I am a capable weirdo.

lizshine74by lizshine74

In Memoir.

I am a capable weirdo.

I’ve managed to contain my PTSD into a neat little container. I can’t drive on the freeway. If I do, I panic. Panic of the sort that in my teens and early twenties could hit me while brushing my teeth or standing in line at the store, irrational fears that all the worst things that can happen will happen in the worst way and there is nothing I can do about it.
This past couple of weeks I had a situation come up where I had to face the shame of the fact that I do not drive on the freeway in a way that really got under my skin. It became clear to me as I communicated with several people about my plans for a trip that did not involve me driving a rental car, but instead involved careful planned taxis, public transport, and ride sharing, that no one else did those things in this situation. I kept getting met with pushback. This stirred my thinking about how intolerant most of us are for personality differences and quirks. Worse? I’ve bought into that crap all my life.
Our bigotry is evident everywhere. We use words like “issues”, “illness”, and “strange” to describe people who think and act differently than we do. We try to hide our quirks and differences, spend time and money trying to fix them. We are all so afraid of crazy, we leave no room for eccentricities. We live in shame of our every strangeness.
Now I know that there are some pockets of society where we accept strangeness and eccentricity, but as a whole, we do not.
I’m tired of pretending.
I am a nutcase at times. I battle anxiety, sometimes depression. I have shades of OCD in my obsession with organization and keeping things in their place. At times of highest stress, I get eczema on my hands and then I run scalding water them to relieve the itch and give temporary relief because the pain stops the itching. When there is pain, there is only pain. I am extremely reticent around strangers. I battle insecurity and feel inferior on a daily basis.
I am a capable weirdo and I wouldn’t want me any other way. My weirdness pervades every aspect of who I am. What needs fixing is our obsession with fixing everyone to make them the same. Perhaps if we embraced our own strangeness we could find a way to embrace the strangeness of those people who are truly mentally ill and in need of our love and support, not our fear.

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Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.