Lachlan Brown
There’s a line in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando that’s always stayed with me: “He—she—was different; some people are born different.”
If you’ve ever felt that way—like your mind takes the scenic route while others stick to the map—you’re probably used to being labeled a little “offbeat.”
Maybe you talk too deeply, too soon. Maybe your interests zig when everyone else zags. Maybe you’ve been told you’re intense, unconventional, or just a bit too much.
And maybe, if you’re anything like I was, you’ve spent years trying to soften the edges of your eccentricity—hoping it would help you belong.
What I’ve come to realize, through my own work in psychology and my exploration of Buddhist thought, is that eccentricity isn’t a character defect. It’s a sign of perception operating at a different frequency. And if you learn how to live with it, rather than against it, it becomes not just a gift—but a path.
When weird becomes weary
Growing up, I didn’t have language for what made me different. I just knew that I felt things deeply, saw connections others didn’t, and often spoke in metaphors when people wanted bullet points.
I could be the life of the party—but I’d leave early and overanalyze everything I said on the way home.
There’s a kind of emotional tax that comes with being eccentric. Not because something is wrong with you—but because you’re often asked to explain or temper yourself in ways that others aren’t.
You learn to scan for disapproval. You try to preemptively shrink. You build an entire emotional toolkit around protecting other people from your intensity.
Psychologists call this “masking.” It’s common among neurodivergent individuals, creatives, and deep thinkers. Over time, masking leads to emotional exhaustion, identity confusion, and even depression. You end up living at the edges of yourself.
But what if the problem isn’t your eccentricity? What if the real issue is the way we’re conditioned to believe that uniqueness must be streamlined for social comfort?
The culture of averages
In Western psychology, there’s a long-standing tendency to pathologize difference. Anything that doesn’t conform to the bell curve gets scrutinized: behavior, attention, mood, even how we love.
But as Carl Jung once wrote, “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
Our culture loves innovation but fears the innovators. We praise originality in theory but demand conformity in practice.
The eccentric among us often live in this double bind: admired for their creativity, but subtly punished for their divergence.
That’s where I find Buddhist philosophy refreshing. Instead of categorizing traits as good or bad, it asks: Is this causing suffering? And more importantly: Is your relationship to it balanced?
The eccentric mind and the middle way
Buddhism teaches the Middle Way—the path between extremes of indulgence and denial. It’s not moderation in the watered-down sense. It’s discernment. It’s understanding when a strength becomes a fixation, or when sensitivity tips into suffering.
For someone with an eccentric mind, this teaching is transformative.
Eccentricity often thrives on intensity. You get obsessed with a project. You lose hours in abstract thought. You leap between ideas like a jazz musician improvising scales.
These states can be exhilarating—but they can also be destabilizing.
I’ve found that practicing the Middle Way with my own eccentricity means honoring its gifts without getting swept away by its chaos. It means creating rituals that ground me—daily movement, meditation, simplicity—so that my mind has room to roam without becoming unmoored.
It’s not about taming your wildness. It’s about building a container sturdy enough to hold it.
The beauty of not fitting in
There’s a Rumi quote I come back to often: “Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead, let life live through you.”
If you have an eccentric personality, chances are you do let life live through you. You feel the undercurrents. You read between the lines. You make connections others overlook.
And yes, sometimes you confuse people. You disrupt comfort zones. You say the thing that breaks the silence, not because you’re trying to be bold, but because staying silent feels like a lie.
That can be isolating. But it’s also what makes you an artist, a seer, a systems thinker, a builder of new paradigms.
According to research, eccentric individuals are often highly creative and divergent thinkers—they have the ability to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions.
In other words, your unusual way of thinking isn’t a distraction. It’s a contribution.
But here’s the paradox: the more you try to explain your value to those who don’t see it, the more you disconnect from it.
The real work isn’t convincing others. It’s coming to see your own way of being as valid—without needing to justify or translate it.
Making peace with your edges
So how do you live well as someone who doesn’t quite fit the mold?
It starts with letting go of the idea that you should. That doesn’t mean isolating yourself or rejecting all structure. It means finding environments where you can breathe fully—and creating internal conditions that honor your nature.
In practical terms, that might look like:
- Choosing depth over popularity in your relationships
- Protecting your creative rhythms rather than forcing uniform productivity
- Finding solitude not as escape, but as nourishment
- Giving yourself permission to be cyclical, inconsistent, even obscure
And above all, it means noticing when you’ve swung too far in either direction—too withdrawn or too performative, too absorbed in ideas or too reactive to outside expectations.
This is where the Middle Way becomes more than a concept. It becomes a compass.
Final reflections: A life unapologetically lived
I no longer try to round out the edges of my personality. I’ve stopped pretending I’m not intense. I’ve stopped apologizing for how much I feel, how quickly I shift, or how strange my inner world can be.
What I’ve found is this: when you stop treating your eccentricity like a flaw to be managed, it transforms. It stops being a burden. It becomes a rhythm. A signature. A spiritual path.
The Middle Way isn’t about blending in. It’s about standing centered in your own difference, without tipping into either shame or arrogance.
So if you’ve ever wondered whether your eccentricity is too much, let me offer you this:
It’s not too much.
It’s just not mainstream.
And that’s the point.
The world doesn’t need more sameness. It needs more people who are willing to be fully themselves—brilliant, contradictory, wild-hearted, and whole.
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