I was very sensitive. My parents have said they rarely spanked my brother and I because it would have been useless. They could have spanked my brother for an hour and he would have just looked at them calmly and said, "are you done?" They said with me they only needed to look at me funny and I would burst into tears.
I grew up on a farm and my memories are largely of being alone in nature.
I do have a memory of my brother and I doing a chicken dance to a 45 record of chickens clucking "in the mood." Still makes me smile. So my appreciation of quirk started young.
My mom had a plaque on the wall with this saying:
"I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant"
She said it was because that's what having conversations with me was like. I think she found me a little frustrating and enjoyed me. She was infp.
I was socially awkward and picked on. My mom was not the kind of mom that made sure her kids were clean and well-dressed. I was called "Raggedy Ann" by my classmates in elementary school, but I was so disengaged I didn't know it until they told me about it as an adult.
I was a major clutz. Boys would walk next to me in the halls, mock tripping over their feet and mockingly tell me "don't trip."
I was befriended by a popular girl in high school who saw
potential in me. I became popular as her sidekick. Then a few years later, I had enough of her mean girl shit and separated. I settled in with two very different best friends. One was an evangelical Christian who had a rough home life like me (just a stepdad instead of stepmom). She wanted to save me and invited me to bible studies at her church. I went and was open, but she knew I didn't believe. I did like the warmth of the community. My other best friend was the child of a hippie mother who loved Bon Jovi and Metallica and Stephen King. She was smart and thought critically about things in a way that was unusual in our small school. After a break-up with a boyfriend she wished, out of anger, that he would die in a fiery car crash. Then he did. My Christian friend was convinced my other friend had cursed him. Aside from the obvious pain that a life was gone, I found the conflict between the way these two people experienced the world, and my ability to like and connect with both of them, kind of humorous.
I became Snow Princess (second tier to homecoming queen), mostly because I was nice to people, and people actually like you when you're nice. Not that I thought that then. I was just nice because I genuinely like people and see interesting and likable qualities in most people.
Interesting memory lane. I could keep going, but out of kindness, I'll stop.
I will leave you with this bit of quirk from my childhood, though:
