"Be Yourself" Only Works For People Who Aren't Annoying
In defense of letting the freak flag fly at half mast.
Somewhere along the way, people got “geeky” and “unlikable” mixed up.
Geeky people aren’t unlikable. Well, they can be, but their geekiness is not the reason. Stereotypically geeky interests in anime, comic books, fantasy franchises, D&D or anything adjacent are actually incredibly common, if not a great jumping off point to make friends. I concede that being a geek can be challenging during adolescence, when (depending on your generation) you felt judged if you weren’t the Hollister polo shirt type, but once you’re an adult, being a geek is basically a one-way ticket to infinite hobby clubs and avenues to make friends. If you’re scared to talk to people, that’s going to make things harder, but being a geek is not the problem in that case. Geeks are not, in any real sense, “weird,” if only because there are so many of them.
Back when I was in high school, I noticed this. The geeks always had friends! Simply “being a geek” would not cause social isolation and friendlessness. And because this wasn’t a 1980’s movie, nobody got stuffed in a locker by a letterman-jacket-wearing guy named Brad who pounded his fist into a cupped hand and said, “Well, well, well, if it isn’t the dweeb brigade.”
When people hear that you are struggling socially because you’re “weird,”(as I have) for some reason their assumption is that you must be a geek (or some other variation of non-normie) and therefore you should just “be yourself” and find other weird people to befriend. But people have flattened “weird” to include “enjoys comic books” alongside “everyone who meets this person is immediately put off by their objectively unappealing behavior.”
For people whose “weirdness” begins and ends with the fact that they aren’t into sports and they enjoy watching anime or doing improv, yes, they should be themselves because that’s actually not that weird at all. But for other people—often neurodivergent or just “socially challenged” people who are weird not because they like fantasy novels but because they do annoying things—being yourself (while making zero adjustments and implementing zero filters lest you “dull your shine”) only goes so far.
