by Connie Brisson

I’ve always loved fairy tales and myths.

As a kid, the fairy tale that captured my heart the most was The Princess and The Pea (by Hans Christian Andersen). While I wasn’t sure how that princess could feel that pea under all those mattresses, I instantly related to how sensitive she was, to her ability to feel and know things that other people just didn’t. And although someone else might think she was weird, I thought she was special.

While other princesses were singing with mice and birds, or cleaning up after dwarfs or step-sisters, here was a princess that could do what I could do and was even going to live ‘happily ever after’ for it. I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to be that princess - to be rewarded for what was different about me.

Growing up on a farm in a rural community in northeast Alberta in the 1960’s didn’t expose me to a very cosmopolitan life. No one was celebrating ‘different’ where I came from. Like a chameleon, I tried very hard to fit in so I wouldn’t be noticed for all the wrong reasons. Then as I got older, I just decided it wasn’t worth it to openly share the parts of me that were unique (and maybe a little weird J).

I was in my late 30’s when I came upon CranioSacral Therapy (CST) and found the kind of magic that existed in fairytales. Whether I was on the bed receiving a CST treatment or the practitioner giving one, this was as close to magic - to different, weird and enchanted - that I’d ever been. It was about being sensitive, feeling energy, listening to intuition and deep inner healing.

When Mosaic Magazine came to me, I was so excited to share these magical, transformational and life changing things with everyone else. And although it’s been six years since I took the magazine over, and there’s nothing that I believe in more than self awareness and personal growth/development, I have to confess there were still rare moments when I was visited by that little young farm girl in me who feared being seen as weird for the different things that I believed in.

This was surprising to me because I’m absolutely certain of this one thing: that it wasn’t until I started to accept, explore and embrace those unique parts of me (that others might label as weird) that my soul began to awaken and flourish. Whether it was through transformational bodywork like CST, taking other self awareness/energy courses, working with Feng Shui, falling in love with crystals and then creating my own line of transformational gemstone jewelry or writing for and publishing Mosaic, I felt like I had discovered a lost treasure - and that treasure was inside of me.

Whatever ‘normal’ was, I just didn’t want it anymore. I had died a little every day when I was normal. Over here… way over here in the land of weird… that’s where the real spice was. ☺

So when Liz Garratt recently asked me (in her Inspired Business Planning Circle) if there was anything holding me back from giving 100% in my business, I guardedly made my ‘weirdness’ confession. But then (as it always does when we share from these deep and vulnerable places) something wonderful happened; I discovered I’m not alone. Each person there had their own version/concern about being different. These were all successful business women who are doing their own thing, their own way, so it shocked, and then delighted me to learn of our kinship. I’d told this big secret and then I found out that EVERYONE has the same secret – the fear of being different, weird or not accepted.

In Norse mythology there are the Three Norns also known as the three Fates, The Three Wyrds or the Wyrd Sisters. They appeared just after a child's birth to determine the course of its life, its destiny. Urd (or Wyrd) looked backwards to the past, Verdandi oversaw the present and Skuld determined the future.

I loved this play on words of weird and Wyrd. What if, at the time of our births, some wonderful force (whether it be God, our Higher Self or even the Wyrd Sisters) blesses and bestows upon us an unusual gift of ‘weirdness’ that enables us to heal our past, live with presence in our present and becomes one of our dearest treasures before we die? What if we carried this gift of weirdness throughout our lives, initially as a wound (of raw places not yet understood and accepted) and then later as a coveted trophy (of places conquered and admired)?

Yes… What if weird was good?

Connie