Strange and Unusual

In the movie Beetlejuice, a teenager named Lydia Deetz lives with her loving (but terribly normal) parents. It is immediately evident that Lydia is into goth, a music genre that focuses deeply on introspection, and does not shy away from the macabre or dark.

At one point while reading from the Handbook for the Recently Deceased, Lydia comes across something that resonates with her. She reads a line that says that the living often ignore the strange and unusual.

Lydia’s next line is an instant classic. She says, “I myself am strange and unusual.”

This is quite the powerful embrace of something a teenager might normally desperately want to hide—that of being markedly different from the other kids.

I knew that fear of stepping out of line, of being ostracized and ridiculed because I didn’t exactly fit in. Eventually, hormones guided the USS Andrew into a slightly different direction, ultimately inciting me to confront all of these fears directly.

It took something that I didn’t know I had in me when I was younger: the courage to value being myself more than pleasing other people.

Wynona Ryder’s character Lydia shows this ability in an instant with that pithy line that says it all. She clearly means to embrace her strangeness, and she seems proud to be unlike others.

The word strange has a very interesting origin story. If we go back to Old French, we get estrange, which meant something like foreign or alien. Go back further, into Latin, and we find the word extraneus. That’s made up of the word “extra” (literally “outside”) and a suffix that implies that whatever you’re talking about is a part of the “extra” group.

So, strange comes from an original meaning that was more neutral, at least insofar as conformity isn’t automatically a good thing. Today, if you say someone is strange, you’re probably implying an undesirable trait. This is today’s most common interpretation of the word, and here Lydia is reclaiming the language for herself.

She’s saying that being an outsider does not mean you’re a bad person. In fact, it can be something to embrace.

The word unusual is a bit more straightforward. Things that are usual are those things that are expected to happen. Like that original meaning of strange, unusual need not mean anything negative.

In fact, things would be quite boring if everything was precisely as we expected it to be. Variation is the very thing that makes life worth living, and Lydia invokes her strange nature (her outsider status) to invoke this point by way of macabre memes.

It was the variation in the ratio of matter to antimatter in the early universe that allowed us to exist in our present form today. That is, nothing would be here if not for that slight imbalance—that unusual surplus of matter that makes all of us up.

It is the variations in DNA that allows life to evolve from one species to another. If all DNA was the same, no complex life would ever form.

Things that are unusual and unexpected are just as important as the expected things. Without them, we’d have a very boring existence.

Strangeness, too, is a necessary component of our present condition. Outsiders have revolutionized the way we see things again and again. Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, and Richard Feynman are all three titans of thought who contributed unimaginably important ideas to our understanding of the world, and all three were very much outsiders.

Einstein and Newton, too, were among the greatest contributors ever to our base of knowledge. Both were very much outsiders, and I’d argue that both were unusual, too.

Need I go down the list of strange and unusual artists and writers? The list of usual and “normal” creators is probably much smaller than the other list.

In the movie Beetlejuice, Lydia ultimately becomes a sort of hero. Her strangeness is exactly what allows her to connect with Barbara and Adam, the couple who “haunt” the home Lydia’s family has moved into.

Strange and unusual people are necessary. They are the ones who change the world for better. Even more so, variation is fantastic and necessary. We literally would not be here if not for variations within the universe, and variations within individual molecules.

If you yourself feel like you’re strange and unusual, let’s celebrate that today. What are some things you do differently than other people?