I am a special snowflake. I’m not going to downplay it anymore. I’m not going to say well I kinda have synesthesia but it’s not a big deal, ha ha. No. I’m going to say synesthesia is rad and I feel lucky to have it, and also to be autistic and transgender. I’m rare! I’m weird as hell and I can back it up with statistics. I didn’t do anything to deserve being this way, I’m just an outlier, and I’m happy about it. The alternative is to be sad about it, and that wouldn’t accomplish much.

I expect we all understand on some level that modern western colonialist society punishes anyone who deviates from the norm. Like, that isn’t shocking news, right? But there’s a specific engrained behavior I’m trying to eradicate from my mind, which is the automatic apology for being special.

It seems almost bizarre that such a nonspecific word as special has acquired so much baggage. The euphemism treadmill turns words into slurs and special has been accumulating gross connotations for as long as I can remember. In my recollection of growing up in the 80s and 90s, it replaced the word retarded, which was meant to be an objective description but rapidly turned pejorative just as words like stupid, dumb, idiot, or moron did before it. Special began with a more compassionate tone, implying that someone could be different but worthy of love, and maybe even possessed of extraordinary skills, like the so-called idiot savants.

Which, by the way, we should also take a moment to unpack. What a damning with faint praise, to say that no matter what wonders you accomplish, you will always be subhuman, a mere novelty. But I don’t want to dwell on that phrase because it’s really a way to single out and rationalize the exceptions rather than address the underlying prejudice.

You aren’t allowed to boast about your specialness unless it fits the narrative. You can excel in proscribed ways, in school or sports or sex or money or fame. You aren’t allowed to say “I can’t live the way ordinary people do, because I’m sensitive or slow or weak or unable to sit still for five minutes, but I am human and I should have a place in society, and my deviance from the norm should be respected as a sacred symbol of the boundless possibilities and expressions of the human experience, rather than ignored, oppressed or eradicated, because-“

And that’s where I usually fall silent. Because at some point when your pleas for compassion fall on deaf ears, you have no choice but to say Jesus, Debbie, I’m just asking you to stop being such a goddamn fucking Nazi. Save us all some grief and admit to yourself that the United States of America is genocidal to its core, you can’t solve minority issues with majority rule, purity is stagnation, diversity is crucial to the survival of the species, compassion is what differentiates us from other animals, and the ability to function in one specific environment is not necessarily a virtue in the abstract. Everything has changed, is changing, and will change again, and we will not overcome those challenges by all thinking the same way.

Sometimes I’ll say something like, “trans people are so cool and funny and beautiful,” and someone will get mad, because how dare I imply that cis people are ever less cool, less funny, or less beautiful than trans people? And I’m like wow, is this the first time you’ve felt insulted in your whole life? Have you been to the city council meetings where trans people as a group get called rapists and psychopaths, and no one in power even blinks and says hey, that might be crossing a line?

Everything special about me is a story about us, about our potential and our limitations, and I want to tell those stories. In doing so, I’m going to wax rhapsodic about how good it is to be a freak. If that hurts your feelings, feel free to step away and read any of the millions of stories about how good it is to not be a freak.