Before I was anything else, a librarian, a scholar, a student, even, before I knew what it meant to be my father's female son or my mother's only daughter, I was a weird little girl. For the first 15-ish years of my life, I scarcely spoke in public, because I knew if I did, or I supposed if I did, the world would find me out. They would realize I was unlike them, even if I didn't know quite how, the world would suss out that under it all, the cloaked, fearful, choked silence, I was a lot like Gonzo the Muppet.
I say Gonzo the Muppet, because I spent so much of my life watching the Muppet Cinematic Universe (the real MCU, in my eyes) and Gonzo long spoke to me in a way no character ever had, or ever has. No one else understood the meaning of being a Freak like him, no one understood what it was to be so earnestly odd, the painful dichotomy of compulsive humor and incommunicable feelings of misplacement. Gonzo and I both looked up from a world that didn't quite fit us, into an abyss of space and wondered, do I belong here?
My entire life, I have been a weird puppet girl, but so much of my life, I was so unwilling to unleash it. I knew what it was to be different, and I knew the world saw that about me, but what if the world knew exactly how my oddness sat in me? What if the world knew each night for nearly 6 years I watched the original 1970s Muppet Movie, sometimes syncing it so the finale "The Magic Store" would happen exactly at 11:11pm, because I had the time stamp memorized, on the TV my parents put in my room to keep me from wandering the house at night. Nightly it played on alternate loops with Schoolhouse Rock until I fell asleep.
I had a disproportionate vocabulary I used technically correctly but contextually incorrectly, but a stubbornness that never allowed it be corrected. I had a habit of not knowing how to start a conversation, so sat in longing silence until one would be started with me, and then had a habit of not knowing how to talk about things I didn't have knowledge of. I had a need to correct even subtle bits of misinformation, regardless of if they were relevant to the situation at hand. To me, this was kind, but to others, less so.
There is a picture of me as a little girl, a missing front tooth in my smile spilling over the brim as I hold a box set of Muppet plushies. They sit on my shelf for years, periodically coming down to act out the movie in full or recite the entirety of the book "Fox in Socks," which I had memorized. In private, I was quite verbose, the intricacies of my oddness working colorful spirals behind my eyes, as I spun in circles through my room, flexing and extending my fingers. If no one was there to see exactly how, I enjoyed being a Freak.
Of course, eventually, I had to speak to others without the buffer of someone else. I had to learn to be in public. My older brother moved away for college and suddenly I found myself in a situation I hadn't encountered. The world surrounded me, closed in, and there wasn't someone else there to show me how a normal person might do it.
The first many years had trial and error. I never did figure out how not to flap my hands when I was excited, though I remember hearing my parents assure each other I would grow out of it. I still struggled to have conversations on topics outside of my knowledge base. I remain unsure of the exact cadence to follow when beginning a conversation. Despite two years of conditioning therapy, when left to my own devices, I don't make eye contact when speaking. For the first many years, I still lived in fear of being found out, so still rarely spoke, and when I did, only in scripted bits.
When I began speaking on my own, I had to contend with the deficits in myself. Would I rather be known, deficits and weirdness et al, or would I rather be silent? Until my senior year of undergrad, the strict scripts let me live in an inbetween. My senior year, the conflict in the inbetween had worn acidic grooves into my stomach, and so I partook in a type of rejection therapy, and I let myself be. I have never had the privilege of being able to mask, but I have had the privilege of being perceived as standoffish, aloof, quiet, shy and steeped in the oddness I can't undo, rather than the reality of my oddness, which is passionate, hyperlexic, conversationally a bit rigid, excitable, kind, and oriented toward justice, perhaps to a fault.
When I began librarianship more generally, but specifically moved into the academic world, I looked into space again from the ground beneath it. I had begun to master the acceptance of my oddness in my personal life, but professionally, I wondered... Did I belong here? What was I if not a creature, unidentifiable amongst recognizable species? Who was I but a Freak and court jester?
The answer rests in the Muppets I love so dearly. In Muppets from Space (1999), Gonzo meets the alien species he belongs to after enduring and escaping experimentation and MK Ultra esque threats by the MCU version of the CIA/FBI with the help of his earthly family. Despite doubts that the aliens Gonzo is sure are communicating to him are actually real and going to appear, they do, and have come specifically to take him back to his home planet, where they are revered celebrities. Gonzo, however, declines the offer, opting instead to stay with his earthly family as the official ambassador to earth.
On earth, the sprawling blue rock where we live, I let myself be a Freak. Often, it hurts, and often, it's lonely. But here we are, sometimes the act of being a freak, a weird little girl, allows others to do the same. For a moment, the world, cold, lonely, inept and uncaring, tersely misunderstanding words used technically correctly but situationally inappropriately, opens like the unassuming egg shaped spaceship from which Gonzo's celestial relatives emerge. I make a puppet in my office, I teach information literacy, I make a video essay, I prop the door open for a student, I write a letter of recommendation; I love the world. I flap my hands, I hardly ever feel ashamed for it anymore, someone asks me about my puppet. Thank God I opted to stay on our little blue marble.