The Art of Being Wrong

I’ve previously written about how I’ve embraced my weirdness since my childhood. As time goes on, I realize more and more that not only am I weird but in some scenarios, I’m wrong. Neither bad nor good but just plain wrong. I don’t fit, my ideals aren’t right and I’m completely out of my element… and wrong.

This notion I can provide support for all the way back to my childhood in farm town Saskatchewan. Picture my entire school being obsessed with Ace of Base in the early 90s. Picture me going up to the DJ at a school dance and requesting Meatloaf or The Cranberries because I couldn’t bear to hear The Sign another time without retching. It was weird and seemed a little wrong.

Following my move to blue collar town Alberta, I encountered something new. The kids there listened to Nirvana. At that time, I’d discovered The Doors and could have gladly spent my life listening to their greatest hits album but I felt like I was closer to being right. I was still wrong because I didn’t like Nirvana (and don’t to this day) but I faked my way through until I discovered punk music and joined an entire counter culture of kids who were just as wrong as I was.

My friends and I took some pride in the fact that we were misfits and no other group would accept us as we were. It wasn’t for lack of trying though. I was as much a social butterfly then as I am now but my main group of friends from high school is the one I still hold on to today. We were from different schools in different towns and all felt like we had few people to rely on outside of our group so we encouraged originality and grew in our wrongness. I became quirkier while some of the others began travelling down some very dark paths. Some of them remain there still. They’re not bad people but they make mistakes, just like we all do, but most people would consider them wrong for doing what they do and me wrong for caring about them.

Fast forward to my adulthood. I can’t tell you how many things were wrong with me over the last several years (but I’m going to try).

Let’s kick things off with a bang – I don’t believe in God. I don’t think I ever really have or ever will. According to the majority of the religious community (in my experience) this makes me wrong, and not as in ‘I don’t fit’ wrong, as in ‘I’m wrong because God exists’ wrong. I’ve been told by perfect strangers that I am going to hell because of my belief system. I’ve been told the same thing by friends and I probably have family who have already closed the tab, refusing to read any further. Are they wrong? No. They’re entitled to their opinions. They can believe what they want to believe. I don’t like it when it gets forced down my throat. But me? I’m the one who’s wrong.

Moving on to work. This is a hard one for me… I always feel so torn. In Alberta, my career was one of the few places where I felt that I fit. The problem that I had with my professional community though, was that everyone was and is encouraged to think ‘outside the box.’ Since removing myself from it, I’ve seen that even our most forward of thinking was, in some senses still ‘in the box’ because it had to fit within some very careful parameters of what was considered to be best practice. Without getting too into things (another post about my work is likely to surface soon enough), I believe in inclusion as the ideal but I currently work in a segregated school and it works for these kids. In fact it often works better. How do I know? Many of the kids I work with were in inclusive settings and they fell through the cracks, so now they’re in a segregated setting where they’re excelling. I believe that sometimes segregation works and that makes me wrong.

And since I seem to be trying to piss off my entire universe, let’s move on to my family. Don’t misunderstand though, I love my family and they love me. They’ve been supportive through all of my highs and lows while picking me up every time I crash and burn… but I’m wrong to them too. You see, I’m very left wing while the majority of my family (but not all) is pretty far to the right. To add insult to injury, I’m also the youngest sibling of three. I can’t possibly be right, ever. I’ve been credited for years by coworkers and friends for my astounding memory and attention to detail but when I go visit my family, I am credited for having a horrible memory and making things up as I go along because I couldn’t possibly remember such things and therefore, I’m wrong. Even when I have a good point, I’m wrong just because I’m wrong and I’m the youngest, most random, free-spirited, inexperienced, wrong person who ever wronged being wrong.

My environment (this time location versus family) has always been very conservative and yet I’ve come out on the opposite side of things. I’ve always stuck up for the little guy rather than driving over him with my pickup truck and could never understand why people did what they did. I’ve fought for the things that I believe but only ever have found myself right when I’m with kindred spirits (of which, I have a surprising amount in Alberta despite its dominant culture). I admit that we are the products of our environments but in my case, I seem to be the wrong product. So much so that I very recently compared visiting family in Alberta, to visiting family in jail. I never felt right there and I don’t think I ever will. I applaud those friends who can feel at home there as it’s something I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do.

In terms of my relationships, I seem to have somehow shown that sometimes two wrongs can lead to a right. Or maybe I’m wrong about that too (let’s hope not).

In recent years, I’ve relocated my life and my wrongness to a city where I don’t feel so wrong any more. Here, I feel encouraged to have unique taste in music, my friends once again find me weird but not uncomfortably so, my lack of religion is a non-issue, I’m enamored with my profession, and my family still loves me even if it’s at a distance. Somehow, by following my overwhelming sense of incompatibility with the world, I found a place where not only am I okay, I can finally be right and feel at home.

Some people (near and far) still tell me that it seems wrong to be so far from my roots but I can honestly say that life has never felt so right.

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