A newsroom colleague of mine called me an odd duck the other day.
He said he meant it as a compliment. I took it as one.
The older I get, the more I understand that if you are completely who you are without apology — without trying to be less than or more than others, just simply who you are — you are often an odd duck.
The way I define it, and the way I hope he meant it, is that I am unique. Unusual. And a little strange compared to everyone else.
High praise, especially in a newsroom, where you really want to find people who resist the herd mentality.
It surely has, for me, been a long time coming.
You see, I was raised in a culture and an era where it was important to worry about other people’s opinions. Back then, to bring up a young girl safely and successfully, mothers used this sentence a lot:
“Don’t (fill in the blank) or people will think you are (fill in the blank).”
There were a lot of those sentences when I was growing up and when we stopped listening to our mothers, we started saying those words to each other. It was very important to worry about what other people thought.
My best friend, who I met when I was 12 years old, was different from all the other girls. She was raised to care more about what she thought of herself than what other people thought of her.
I was mystified by that. As she and I moved through our lives, I watched her do battle, intellectually, everywhere she went. Swordfighting ignorance with her language and her brains. Trying to figure out the best thoughts, climbing the boulders of ignorance to get to the peaks of profound good sense.
Me, not so much. I kind of ambled everywhere I went, intellectually, socially, emotionally. Not making too many judgments, just observing. Spending more time trying to figure other people out then figuring myself out.
I like to think that our friendship has always been the perfect balance of yin and yang. In the thousands of conversations we’ve had since the day we meet in Mrs. Peppers’ ninth-grade algebra class, she’s taught me to question more, to think harder and to say what I think. In return, I hope I’ve at least helped her to see that life doesn’t have to be always lived with your saber drawn.
I never deliberately tried to care more about what I thought than about what other people thought of me. But, I kind of ambled into that place, learning that when I lived from that altitude, I was a happier human.
Funny, too, because if there was ever a business where worrying about what other people think of you is a spectacular waste of time, it’s this one. In this job, we are writing the living history of a region. We often tell intimate, important stories that deeply impact a lot of people’s lives.
Some days I am a hero. And some days, I am an idiot.
I surely have to care what other people think of me. But I have to care more about what I think of myself.
Just the other day, an e-mailer reminded me to question, question, question. As if I didn’t. Some days, you simply just don’t ask the right questions. I’m guessing that’s probably true for more people than just me. But I did hear him. And every time I ask the wrong question and get burned for it, I get better at asking questions.
I do this work because I care about other people. But when it comes to other people’s opinions of me, I am really trying to always check in with myself first. It’s a evolving self-awareness that seeps into my lifestyle as well. When I’m searching for what to believe or how to think or what to do next, I check with me first. How will that thought or action make me feel inside? Asking that question seems to be working out pretty well for me.
As near as I can tell, I am a getting to be a perfectly fine odd duck.
So, I thanked my colleague when he called me that. But, what I didn’t tell him is that he is a perfectly fine odd duck, too.
I also didn’t say, “birds of a feather ... ”
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