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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, I feel you about the lack of real weird around here!  I remember joining a hobby that I very much enjoyed and making friends (I have some normal friends -- I'm very very good at pretending to be normal) who kept talking about how this hobby was full of wonderful people who let them really embrace because weird and unusual and how it was so nice and welcoming... when they were all people I would absolutely classify as "normal."  I miss being the comparatively normal one sometimes, honestly.  I'm planning to move soon and I really hope my new area has some genuine nutters (affectionate).[/quote]

YES. I had an off-beat hobby for a while thinking it would help me find people who are a little more off-beat like I am. Instead it was full of lawyers, consultants, and other professionals who turned the hobby into just another thing to be ultra-competitive and intense about. I still always felt like the "weird one" because I didn't work for some big name firm or company, I had not recently bought a condo or SFH in a nice neighborhood, and I didn't take regular vacations to the Caribbean, skiing out west, or European capitals. They were all super conformist and it was like this one off-beat hobby was another way of conforming -- I'm a corporate lawyer but in my free time I box/roller derby/circus/pole dance/etc.

People in DC work very hard to meet the expectations other people set for them, even when doing things considered "alternative" or "indie", and if you truly walk to the beat of your own drum, it's hard to find kindred spirits here.[/quote]

You are impossible. Your experience could easily have taught you a completely different lesson -- like, "you can't judge a book by its cover, and next time I see a lawyer, consultant or other professional, I'm not going to make shallow assumptions about who they are on the inside." [/quote]

You are missing the point. It's not about judging someone, it's about the fact that doing one off-beat hobby doesn't make you non-conformist if in every other way you are a conformist. And when you get a bunch of pretty conformist people together doing something unusual, they will make that unusual activity conformist. So if you are someone who is neuro-divergent or just struggle to fit in, you might join that hobby think you will find people like you, people who who feel like outsiders, only to find that everyone else there is really similar to one another in very socially-approved ways.

The lawyers and consultants I met in this hobby were what they appeared to be -- competitive and fairly traditional. Their choice of hobby did not actually reflect a more unusual way of viewing the world or a refusal to engage in cultural norms for their own sake. Which is great for them! They seemed nice. But I still didn't fit in with them.[/quote]

Maybe they chose the hobby because they liked it. Maybe you have more in common with people than you think.[/quote]
Dp. That is such a good point. These self described weird people would have to reframe their whole existence if they admitted that they are more "normal" than they thought. Truth is, everyone feels like an outsider at some point in their life. Most of us just carry on with living rather than view every interaction as evidence of ourdifferences.[/quote]

This is extremely easy to say if you mostly fit in.[/quote]

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