Everyone’s weird, and I’m so relieved about it.
Every time I find out that someone does something strange, it’s a huge relief to me. Relief. I think that’s the right word. Let me explain.
There’s this veneer of professionalism that we rub all over ourselves in the workplace as we pretend we’re all the same shade of corporate beige: a mass of industrial automata, hellbent on meeting our quarterly objectives. We’re all seasoned technology professionals here, experienced at leading people through change and operational management.
And then, sometimes, in the office, among the meetings and the RACI’s and RAGs and Risks and Issues you catch a glimpse of a human with particular preferences. Maybe someone will leave lying around a photo of the giant tree-house they’re building in their garden. “Oh,” you’ll say, “I didn’t know you had children.”
“I don’t,” they’ll say.
“But the tree-house?”
“Oh that’s just for me.”
A friend of mine at University used to occasionally glance at the clock and then clap to herself. She explained that when she looked at the clock and she spotted a pattern in the time (such as 12:34 or 11:11 or 12:21) she clapped the pattern to herself.
It’s a little obsessive and a smidge compulsive, but this wasn’t obsessive compulsive disorder. This was a quirky choice.
Over the last few years, I’ve grown more and more to love quirky choices.
Calling these things “weird” or “strange” does them a disservice. On the whole, people don’t like being weird. We have a natural herding instinct, a piece of legacy software in our brains left over from the days when if you were different from the pack a saber-toothed tiger would come and pick you off. Or maybe there’s some other cod-psychological explanation. Maybe saber-toothed tigers didn’t co-exist with early man. It doesn’t really matter. It’s a thing. We don’t like being weird.
And so we bury all these unique, special preferences deep down and slather on the beige conformity. My hobbies? Why I like watching TV, travelling and socializing with friends. Maybe add in a little bland personal preference: I also like scuba diving and playing cricket. Hobbies that reveal preference, but not individuality. We don’t reveal the real us: I’m quite partial to picking scabs on my elbows and I have a favourite pair of scissors.
Sometimes, in the midst of all the the professional conformity at work I have this sudden fear that there’s something wrong with me. Maybe no one else has a favourite spoon? Maybe they just grab whichever one is in the drawer, and when someone lays the table and gives them one of the rubbish spoons, they don’t swallow a little gulp of disappointment. Maybe they just trot through life, one straight-forward encounter to the next.
And then you get those moments. Someone tells you that they’ve found a brand of dental floss they really like because of the way it feels on their tongue or that sometimes when they’re on their own in the office they pretend to be a windup robot running out of charge.
And it’s in those moments I get a sense of relief. And I’m not sure if the relief is from the realization that I’m human, or that they’re human.
At University I came across a quotation somewhere. Despite hunting for it extensively and asking the sorts of people who I thought would know, I’ve not been able to find it again. If you know where it came from, please let me know, because I’m probably going to butcher it and I’d love to see if my memory (and internalisation) of it is the same as was intended. I’m starting to wonder if I made it up now, but it doesn’t feel like sort of thing that would come from my brain.
It went something like this:
The novel is the most moral of all literary and artistic forms because it is the most specific.
It caught in my mind for two reasons:
- I’ve never categorized artistic forms in terms of their specificity before. It feels quite a strange thing to do. Is sculpture more specific than libretto? It’s like a Buddhist kōan.
- It hasn’t occurred to me before that specificity would be correlated with morality in any way.
Initially it felt like one of those bold academic statements that don’t really hold in the real world and require strange re-definitions of common words. But as I’ve chewed it over, it’s become to feel real and say something quite important to me about my love of literature, narrative and life. I know, now I sound like those cod academic statements that don’t hold real meaning. But stick with me.
Perhaps this is nothing more than a fancy way of saying what Atticus Finch said in To Kill a Mockingbird:
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.
But I think it is. Because, while what Atticus says is true, it doesn’t tell you how to climb into someone’s skin.
Specificity gives you something concrete to hold onto, and tells you something about our route to understanding each other. It’s the specific details of someone else’s life that allow us to connect, and connection prompts a moral response. In fact, maybe connection is the moral response.
And perhaps that’s what I feel when someone lowers the professional portcullis and lets slip that they collect Smarties lids or really look forward to their sneezes.
Of course there are two bits to revealing this specificity.
Firstly, the obvious one. You have to have the confidence to reveal these private, inner pieces of your experience. And that’s not easy. When do you even do it in the workplace? AOB? At team drinks? Pop them in your email signature? You fear, of course, that people will respond with derision. These are moments of attempted connection, of expression of your own inner experience. And when you reach for connection, there’s always the chance that you will be rejected. That your feeling will not be reciprocated. The thing is, sometimes I feel more connected to someone when they reveal an insight into their experience of life that I don’t share. What we both have in common is our own unique experience of life.
Secondly, and less obviously, before you can even think about how you might share one of these thoughts or preferences, you have to be able to recognize it in yourself. We all have these small things, of course. Some are almost universal and have become bland in their repetition — the cold side of the pillow on a hot day and so on. But it requires something special on your part, I think, to spot your own specific ones. Possibly you even repress these feelings in the face of adulthood? Who has a favourite pair of scissors for Christ’s sake? We’re adults. We have things to do. Bills to pay, people to set OKRs for and so on. No time for the small joy of cutting paper with your preferred equipment.
And perhaps these two things are rare — self reflective insight and openness. Openness to the preference and to share it with others. And perhaps that’s why I feel relief and joy when someone shares one of these with me.
And so, I’ll leave with you with a couple of my own:
- Sometimes when left on my own, I wobble my kneecaps to myself.
- I have a preferred sink for brushing my teeth in because I like how the toothpaste behaves in it.
I’m a weirdo, and I hope that’s a relief to you. It is to me.
