This is the tenth post in my series of daily posts for the month of April. To get the best of my writing in your inbox, subscribe to my Substack.

I.

In 305 to my city, Drake has the following line:

tonight was your night

go get you some lobsters and shrimp

He has an unduly strong emphasis on the shrimp, almost pronouncing it like shrump. I was obsessed with Drake in high school and college so this line stuck with me, and it became an inside joke between me and a close friend. To this day we continue to send each other unprompted texts like this:

Shrump

Or this:

SHRUMP

My problem is that I have very few friendships that allow me to send texts like this.

II.

There was a TikTok that made the rounds recently in my Twitter circle:

The TLDR is that you had all kinds of weird mannerisms as a child—stomping around, making weird faces and squealy noises—and that this was your natural way of regulating your nervous system. As we get older, we stiffen up—we’re told how to behave, how to act “normal”. But then we have all this pent up energy that we don’t know what to do with. Her last line: “if you wanna heal, you have to be ✨ WEIRD ✨ ”.

III.

I was telling my coach about how one of my preferred modes of exercise is dancing in my room until I’m drenched in sweat. I was flattered to hear him say: I would consider it a huge sign of progress if a client of mine was able to dance freely for half an hour every week. Until that point I was mildly embarassed of this exercise routine but I began to wonder if it’s actually a sign of being good at channeling my own weirdness.

IV.

In the discomfort of intimacy I wrote about interactions with my brother:

There’s a specific dynamic that comes up every time we have a family trip. Him and I are initially very excited to see each other: all silliness and old inside jokes.

“Silliness” understates it. My brother is the only person on earth I still feel totally comfortable making weird squealy noises to and randomly wrestling with. We also send each other texts of the “shrump” variety, except it’s for even longer-standing inside jokes referencing experiences from 15 years ago.

V.

One of my favorite things about Persian culture is that dancing is a thing that everyone has permission to do at almost any social function.

This video is actually a relatively tame example; there’s much more debauchery where that came from.

We can view this as yet another form of nervous system regulation. (Or we can think of it as humans being fucking dope, of course.) It’s so strange to me that in American culture (at least the parts of it that I participate in) dancing is relegated to dark, sweaty, alcohol-infused parties with teenagers and twentysomethings. Contrast this with Persian family gatherings: well-lit, sober, all ages involved.

VI.

Here’s my other problem: you can’t force weirdness. Or at least, it feels hard to do so with people you don’t know. There’s a reason we all learned to be composed: it helps us coexist. It would be difficult to commute into the subway or take rides up the elevator if our fellow travelers’ behavior was as haphazard as a toddler’s. Being composed makes us more predictable—it tells our companions that we are capable of regulating our emotions if the circumstances require it.

But perhaps we’re due for a correction. Just as different cultures have different levels of tolerance for dancing, we can evolve our culture to have a greater tolerance for weirdness.

VII.

When I look at my closest friends—the kinds of people I can squeal to, make funny faces, or say shrump to unprompted—the commonality is that we have a depth of shared experiences together. They have seen me in all kinds of shapes: happy, sad, angry, dejected, agitated, and…squealy. And they have shown me that my weirdness is acceptable—every time they had the chance to leave and say “that’s enough”, they stayed. They squealed back. They gave me the “shrump” to my “shramp”.

As I said, our culture is due for a correction. And I know a blog post is not gonna change much. But I can make two suggestions: (1) allow yourself to express your weirdness, even if just in the privacy of your own room. (2) put yourself in situations where you’ll see your friends in more shapes than you’re used to: trips instead of dinners, dancing instead of talking. The more of you they see, the weirder you can let yourself be.