The "be weird be random be who you are" trend landed in my TikTok feed and I sat with it for a minute. On its face it's just one of those low-stakes affirmation trends, people doing silly dances, showing their niche interests, celebrating their own weirdness with a kind of defiant glee that is genuinely delightful to watch. No notes. Be weird. Yes. Do it. Absolutely.
But here's where I diverge from just adding my own goofy video to the pile and calling it a day: for me the phrase "be who you are" has a history. A specific, loaded, complicated history that took me the better part of a decade to excavate. Because I grew up in a place where "be yourself" was on offer, was even in certain Sunday school rooms actively encouraged, but the self you were being was pre-approved. The asterisk was bigger than the invitation.
I want to talk about that. About what it means to find out that the self you were given permission to be wasn't actually yours. And what happens when you find the real one.
the asterisk: "be yourself (within these parameters)"
Here's how it worked, for anyone who didn't grow up in evangelical small-town culture: you were told that God made you uniquely, that you were fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14, that one got a lot of play), that your individual gifts and personality were part of God's design. This sounds like radical permission. In practice it was radical permission with a long list of exceptions.
Be yourself, unless yourself was drawn to the wrong gender. Be yourself, unless yourself questioned the theology you'd been handed. Be yourself, unless yourself wanted to make music that didn't sound like the approved music. Be yourself, unless yourself didn't want to get married, have children, take the expected shape. Be yourself, as long as "yourself" was legible within the categories the community had pre-approved.
The genius of this (and I use that word grimly) is that it didn't feel like restriction when you were inside it. It felt like freedom. Bounded freedom, sure, freedom within a clear structure, which is something a lot of people find genuinely comfortable. The trouble came when what you were started falling outside the bounds. When the asterisk turned out to apply to you.
For me it was a few things landing at once: music pulling in directions that didn't fit the mold, questions about the text I'd been handed that the text couldn't answer without help from an apologetics manual, and quietly, underneath everything, for longer than I'd admitted, the bisexuality I'd been filing under "temptation to resist" for years because nobody had ever offered me a different frame for it. All three of those things were me. None of them were permitted.
the specific violence of being told your "self" is a sin
I want to be careful here because I'm not interested in positioning myself as uniquely victimized. There are people who've been through far more brutal versions of this than I have. But I think it's worth naming clearly: being told that parts of your authentic self are sins to be managed is not a small thing. It doesn't just shake off when you leave. It goes somewhere. It builds structures inside you.
For years I had this specific internal experience I didn't have language for. I'd catch myself doing something, writing a line in a song, feeling attracted to a woman, asking a question that didn't have an approved answer, and a part of my brain would immediately begin the audit. Is this okay? Does this fit? Should I be feeling this? The audit was so automatic I barely noticed it was happening. It was just the sound of my interior life. That constant low-grade checking.
What nobody told me, what I had to find out myself slowly through years of therapy and music and reading, is that the audit itself was the damage. Not the things being audited. The reflexive self-surveillance, the anticipatory shame, the habit of filtering experience through an approval system that was never mine to begin with. THAT was what I'd been handed. And taking it apart has been the work of my adult life.
This is what the record I'm making is, in large part, about. I don't know if that's obvious to anyone else when they hear it. I think it might be. The songs are about the audit, about what it costs, what you lose while it's running, what it feels like when it finally goes quiet.
what "be weird" looks like after you've actually earned it
The people in those trend videos look like they're having fun. Genuine, unguarded, unselfconscious fun. They're doing the thing with full commitment and zero apparent shame and it radiates. And I've been watching them thinking: yes, but do you know what that cost you? Because some people are born into circumstances where "be weird" is just available, where their family was already warm and accepting, where their self-expression was never seriously penalized, where the weirdness was always kind of celebrated. That's amazing. I love that for them. I'm not being sarcastic.
But for a specific subset of us, being weird, being ACTUALLY weird the way your actual self is weird and not the performed quirky version, was something that had to be won. Claimed through a series of hard choices and losses and griefs. I left a community. I left a faith. I spent years unlearning the audit. The red hair and the tattoos and the music that goes places good girls don't go, none of that is accidental. None of that is spontaneous self-expression in the way it looks from outside. It's the accumulated evidence of a lot of deliberate choosing.
I don't say this to be a killjoy about the trend. I say it because I want the people who are still inside the asterisk, still trying to figure out if their self is the approved kind, to know that the way out exists and what's on the other side of it is real. The unguarded thing. The full commitment. It's there. It costs something. It's worth it.
randomness as practice: the music connection
There is something I've been learning in the studio that connects to this in a way I didn't expect. When I let a session get genuinely weird, when I follow the random impulse instead of the planned one, when I play the wrong chord on purpose because I'm curious, when I write the line that's slightly too honest, those are the sessions that produce the things worth keeping.
the random is where the real is. The planned version of yourself, the one performing the approved self, doesn't have access to the stuff that's actually interesting. The interesting stuff lives in the unguarded moments. The moment before the audit kicks in. Which means learning to create longer and longer windows before the audit, turning the sound of your actual mind into the source material instead of the thing to be corrected.
I have whole notebooks of unfiltered writing that I did as practice for this. Not for posts, not for songs, just to hear what my actual brain sounds like when I stop managing it. That's a skill. It takes time. The front-row girl who spent twenty years auditing herself doesn't just shake it off one day and become someone who free-associates at will. You have to build the muscle. The record is the current iteration of that building.
The songs that are coming out of this process are the strangest, most honest things I've ever written. They surprise me. That's how I know they're real.
to the kids still in the asterisk
If you're still in it, still trying to figure out whether your particular weirdness is the sanctioned kind or the kind that gets you a concerned conversation with a youth pastor, I see you. I was you. I know how it feels to love the community and simultaneously feel the edges of yourself pressing against its limits.
I'm not going to tell you what to do with that, because I'm not qualified to make that call for you and your specific life and also because that kind of unsolicited advice is exactly the thing I've spent years trying to unlearn from my own upbringing. But I will tell you this: there is a version of "be weird" that isn't just a cute trend. There is a version that is hard-won and specific and costs real things and produces a life that actually fits you. I'm living it. It's not perfect. I still have cold coffee and insomnia and a dying pothos who refuses to die and a record that isn't done yet.
But when I'm in the studio at 2am and something comes out of me that I didn't plan and it's exactly right, there is no audit. There is just me and the song and the sound of something true. No asterisk. No exception. just the full, unqualified permission to be exactly who I am.
That's the thing I'm writing songs about. That's the thing worth chasing. Be damned weird. All of it. It's yours.