inner-weird kids are lucky to have them as guides, and should let them have a say, a place in who we are!

A friend once said to me, “I think I was never as wise as I was at age 10″ and this always stuck with me. Those wise ten year old’s  haven’t gone anywhere and their wisdom is still strangely spot-on.