Clinging to Strangeness as a Defense Mechanism

And why I'm remaking this Substack

“You will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring two pence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it... Give up yourself, and you will find your real self.” - C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

For the last several years, the name of my Substack (and before that, my Wordpress site) has had something to do with strangeness: Strangest Days, Strangelove, Strange Lights, etc... This was in part because I believed that unusual, surreal-tinged content would be more interesting to potential readers, and that therefore I would become valuable in the entire world’s eyes.

Other than being afraid that people would expect Strange Lights to be a UFO blog, these titles felt deeply right to me. They represented the vibe I wanted to cultivate, and the sense of thoughtful mysteriousness I wanted to be associated with.

However, I realized more recently that I was also clinging to the idea of “strangeness” as a kind of defense mechanism against my own feelings of insignificance.

The Enneagram remains the most useful personality dissector I’ve ever come across. As a Type Four, I resonate with this description of how unhealthy Fours might use the idea of strangeness to protect themselves:

The “romantics” of the Enneagram, they long for someone to come into their lives and appreciate the secret self that they have privately nurtured and hidden from the world. If, over time, such validation remains out of reach, Fours begin to build their identity around how unlike everyone else they are.

I think that’s what I was trying to do, on some semi-conscious level, with the Substack and the Wordpress. Even when validation was actually available, to curate “strangeness” was to curate uniqueness and originality, and therefore valuableness. Or so I thought.

Essentially I was clinging onto an idea about myself to help me derive a sense of value apart from God—an idea which was essentially a wound. As much as I might say “Being called weird is a compliment,” at its core it typically isn’t.

So, as part of this ongoing soul-reclamation project, I’m retitling this page as The Barbershop—out of the hopes that it will become merely an extension of who I am, as opposed to some sort of performance. I will no longer use strangeness as a primary criterion for publication, nor try to manufacture originality—which will hopefully free me up to write about what’s true and significant without caring too much about whether it sounds unique and original enough. My goal as a writer will be to embody C.S. Lewis’s idea, quoted above: “...if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring two pence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

Welcome to The Barbershop.