It’s a Ziggy Stardust kind of day.

My favorite people in the world are authentically weird. I think they’ve all made me wince at some point with their weirdness. It wasn’t anything wrong with them. I was wincing at the parts of me that were uncomfortable for me to deal with at the time. Knowing these people gave me permission to be more me than I allowed myself to be before.

It was not always fun times. But now it is. I was so scared of rejection. And with good reason. But hiding my weirdness didn’t serve me. Finally asking for what I needed and wanted and deserved did lead to rejection but it also taught me a lot about myself and the person I was asking.

If you have ever dealt with insecure people, you can see how exhausting they are. They exhaust themselves with backflips to appear amenable. Or appear confident. And then they’ll undermine the whole thing because they’re so unhappy. It’s manipulative. And it becomes obvious and exhausting to the people around them. They might be liked but they’ll never be respected. And when they’re not in the room, no one misses them. They didn’t have enough essence to be missed.

I used to be one of them. I didn’t have a spine. It happens to a lot of women. We’re told strong opinions aren’t feminine. We’re told anger and darkness isn’t cute. We’re told to just give and give and base our worth on external validation.

Fuck cute. Fuck pretty. Try being a cute, pretty 60 year old woman with integrity who flips her hair and negs men to get what she wants. That woman doesn’t exist. Sally Field couldn’t even pull it off. At some point you have to confront the not-so-pretty parts of yourself and become the badass weirdo you really are or you’ll turn into a bag of skin with nothing but jello inside. I don’t care if you like me. Nothing about me is here to be liked. I’m here to be me. If people aren’t hip to the inherent value in that, they’re missing out. They can listen to top 40 hits and judge from the rafters. I’m here for Bowie. I’m here for the unapologetic. I’m here for the real.

If I’m making you uncomfortable, maybe ask yourself why. It might be the beginning of some interesting exploration.