Owning Our Quirks

Photo by Bankim Desai on Unsplash

​Unraveling the neurodivergent complexities of my own mind is a never-ending emotional odyssey — each new insight arriving like a small, life-altering revelation. The discoveries hit differently when you spend 57 years inside a spicy brain with no language for why the world never quite fits. I never realized that feeling different wasn't a flaw — it was just how I was wired. 

Take the internal narrator, for instance — something I assumed everyone had until recently. Mine never shuts up. This past week, I noticed that when I let it wander mid-task, it stopped talking me through the steps, and suddenly, I've lost my place, forgotten what I've done, or can't recall what I meant to do next. That same voice is also my interpreter: music, a podcast, a conversation — none of it registers unless I silently echo the words back to myself, or they dissolve into noise, crowded out by the ten million other thoughts already in rotation. It isn't a memory problem, as people often assume. It's a finely tuned system that demands close attention — one that's constantly being seduced away by the same stream of creativity that powers it. 

Scrolling back through twelve years of blog posts, I can see the quirks hiding in plain sight — documented long before I had any framework for understanding them. I just thought I was weird. Still do, actually. At Deep Root Center, that's always been a point of pride: we own our eccentricity, and I wear the title of head weirdo without apology. 

This piece, written the day after my 50th birthday in 2014, finds me committed to being fully myself — though it would be another seven years before I understood I had been masking my neurology my whole life. Even so, something essential has remained intact. The colorful stripe never fully disappeared, except for a brief time during the pandemic. It just shifted — hot pink quietly moved to purple, blue, and now teal. I probably won’t adopt hoop earrings or flowing gowns. Both would be a sensory nightmare; however, the tattoo has been on my wishlist for a while—I even have the design ready and waiting for me to find an artist and make an appointment. 


Analysis of the Hot Pink Stripe
​11/19/14


The following disclosure may delight, surprise, or even dismay a few family members, friends, and acquaintances. As of Friday, I am sporting a hot pink racing stripe running through my dishwater gray hair.

When I told my mother, her first question was, "Is this all about turning 50?" My immediate response was an emphatic no. Let me be clear: this is not a midlife crisis. I have always hated my hair — even when it was a perfectly respectable dark brown. What I'm working with is an unfortunate hereditary combination: straight as a stick (my Gram's term for her own), clumpy at the temples (thanks, Dad), and aggressively early to gray (mid-twenties for me, early twenties for my Poppy, who has very little left at 91). As the eldest, I could have landed the naturally curly gene, but that skipped a generation — you're welcome, MacKenzie — along with the male pattern baldness. Sorry, Ian.

So what's the connection? I have spent years preaching about being comfortable in your own skin, about choosing yourself over the crowd. And mostly I've practiced what I preach — even as a teenager, when the herd was chasing the latest fad, I was usually headed the other direction deliberately. The list is long and fairly impressive. 

So why hot pink? Here's the contradiction: alongside that instinct to take the road less traveled, I am also someone who would rather work quietly in the background than stand in any spotlight. Bold choices, invisible presence. It sounds like a mixed message.
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This is an analysis, as the title suggests — and I'm genuinely thinking it through as I write. My best theory: my internal, non-cerebral, truest self has been trying to get out. She's been yelling, pitching fits of considerable creativity, and I have worked hard to ignore her from the comfort of my warm, safe, non-threatening comfort zone. It appears she is done being ignored.

So we're trying this for a while. But hot pink — really? What comes next: large hoop earrings, flowing gowns, a tattoo? Now that she's out and making herself known, no one can say where this ends. The next fifty years are sure to be interesting — or, at the very least, a lot of fun.

DRC News

We have had another weird week that flew by in a blink.  Several families were traveling, so we had a smaller crew than normal. We had to cancel our field trip to Nicandri and will have to reschedule it for September.  The kids who were here spent a good portion of their time on independent projects and cool conversations. Tuesday, we did a seed propagation experiment for Kitchen Sink Science. 

DRC Pop-Ups

The Pop-ups Peeps had fun at Nicandri on Thursday, even though the Canton Crew could not join them.