My friend stared at my hand with an inquisitive expression. “Why do you have only one nail painted black?”

I smiled. I had been waiting for this question all day. “Well, it is a symbol of the internal struggle between light - represented by the unblemished nails - and dark, represented by the singular black nail.”
My friend raised an eyebrow.

I laughed. “Actually, there’s no real reason. I just felt like it.”
Just because I felt like it. I do a lot of things just because I feel like it. Like running on the driveway, blanketed with a thick layer of pure white snow, without any shoes on. Like sitting amongst a cluster of bushes, enjoying the silence of nature and being hidden from the world. Like eating pizza for breakfast, or taking ridiculous pictures of myself (and never posting them on Facebook, of course!), or pouring bottled water down both my parched throat and my red, warm face. Like wearing mismatched socks in obnoxiously bright colors.
Yes, it’s different. Yes, it’s unique. But most of all - it’s weird. Ha! There, I said it. A word that is prohibited from high school life, only spoken in a whisper about the most nerdy, ugly, and bizarre people on campus. The thing is, though, once you realize how important, how inspiring, and how beautiful the word “weird” is, you’ll love it as much as I have grown to.
Imagine this: a perfect person. And by perfect, I mean literally perfect. She (or he) always wears the coolest clothes. She/he aces every class, no matter how difficult. She/he is talented at every sport, activity, or hobby you can imagine. She/he never says the wrong thing. Basically, this perfect person has no flaws. Great, right? Wrong.
Because this person always wears the coolest clothes, they are not creative because they can’t think outside the box and design a completely unique style that defines who they are. Because this person gets a perfect grade on every single homework assignment, they never learn from their mistakes (because there are no mistakes to learn from!), and the joy of discovering something new is absent from their lives. Because this person has no flaws, this person is boring.
Our quirks, our unique traits, our weirdness makes us who we are. Each of us is completely individual, totally different from the person next to you, and the person next to him, and the person next to her.
If we weren’t weird, we’d be boring.
If a person calls me weird (and believe me, I hear it a lot - mostly from my equally weird friends and family), I don’t cringe and come home from school that day crying, wondering what I did wrong to deserve such an insult.
Instead, I smile, and say, “Thank you. So are you.”