Being weird is not a problem

Ode to Little Edie

At first I thought maybe I was afraid of ending up that way. I saw myself in her, the way I could be so enthralled by my own imagination running off the rails. Little Edie bursting out of her screen door grinning like a cherub baby doll and fixing to do a little dance even though no one really asked for it. I was obsessed from my first watch of The Beales of Grey Gardens (which is the follow up to the original documentary Grey Gardens, which I hadn’t seen, but I didn’t know that at that time. Didn’t matter. Still met Edie.)

Edie seemed carefree, sweet, confident, maybe even delusional? But very obviously creative and strange above all else. Strange is a good thing, and I’ve thought so since middle school when began the practice of others calling me “weird,” and my decision to wear it like a badge of honor. Was it out of defense that, when othered, I simply said “thanks”? The theory being that it would be more shameful to be weird without knowing it than it would be to appear intentionally different. God forbid I be an ignorant mutant oblivious of my oddity. Accepting the otherness turns in to leaning in, performing it, showing off exactly how unpredictable I am. Which reminds of Little Edie entering a scene mid-song and dance, wearing a bathing suit as her costume.

I’ve often thought how easy it would be for me to slip out of reality, for which I have had such distaste on so many occasions. Gradually choosing to disengage with one norm here, another norm there, dropping the veil of reasonable behavior a little at a time. I’ve scared myself into thinking I have the capacity to “go crazy,” by which I guess I mean I could cease to function enough in the structure of this life that people no longer know what to do with me.

But if you’re so determined to live the life that feels true to you, regardless of how that fits into the templates many people follow, is that really a bad thing? You might have to meet people in the middle, sometimes, in order to get along and survive. A little accommodation can go a long way in preventing isolation. Or you could just not bother, if it doesn’t matter to you much.

From my understanding, a big reason why Little Edie and her Mother ended up as reclusive eccentrics in East Hampton was because Mother refused to behave like the refined, well-trained socialite she was expected to be. She wanted to sing opera or something rather than go to garden parties and chitchat with other rich wives, including her niece Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. I read somewhere¹ that Mother would wear sweaters over her dresses which pissed people off. (And meanwhile, Little Edie would wear sweaters over her head—very chicly, I might add—to cover her baldness, which either came from alopecia or setting her hair on fire in a tree, according to her less famous cousin John Davis.²) Instead of embracing Mother as she was and letting her do her own thing, her community sort of pushed her out of frame. Sounds like she was fine with it. She didn’t want to go to the dinners anyway.

Little Edie had a very close relationship with Mother and shared the same order of values—creative self-expression over blending in. The two of them were fine with prioritizing their singing and their poetry and their dancing in their big, dramatic mess of a house, hidden within their violent jungle of catalpa and bittersweet vines. They trusted their own instinct and passion over anything else, which I find wildly admirable.

“I can tell what’s inside a person right away,” said Little Edie. “Mother and I can see behind the masks; we’re artists, it’s the artist’s eye.”³

A month after my initial viewing, I am no longer worried about ending up like Little Edie. I’m instead hopeful that I can foster more Little Edie energy in my life. My obsessive studies (i.e. reading old articles on my phone, scrolling through google image results, and rewatching clips on YouTube) have convinced me that Edie is not completely out of touch, as I initially thought in the first 30 minutes I knew her. She just doesn’t care what others think. Like truly doesn’t. At least, not enough to make her change herself.

Maybe I’m wrong and projecting what I want to believe. Don’t really care, though. This version of my parasocial relationship works well for me, the way a tarot reading works for me because I see what I need. And right now I need to believe that being your weird-as-fuck self is a-ok.

1. The Secret of Grey Gardens by Gail Sheehy, which I read in the bath the other day

2. My new home page

3. A Return to Grey Gardens, also by Gail Sheehy, which I also read in the bath