On Being Odd

a confession of joyfulness

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

I knew I was odd from a very early age. My earliest memories of primary school are of being conscious that I didn’t fit in. I built acceptable personalities that other children might like. I mined for personalities from characters in television programmes. I once slapped a boy around the face because I’d been watching old black and white films and was trying on my Bette Davies personality, aged seven. There was a period of time when I insisted that I was a dog, too, and refused to speak and refused to come out from under a table, every day, for months. If I was in any sort of stressful situation I would feign sleep. The running joke in my family was that I could fall asleep in literally any situation - I would fall asleep in brightly lit, noisy, places, I would fall asleep and miss parties and social gatherings. Amazing. My mother used to call my strange behaviour my ‘artistic temperament’ which, looking back, was probably a way of categorising my oddness to make it acceptable to her. I have deleted this paragraph so many times, and re written it, and rewritten it to make it acceptable, and unwritten the edits to be honest, because so much of my work now is about authenticity, and I want to be authentic here.

This feels like a confession - to confess that you have never fit in, and that you never will fit in, except around other odd bods, which, thankfully, the literary world is full of, is a vulnerable thing. There is a shame to it. It’s a shame that I have used to thoroughly beat myself up for not working hard enough to not be odd, for my entire life. I use the term ‘odd’ because I remain undiagnosed for anything neurodiverse - I’m languishing on an NHS waiting list - but I also know that if I ever was assessed and they said actually Mrs. Pratt, you are not autistic or ADHD, you have thoroughly wasted our time - I know I would walk out of the clinic still being the same level of oddness, it wouldn’t change me. So let’s stick with it.

It took me until I was about forty five to realise that my oddness; this thing that I had been trying to fix, this thing I had been trying to force into a box of what other people thought of as acceptable, was in fact completely acceptable, if you did away with silly societal rules around what was acceptable and stopped giving a fuck about them. In many ways my odd way of making connections, of reaching conclusions and of linking ideas and images was really, actually artistic, my complex internal world - the super shy girl’s world - was a story telling machine. Part of me thinks that it would have been helpful to have come to that conclusion earlier on in my life, instead of being so utterly miserable and hating myself for so long, but hey ho, one cannot have everything one desires.

So here I am, an oddbod still fearing that the moment I say outloud that I am a bit weird I’ll lose a swathe of followers and people will start (if they aren’t already) laughing at me or pointing at me in the street or, because this has happened, holding me up as an example of how not to be if you want to make friends and get on in life.

I fear it, but not as much as I fear going back to living my life in a less joyful way. The real me is joyful like a child is joyful. The real me is quite childlike all round, to be honest. I clap my hands when I see something I like. I make happy noises over food, ramen in particular. I don’t think you have to be odd to be joyful, but I think if you are outwardly joyful, you are seen as odd. How sad.

This is a post of confession but it is also a post of thanks because there are people who have helped me, quietly, behind the scenes, to look at myself in a different way, to those people I say thanks and at some point, in the future, i shall talk about this more, with more nuance, less tentatively, but for now this is enough. Thank you for reading.

New Course Klaxon!

What To Look For in Winter

What can we learn from nature in winter? How can we write about it? Where do we exist in the natural world and how do we tie that world to our own lived experiences, physical and emotional?

Winter is the dark time when the world is waiting: a time for survival, a time for for reflection, a time to experience the darker side of the world and to dig in and recognise the strengths in ourselves and the resilience of the world around us. In this four or six week course (depending on the tier you choose) we’ll be exploring nature in poetry and prose using natural and supernatural themes. From migrant birds arriving and leaving, to insects in their subterranean hideouts, the trees speaking to each other out of sight to the rites and folklore around the darkest days. This is your chance to explore the natural winter world both as an observer and in the context of your place in it. In What to Look for in Winter we’ll explore this world through published works, museum artefacts, film, imagery and physical interaction with nature, using prompts and directed activities to write ourselves into the winter months. 

The course starts on 3rd January, a chance for you to start the year by prioritising your writing, perhaps, and to face the post new year’s slump with positivity and courage.

If you are a paid subscriber to Notes from the Margin, you are entitled to a discount on the course, as a thank you for supporting me and my writing.

You can find out more about the course, and book your place on it, here: