IT'S NOT EASY BEING A WEIRD GIRL

This is my first piece of creative writing that I have done on here. I spent valentine's day in my bed on my phone writing it with nothing in my stomach but a strawberry mini milk. Please be nice!!

When I dance i am in my own world with the music. I feel the rhythm in my bones and the lyrics in my heart. It’s not enough for me to hear the song, I have to BECOME it. To me it's such a simple, intuitive act, but nobody else understands how I'm able to dance like I do. Which makes me wonder - is something distracting them? Are they afraid of the gaze of others? Are they afraid of attracting attention? Are they afraid of how they might look? Are they afraid to be childish? Are they afraid of their inner child?

Being a whimsical girl can be so lonely sometimes.

Because sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who actually NOTICES how beautiful the world is.

Sometimes being so much more aware of all the beauty and significance in the world than than everybody else can make you feel like you live in a different world to everyone else

A world where every moment has the intensity of a thousand lightning bolts, where every flower smells like magic, where the sky always looks like the gates to heaven, where every bite of food is delightful. Where everything is rich and meaningful. Where everything is worthy of grunts and squeals and moans of joy.

The only problem is that I live here completely on my own.

Out in the "real world" (AKA the world as perceived by people who lost their whimsy long ago) people are mean. Skies are just grey. Being yourself is too frivolous. They judge you for enjoying things. They call you “corny” for seeing meaning where they don't. They judge you for your willingness to be weird, vulnerable and silly in pursuit of a more magical and splendid life.

It takes a lot of loneliness to become whimsical. It takes a lot of rejection from outer society to choose to live in your own little world.

Sometimes I wish that I could just live in the same world as everybody else, where the sky is grey and miserable, where things are shit, where whimsy is childish, naive and shunned. Because at least it wouldn't be lonely. At least I'd have other people to bitch and moan and judge and have a drink down the pub with.

Whimsy is seen as a soft and gentle thing, but truly, you know you're truly whimsical when people start being INTIMIDATED by you. When they start viewing you as having a “big, unassailable aura of confidence and self assurance about you” (as one girl told me). People actually begin to almost fear you.

Think of Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter. The gentlest, sweetest, kindest girl, and yet she appears distant. She appears to be carrying something that others don't understand in her soul. And so most people are unsettled and intimidated by her, and as a result she is bullied and shunned.

I carry something in my soul that others don't understand, and which makes them afraid. But all it is is wholeness and a sense of connection to myself. A deep understanding that trying to fit in to the world around me (that never understood me anyway, even when I tried my utmost to break myself down into little pieces to make myself digestible and easy to understand) was always going to be a futile pursuit, so instead I was forced to connect to myself.

I had to befriend myself because I couldn't make friends with anybody else. I had to learn to love being alone because I had no other options. I had to learn to love myself because nobody else did. I had to understand myself because nobody else understood me.

From time to time, I am approached and noticed by people:

Usually by 2 different types of men. Some see my nonjudgmental and accepting nature and crave it for themself. They themselves are insecure and awkward. They hope that I will be the one to accept them, to fix them, to make them more confident. And I do accept them. But truth be told, I am not really "confident". I accept others but I am still afraid that I myself am unacceptable. I hold space for others but I am still afraid that I am too much. I don't repress myself anymore, but I am still afraid that secretly others all cringe at me. These men are only thinking about themselves, and don't have the capacity to nurture the real, vulnerable, sad and sensitive me behind the veneer of confidence.

There is another type of man who notices me. The ones who are charismatic, unafraid to talk to women, and unafraid to speak their minds. And they tell me in earnest how attractive they find me. They make me feel truly seen. They tell me they like me because I'm not boring "like everybody else". Perhaps they say the thing out loud that most people think but keep to themselves. That in nature, every magnet has two poles. A woman who isn't afraid to be repulsive, weird, embarrassing, perhaps even REPUGNANT. Is, ironically, a woman who is wildly attractive. These are the men who truly flatter me. They feel like a home that I have never known before, and make me feel so wantable. I become so humiliatingly, humiliatingly attached, intense and insane over them that whatever untenable, alien, untouchable, beyond human erotic appeal I held to them ends up vanishing. They like my authenticity, until I authentically tell them how humiliatingly much I need them, and want to merge my soul with theirs, and how badly I want to experience human connection in its rawest, most childlike, most ancient form with them. I am human, and desperate, and I need to be loved just like everybody else does. And in that regard, I am in fact just like everybody else. My attention stops being a prize to them, and starts becoming a weight.

I get noticed by women too. "Normie" girls will see my unafraidness to wear bold outfits and throw moves on the dancefloor, sometimes telling me "you're such a queen!!" They assume my confidence in self expression to be a sign of social status. A sign that other people hold me in such high regard-- I am so much of a “Queen Bee” -- that I am able to do whatever I want. They place me on a pedestal because in their world, freedom can only come from popularity, so they think I must be “popular”. I'm conventionally attractive, skinny and blonde, so this illusion holds up for a bit. But I fall down from the pedestal when they truly see me for who I am. They see it in my lack of eye contact. They see it in the ways I tense up uncomfortably when they try to take my hands and dance with me. I can't dance in their polished, restricted, scripted, physically flaunting but emotionally unexpressive way. It becomes clear to them that I am not a popular girl. In fact I have never even been near a social hierarchy in my life.

