Wonderfully Weird

I have always been a weird girl. In fact, I have made my career out of it.

It’s something I embrace now, but it caused me great pain in my younger years. I remember how painful it was not to be like other people. To be taller, or shorter, or to think differently, or to experience the world in ways that were seen as deviant to the norm. I could feel my difference. It wasn’t something you could see. It was the wrong runners. What my mum put on my sandwiches. It was my scabbed knees. My tallness. Me.

When I was 15 I was playing basketball for Queensland. I was in Perth at the National Championships and our team had a day off. It was decided that we should go to the movies. As the daughter of a single mum who lived on the widow’s pension, I had never travelled before, so being in Perth was exotic. I had spent almost a week inside a basketball stadium, the idea of being inside a cinema seemed to be wasteful of this wonderful opportunity to explore our surroundings. I suggested that we get the train to Freemantle, or that we go to the gallery, or a museum. The team manager was a woman in her 40s who clearly didn’t like me. She found me difficult and didn’t appreciate the challenge. She’d decided that we girls would like to go see Flashdance. I told her I didn’t want to go. That I didn’t want to see Flashdance. That I was happy to stay behind and maybe go to a park and read a book.

Well that was enough for her, she lost it. I copped this massive rampage where she yelled, ‘Everyone else wants to see Flashdance. What’s wrong with you? You’re not like the other girls. Mandy Nolan you are a freaky weird girl.’ I didn’t argue back. I quietly took the abuse. Those words pierced my skin, and they confirmed everything I had often thought about myself. That I wasn’t the same. That something about me was wrong or shameful. I still remember how much I cried. How humiliated and powerless I felt.

Later that day I sat in the cinema and I watched Flashdance. I cried in the dark. The enjoyment of everyone else just confirmed that feeling of isolation and aloneness. Even now I can’t hear that theme song without the flush of shame settling on my body. It’s definitely my trigger song.

I sometimes think comedy was my therapy – it was how I took charge of shame. That if I exposed myself, then no one could expose me. In an unexpected way it made me start to love my dark places. To appreciate that as I grew up, the sad little girl with the crooked fringe who’d survived domestic violence and poverty and the death of her father, who’d navigated the pity of strangers and the inner catastrophe of my very public loss, learned to laugh at the hard things. Eventually. It was a survival tool. What doesn’t kill you, definitely makes you blonder.

So now, when I hear people speak unkindly to young people it triggers me. Careless words from an adult can become part of a young person’s marrow. It’s not just ok to be different, it’s awesome. Being weird used to be my shame but now it’s my super power.

I now embrace my weird girl. In fact, I love her. And I know that it’s the weird girl in me that others love too. Mostly. I hope that other people get to love and enjoy their weird girl selves.

There’s probably a weird kid in your family. Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s that darling baby who just won’t sleep.

Michael Franti sang: ‘All the freaky weird people make the beauty of the world’. So it must be true. Weird, isn’t it!

Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox column has appeared in The Echo for almost 23 years. The personal and the political often meet here; she’s also been the Greens federal candidate since before the last federal election. The Echo’s coverage of political issues will remain as comprehensive and fair as it has ever been, outside this opinion column which, as always, contains Mandy’s personal opinions only.