How to Get Rid of a Reputation for Being Weird

Few people want to be considered weird, but most eventually learn to accept their unique qualities. The pressure on high school students to conform is the greatest of any time in one's life, and the ostracization is most painful. However, with some work, a person can change his reputation for being weird.

Instructions

Difficulty: Challenging

1. Change the way you dress. Don't make the mistake of trying to wear the latest trends, just try to look more like your peers. The way you dress is an expression of who you are, and it may be difficult to give it up, but if you look more like other people, you will be more easily accepted.
2. Ask for resources and programs from your school to help you channel your talents. Many gifted students become bored or frustrated in school, which leads to behavior that can be considered weird. If you're no longer in school, consider that your school either didn't recognize your talents or didn't have the resources to let you put them to use. There's nothing you can do about it now, but you can accept it and move on.
3. Keep your most unusual interests to yourself or share them only with a select few that you know will appreciate them. Instead, discuss only what's more mainstream. Listen to what other people talk about and join them.
4. Join a club, take up a sport or attend popular events, even if you don't like them. Students should consider attending football games and pep rallies and joining the drama club or Key Club. Adults should consider the Kiwanis, Toastmasters and dozens of other self-improvement and community service organizations. This will allow people to get to know you and your talents, and is the first step to forming friendships.
5. Attend to the social graces. You may not see the point of some of them, but other people notice and take offense if you ignore them.

Tips & Warnings

• Try opting for the a less extreme option: being weird but helpful, weird but kind, weird but funny or any other of dozens of qualities. To do this, you'll have to allow other people to get to know you.
• Being weird is not necessarily a bad thing. People who are gifted intellectually or artistically are often considered weird. Many of the greatest people in history were considered weird before their talents were recognized, and some even afterward.
• Don't be so desperate to change your reputation that you let yourself be used by other people or that you completely lose your identity. Remember that you're only trying to change your reputation, not yourself, a unique person. You will appreciate your uniqueness one day.