Where or what is my quirk?

Do I have a USP?

Whenever I am supposed to dig deep and find something interesting and unique about myself, I almost always find myself heading back to my childhood.

I had what most people see as a weird (or at best (worst?) interesting) childhood. My parents were (ageing? I usually put ageing in there, but they weren’t exactly old when I was little, so maybe that’s the wrong adjective) hippies. They smoked pot. They were vegetarian (well, technically, my dad wasn’t, but he lived a vegetarian life at home and occasionally indulged in a bacon roll when out and about and not in our presence). They wore home-made or second-hand clothes (because they liked to, but possibly also because they had to, as we were definitely poor). They had travelled quite a bit. They both went to art college (they met there, in fact). They spent some time living in a caravan on a farm in a kind of semi-communal set-up. They didn’t really have careers, just made money how they could at any point in time, though my dad spent most of his life building and my mum found a calling in tutoring children in care and/or with a variety learning challenges.

I was home-schooled for much of primary school. My choice – I hated school because I was very ahead and the teachers did nothing with that, other than making me sit quietly and silently when I had finished my work, often half an hour or more before everyone else in the class. I was given a number of options - one was to go to the local Steiner school (I visited it and hated it immediately because all the kids were doing was making baskets and they weren’t happy that I could read already), go to a smaller school in a nearby village (neither of them appealed and neither of them was offering the academic challenge that I wanted) and home education. I imagine, though am not positive, that they would have offered private school if it were within their means - the Steiner school was private, but they had ways you could pay in kind and they would have done building and knitting work to pay for me. I chose home education because I got to write my own curriculum – and make my own timetable. I spent a few years soaking up information, most of which was early secondary school level. I especially loved maths, languages and history. My parents made sure I had plenty of opportunities for socialisation and physical exercise - I went to swimming, gymnastics and trampolining classes, and my mum and her best friend set up a drama class which I went to. I also took music lessons with friends of the family and had some group sessions with some other home educated families from the area.

And my mum took me on loads of adventures, from local trips to museums, to hitchhiking round Europe to attend Esperanto congresses. And then we lived in Spain for a year when I was ten, which was a huge adventure and I learnt to speak Spanish fluently, at least with the vocabulary I used going to a Spanish school – I had no idea how to say lettuce or chickpeas in Spanish, as my dad did all the grocery shopping while we were there, though I did know how to say milk (una bolsa de leche, por favor - milk came in bags not bottles) and to ask for ten copies (diez copias, por favor) at the photocopying shop at the bottom of our apartment building. When there I went with my parents to bars and listened to live music and played cards and juego del occo with other kids or grown-ups who didn’t mind playing games. We had friends with a house in the mountains and would sometimes go out there for a weekend. I sometimes got to go with my mum to the English classes she was teaching and see very fancy houses. We spent Christmas in a friend’s parents’ villa and had freshly picked oranges for Christmas breakfast. We stole a bottle of Cava from a bar on New Year’s Eve (because everyone was in the back celebrating and it was just sat on the bar - we would have paid for it otherwise, I’m assured!) and then slept in a tent on the beach while my parents and their friend drank the Cava. And many other little adventures within the whole big adventure of living somewhere else for a year as a kid.

I was an only child for my first twelve years. I enjoyed the company of adults and could hold a conversation comfortably. I read a lot. I could read by the age of three and haven’t stopped since. I got 100% in the 11+ (though they took 2% off to make up for the fact I took it later than my peers – when we got back from Spain and then from caring for my Granny in her final months). I chose to go to the local comprehensive because they would let me start in the middle of the year before I would normally have started – the grammar didn’t have any places but would have guaranteed me a place the next year. I was desperate to start learning big, so I went for the comprehensive. I had a lot of important friendships from there, so don’t regret it, but my life might well have gone a different way if I’d held out a few months to go to the grammar. Who knows, though! I might have been equally disappointed to have to spend the first two years ‘learning’ all the things I’d already mostly taught myself (with some help and guidance and textbook purchasing help from my parents) during my home-schooling years. It was all very easy and not especially interesting and then, by the time it got new (a bit GCSEs, but more A Levels), I think I’d lost of a lot of my passion and ability to learn and did not do anywhere near as well as I should and could have. Plus, I discovered beer and boys and going out partying!

So I grew up being, and mostly embracing being, different. My mother and, to a lesser extent, my father were happy and proud to not be ‘normal’ and to have no ambitions to ‘keep up with the Joneses’. My mum always dressed the way she wanted and said what she wanted to say. She loved art and science and listening to Radio 4 – especially the Archers! She only cared what other people thought about her when it prevented her from doing what she wanted to do. I had a brief foray into trying to conform (quite possibly going through the normal teenage phase of wanting to rebel against one’s parents!) and bought some clothes from Dorothy Perkins and squeezed my feet into some turquoise shoes whose toes where really pointy and literally made my feet bleed constantly. I went to a church youth club and enjoyed going round for ‘tea’ at my friends’ houses and getting a glimpse into ordinary life (though they still had to cater to my vegetarian diet – I couldn’t have brought myself to conform that much).

Thankfully, in Fourth Year (aka Year 10) I found my tribe and got to hang out with a bunch of people who were as quirky (and as academic) as me. They all loved dressing in charity shop clothes and having ‘gatherings’ at each others’ homes. We had really interesting conversations about films, and books, and philosophy and religion. Many of them also came from quirky families. We did things like spend our lunchtime in a sixth form English room reading out loud The Importance of Being Earnest. For fun. And we were in the debating club. And loved going out to live music. And we went up to London on the train and hung out in Covent Garden and rented a boat in Hyde Park (or some park?). And we hung out in the Peli and played pool and drunk Guinness or blackcurrant and soda (my dad knew ALL the landlords in the town and had told them exactly how old I was, so I never got served alcohol, until my 18th birthday when I got a free pint in at least three pubs and no-one wanted to see my passport).

But now? At the age of fifty? I struggle to work out where my individuality and quirkiness lies. Am I not just a normal 50-year-old woman who has gone through the menopause and is questioning what happens next? I frequently wonder if I have some kind of neurodiversity and whether I should look to get tested, but doesn’t everyone? And is that just me trying to find ways that I am different because I was brought up to abhor conformity? And here, again, I am moving forward into a new career chapter, where creativity becomes a larger part of my working life. Where is my imagination? Am I just drawing the same things and in the same style as everyone else? Am I just chasing the same dreams as everyone? What is going to make me stand out in this sea of Gen X women with similar stories?

Perhaps it’s only easy to see these things from a few decades in the future? Perhaps I still have plenty of quirk and individuality and I will look back once I reach seventy and laugh at how I couldn’t see it. Or perhaps I need to embrace the fact that I do actually have a lot in common with a lot of other people (particularly Gen X women) and not worry about standing out!

Do you know your own quirks? Do you chase difference and individuality or do you yearn to fit in and conform? Or are you pleasantly comfortable in your own skin and don’t question these things at all?