Being different really OK?

A comment sometimes gets me to explore a situation a little more.


http://weareone-ruth.blogspot.com/2012/08/being-different-ok.html

vicariousrising said...
I've been getting increasingly comfortable in my "different" skin, but it's not always been this way. My mother liked to call me "odd" and "unique" (this latter was NOT a compliment), and it made me want to hide in a corner.

I wanted to hide my uniqueness; your comment sounds familiar.  My friend in Canada kindly posted a link to an awesome post on this subject.

Why You Should No Longer Care About Being Normal

http://www.purposefairy.com/7118/why-you-should-no-longer-care-about-being-normal/

The post hit five main points:

1. INSANITY –  TO BE NORMAL IS TO BE INSANE

2. COURAGE – IT TAKES GREAT COURAGE TO BE DIFFERENT

3. ACHIEVEMENT – Nothing great was ever achieved by normal people

4. EXCITEMENT – TO BE DIFFERENT IS A REAL ADVENTURE

5. IMAGINATION – UNIQUENESS REQUIRES IMAGINATION

My perspective on this post

1. Ever learned something new that gives you mental whiplash?  I had to read that first paragraph at least 3 times.  I spent years trying to become 'normal.'  The idea it is insane to be normal has me reassessing where I attempted to go for years.  Maybe it is more like taking blinders off a horse.  Whoa ~ there is a whole different world of possibilities.  

2. Yes, I agree 100% it does take courage to be different.  People made fun of me including my mother for some of my odder behaviors.  At the university I worked at, I found my niche.  I didn't mind being called odd there.  I hadn't realized it before but there my oddity was appreciated because I could make the computers and printers do what they wanted.  Odd was acceptable.  If felt good to be accepted.

3. Surviving day to day leaves little time for achievement.  I studied the Butterfly affect in my philosophy class.  I wrote a paper about how the Butterfly affect altered how scientists viewed every experiment.  The Bell curve of results in the past the scientists excluded the extremes and focused on the 'normal' results.  After the Butterfly affect and the chaos theory smashed the idea that normal was what needed to be studied, scientists noted that the amazing things happened in the extremes.

4. <Insert wry chuckle here> Being a multiple certainly led me into some fascinating adventures.  I need to reassess my thoughts on this.  I will agree that my photography takes me on many adventures.  I am planning another one during my next vacation. 

5. Imagination, photography opened up a whole new world for me.  Growing up as a child I was told more than once that I was an imaginative child.  I guarantee you it wasn't meant as a compliment.  I was being shamed into keeping my thoughts to myself.  Art classes and sewing unleashed a part of me that I always felt ashamed of, now I am embracing this wonderful gift. 

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” ~ Einstein 

http://thinkexist.com/quotation/imagination_is_more_important_than_knowledge-for/260230.html

I painted this in the faculty lunch room.