I never received permission from anybody else to take up the amount of space in this world that I do. I was always the kid who was scorned by the popular people in high school. The whispered murmurings of "What's wrong with her? I don't know, there's just something off about her" heard thoughout the grapevine in high school. And now being thought by them too.

And just like that, I fall off that pedestal, I fall a thousand feet to the domain of the outlandish, the undesirable, the greasy haired, the crusty eyed, the untouchable, the irrelevant, where I am forgotten, yet still stiffly smiled at when they see me



My favourite people to be noticed by are my fellow weird girls. Every morning, I think of them while I'm looking at myself in the mirror, getting ready. I try to style myself in a way that is beautiful and polished, but also somehow twisted and esoteric, as if to say I know loneliness. I know anguish. I know longing and I know love. I look at willow trees and I see myself. I AM like a willow tree. You can sit beneath me in your darkest moments and I will shelter you. You are safe with me. I try to look like a walking emotion. The outro from Iris by the goo goo dolls might as well be playing in my soul as I choose what to wear

I just want you to know who I am

I just want you to know who I am

I just want you to know who I am.

Not all of them are even girls. They can truly be any gender. But I know them when I see them.

God. I crave female validation and female acceptance in a borderline romantic way. Even though the thing that I yearn for is very much platonic. A platonic bond is the most powerful of them all, as it must be held together by a motivation more powerful than wanting to fuck or wanting to kiss or wanting to caress. It's a huge kind of love that I'm after in my interactions with my fellow weird girls.

A love that fixes all the wounds we grew up with telling us that we don't deserve to have female friendship. The wounds within all us extraordinary, eccentric women that none of us are good enough for each other. That none of us deserve friends. That none of us should make the first move or shoot our shot. That we should all continue to fear each other’s radiance and remain shy and stick to being friends with guys (who lets be honest, don't understand us as well as we want them to, and all too often stick around partly because they want to fuck us) because guys just feel EASIER.

A love not of youthful frivolity or of talking stages or of false hope followed by heartbreak, but a love to last a lifetime and beyond, and to tinge our lives with meaning. A love to not just be shared with one person, but to surround us from all angles. A love to terraform the impossible strangeness and shyness we were born into as something we can easily and peacefully live with. A love to become forever part of us. A love to become a community. A love to populate our funerals with people who knew us well, and who will write us beautiful speeches that truly capture who we were, not just how we appeared outwardly to others.

As I take their hands and twirl them on the dancefloor, this is what I am secretly yearning for. Some of them are out there and "confident" like I am. And some of them are subdued, repressed, colder, more afraid. I love them all exactly as they are

Because no mask that we wear is 100% effective. There's a hole in the mouth and a hole in the eyes where truth will always slip out. In every weird girl, I always see the cracks in the veneer, the chinks of light coming through from their souls that they couldn't quite mask. I've gotten very good at this.

And whatever slips out I meet with joy and enthusiasm and tenderness, and try to encourage more of by showing some of my own inner light in return. Nothing makes me prouder or fonder than a strange girl radiating her inner light.

In a world where everything is ever shifting and confusing and uncertain, I seek people who hold the eternal sunshine of a strangeness that will never die, and cannot be fixed, and hums like a steady undercurrent throughout their life, unchanging, through all things that they do.

I too share the same eternal hum, the same awkward font of being. I can't select another font from the list, no matter what I do. And I think that this shared font of being, despite being from different families, sometimes even from different COUNTRIES, is permanently binding. It's what makes somebody a soulmate, really.



This essay is a call to action to all the weird girls reading. I'm telling you to shoot your friendship shot with the cool weird girl with the eyeliner and the piercings and the creative talent who you have always admired. And stop being so intimidated by all your fellow weird girls. We all need to get more comfortable around each other, reach out to one another and build community. I don't have the answers on how to do this, but I know that it must be done.

Only in the past 10 years have autistic women even started to get diagnosed. We have obviously always existed, but we have only recently started being counted, started to find out who we are, and that what we are cannot be changed, and should instead be embraced.

It's not easy being a weird girl, especially since there just aren't many of us, and that's why we need each other. It's hard to know where you belong. In a world where we’ve often felt too girlish to sit with the nerdy kids but too weird to sit with the normie kids, it's hard to believe that other people like us even exist at all. But we exist. I am one of them.

I believe in our ability to find each other. To cherish each other, to be fond of each other, to hold soft spots for each other, to hype each other up, to build each other up, to support each other’s endeavours and to be proud of each other

Because what's better than a group of weird girls being themselves, being loud, being feral, being unladylike, and ignoring social expectations together? Nothing. We will save the world. forget terraforming mars, autistic women will terraform earth, each in our own small little ways, into a safer place for all the strangeness and light of the human soul.