We are all weird

I’ve been reading a lot of posts on social media which are helping me to understand the varieties of human experience and attitudes. There are posts about all sorts of ways of doing things, big and small.

I used to be in market research and dealt with surveys that collected data. Most results are distributed on a bell curve. You can calculate the mean or average. But most people don’t choose an answer that is the average one. Usually there’s a lot of people who answer somewhere around the average, but there are always people who answer on the edges. Sometimes that causes a problem, but most often, it just is.

We are all on the edges on something. We all have our own quirks and weirdness. The posts I read include things like whether we wash our legs in shower (who knew this was a thing?), how often we wash our towels (every time we use them versus whenever), what we eat, when we go to bed, etc. My personal sleep schedule is weird, I know that and I need to explain it to people when it interferes with what they want to do with me.

More stories: a friend of mine whose roommate who would only do things on the hour or half hour. The roommate would wait to run an errand if it didn’t fit that schedule. Here’s another story about that roommate from my friend. “Speaking of cookies, she liked Oreo filling, but felt there wasn’t enough. I preferred the cookie part but didn’t like the filling. So we’d split all the Oreo’s and she’d make “double-stuffed” Oreos (long before that was an item) and I’d eat the cookies. Unless she had licked the filling off!!!”

We tend to hide those quirks, we want to fit in and appear “normal”. But there is no real normal.

Next time if there is something that bothers you in conversation with a loved one, that doesn’t hurt them or others, just say to yourself, “ok, that’s their quirk”.

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