I walked into my bedroom the other day and as I put my clothes back in the closet and got out my pj’s, I glanced at the painting I’d purchased a few months ago. It was leaned against the wall right where I left it, waiting to be hung up.
It’s a colorful painting — it takes up space, brightens the whole room. It has just about every color in it — light green, orange, red, hot pink, and in thick lines down the page, these colors fill the canvas.
In the middle of the painting, there’s this thick golden white light. It doesn’t look like it was necessarily meant to be there, but then again, it doesn’t look like it wasn’t meant to be there. I was trying to figure it out why it still looks good, even though it’s essentially just disrupting the whole picture…
It’s so confident and powerful and bright that it just brings all the colors together effortlessly.
…At least that’s the conclusion I came to.
…
So the other day, I was thinking about how funny it is that, as humans, the things that seemingly make us “on the outs” of society — our weird, vulnerable, quirky selves — are actually the things that connect us with others.
Without these weird internal selves, we wouldn’t have the need to connect with others. Each of us would already have a strong knowing about the way other people think, and the ways in which they know and imagine the world to be. But we don’t. So we share. And engage. And get to know others.
But unfortunately, people put up walls to protect these things — scared of the weird and the out there parts of ourselves.
But the thing is — everyone has this weird side to them. Everyone grapples with shame and embarrassment and suppression, and having qualities deemed “not good enough” in the eyes of society.
And the more we choose to give in to the notion that there’s something wrong with those things, the less we get to connect with others through those things.
So I was thinking about the painting, and how the seemingly ‘out there’ parts of it, were actually the things that drew all the colors together. It was because the golden white light shined so confidently over and throughout the page, no one questioned whether or not it was meant to be there. It just was.
We need this in our lives. We need the golden white lights — the quirks, the “out there”, the unique-ness. And we need them to express themselves unapologetically, because these quirks are quite literally what blends us together.
This painting, pressed up against the wall in my bedroom, reminded me that the closer we get to those weird parts of ourselves, the closer we are to sharing those things with others, and the closer we are to having a complete, radiant-looking picture of a life.
Quirks are the superpower.
