April
23
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I Was a Weird Kid by Ursula Vernon
I was a weird kid.
It seems like we could start at least half the author biographies that you read with that line—I was a weird kid.
We were kids reading books when we were supposed to be doing something else. We were bad at…something. Math, or geography or P.E. or all three. We were depressed or discouraged or outcasts or just generally confused. We lived in our heads and made up dream worlds and polished those dream worlds over and over again, like a worry stone in our hands.
Eventually—or immediately, or as soon as we could hold a pencil, or later, in college, or when the teacher gave us that one assignment—we started writing things down.
It sounds like the start of a story, doesn’t it? Once upon a time. Many many years ago. It was a dark and stormy night. I was a weird kid.
When I do school visits, I tell kids that I wrote my first series, Dragonbreath, because I wanted to tell a story about a kid who didn’t fit in at school. I ask if any of them ever feel like they didn’t fit in, and I raise my hand first, so they don’t have to feel weird admitting it, and I say, “You don’t have to raise your hand if you don’t want to.”
Virtually every hand shoots up anyway. The ones who don’t look around, and maybe for the first time, they feel like they don’t fit in. Or maybe they were just reluctant to admit it.
Nobody fits in. Everybody’s the weird kid in their own mind. Everyone’s confused, because when you’re nine years old, the world is dreadfully confusing. Everybody’s bad at something.
Everybody’s got a world inside their head.
I remember that I was obsessed with horses for a while, which was an extremely normal thing for a pre-teen girl, and then I was obsessed with survivalism, which is slightly less normal, or at least gets less press. Galloping horses make good posters that you can sell to said pre-teen girls. Shipwrecks with lone survivors or detailed instructions on meat smoking are less photogenic.
Still, I read every book I could find about having to survive in the wilderness. Swiss Family Robinson. Little House in the Big Woods. My Side of the Mountain. Lord of the Flies. (I recall being deeply contemptuous of that last one. Clearly they had not read the right sort of books about survival. I was also a budding animal lover, so as bad as I felt about Piggy, I felt even worse for the pig. In retrospect, that may have been a poor reading choice for a nine-year-old.)
My friends who were willing to play horses with me were also generally willing to play shipwreck with me (with a strict “no cannibalism” rule laid down, after I read Call It Courage.) When I discovered Pern, they were willing to play dragons.
They drew the line at my next obsession, which was Star Trek, though. It is reasonably difficult to explain Vulcan philosophy to other nine-year-old girls. I went back to being the weird kid.
In retrospect, though, I wonder. Were my friends glazing over when I tried to explain ‘Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations’ because I was weird, or because they had a different world in their heads that they wanted to get back to?
Did they try to explain it to me? It’s been decades. Maybe I just forgot.
I try to remember what games we played that I didn’t start. I can’t remember most of them. Vampires, I think? Princesses? (And I’ll date myself badly and admit that the V miniseries came out around then, and for a very weird stretch, many of my friends were obsessed with it. I blame the shoulderpads.)
I went home thinking I was the weird kid. Now I wonder if they did, too. Maybe they continued their love of vampires and went on to be YA writers, while I continue mucking about with dragons. (Possibly some of them also went on to write first contact stories with reptile aliens. That would be sort of ridiculously awesome, actually.)
And did we ever play any games about witches? It seems like we must have, since the girl witch from my book Castle Hangnail was right there in my brain, the minute I reached for her. Did I want to be a witch when I was twelve, and just forgot? Well, that would have been a very sensible thing to want, wouldn’t it? Not weird at all. Who wouldn’t want to be able to turn somebody into an earwig?
Anyway, my point is, all of us probably thought that we were the weird ones. The more kids I talk to, the more I wonder if any of us are right.
I was a weird kid. And I did carry a world around inside my head. But then, probably so did everybody else.
Ursula Vernon (www.ursulavernon.com) is the creator of the books in the popular Dragonbreath series, which have been Indie Next Picks, Kirkus Best Books of the year, and received an IRA/CBC Choice Award. She has also won a Hugo award for her comic, Digger. She lives in a castle (okay, maybe it’s more like a house) with her husband in Pittsboro, North Carolina.
Nerdy Book Club 
Very thougth provoking. I felt like you were talking about me in the begining – unfortunately no one ever gave me that one assignment that got me writing things down. I wish I’d the courage to follow my dream and write for a living. To face the uncertaintly and unstability that comes with not knowing if anyone will like your work. Or have the courage of putting the ‘world inside’ my head out for the world to read.
How clever of you to ask if anyone felt they didn’t fit in! I bet that was eye opening and helpful for a lot of kids! We can all use that reminder sometimes: that we all feel uncomfortable sometimes.
I also loved your observations about imaginative play with other children. You may not be forgetting the other kids’ games. I’ve often observed groups of kids in which one is the main imaginative leader who suggests the stories. Perhaps you were that leader in your group.
Is this book for sale nationally or from the author??
At a recent school visit I confessed to a class that I was the kind of kid who liked spelling bees better than gym class. A girl in the front just rolled her eyes. Still the weird kid.
“Normal” is a prescriptive statement, not a descriptive one.
If it was descriptive, it would come with error bars and caveats and discussions of the data set’s relevance to other times and circumstances.
Nobody ever tells you this, never mind “when you are a kid”, nobody ever tells you this. So the weird, not-normal people go on being the huge majority and doubting themselves.
Hah – I love this. We’re all STILL The Weird Kid… but it’s good to know everyone else is, too…
Love the thought that maybe other people went home thinking they were weird too. Lots to think about, great post!
I AM a weird kid! Huzzah! 😀
When I was a kid, most of us liked to play Oregon Trail. And while most of the class was happy to just drive our imaginary wagons across the schoolyard plains, and once in a while die of dysentery (none of us actually knew what dysentery was, except that it sometimes killed settlers on their way to Oregon), lose the trail for three days, or drown our imaginary oxen while attempting to ford the river… we had one classmate who preferred to be an outlaw. So we had to decide each recess whether he was allowed to murder us and steal our supplies today.
And I’m 99% certain that was the last time I was NOT the weird kid. But who wants to be normal anyway? Normal’s just a (fairly lackluster) town in Illinois.
Your story made me think back to my childhood. I found myself thinking about all the times I felt “weird” or “left out” because I was different or wasn’t good at something, particularly math. Your message is a great reminder to students that even though they are different, they have things in common, uncertainty. It is ok to be different or the weird kid. Weird is interesting!