Normal Was Never Good Camouflage

“Are you really going out dressed like that?” is one of those questions people ask despite already knowing the answer. No, actually. I spent forty minutes painting red and blue shapes around my eyes so I could sit privately in my bedroom and reflect on restraint. Of course I was going out like that. What they didn’t understand was that the makeup made me feel less exposed than looking ordinary sometimes does.

It’s not that I walk around dressed as a clown every day, although my bright blue eyeliner has probably done little to reassure anyone. I just like things that are a little weird and not particularly subtle. That seems to be enough for strangers to feel involved, but at least they know what to focus on.

Once you already feel strange in ways no amount of beige can correct, you may as well look strange in a way you actually like. I’ve spent enough of my life checking myself against other people and trying to work out whether I seem normal. Dressing conventionally never made that feeling go away. It only meant I was failing at normality in a more socially approved outfit.

Then there are days when the same instinct produces the opposite result. I wear winter clothes in summer because extra fabric feels like a barrier between me and everyone else. Yes, I’m aware that dressing for January in July isn’t the traditional route to blending in. This has occurred to me. I know it probably makes people look more. Fine. It still makes it easier to leave the house.

When I got my diagnosis, my style made an unexpected guest appearance in my medical paperwork. I had no idea schizotypy came with a dress code, or that wearing two different socks could become relevant to psychiatry. I’d dressed like that for years before anyone gave the rest of it a name. It was strange to see something I experienced as taste written down as a symptom, especially when it had always felt like one of the few unusual things about me that I’d actually chosen.

The awkward part of being diagnosed is how quickly personality can be converted into evidence. Once that sort of thing is written down somewhere official, ordinary choices begin to look suspiciously cooperative. Clown makeup: symptom. Winter clothes in summer: symptom. Mismatched socks: frankly, the case is becoming overwhelming. It can make you wonder whether anything is still allowed to be taste, comfort, laziness or a bad laundry day. Schizotypy affects how I move through the world, obviously, but I don’t think it deserves sole authorship of everything I do.

Some of it is deliberate, but some of it is simply me not seeing the point of rules everyone else seems to take very seriously. I understand that clothes should cover the necessary parts and preferably not cause heatstroke, although I’ve clearly been flexible on that second one. I don’t care if my socks match, and if two colours look good to me, that settles it. Sometimes I’ve thought the whole outfit through. Sometimes I’ve just worn whatever was clean and discovered afterwards that it had somehow become a statement.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t stop at clothes. The same thing happens when I speak. There are ways you’re supposed to phrase things, soften them, pad them with enough warmth and make sure nobody mistakes directness for hostility. I learned most of this through the pleasant process of getting it wrong and watching everyone react. Sometimes I’m being deliberately blunt. Other times I think I’ve said something perfectly ordinary and only realise from the silence afterwards that I missed something everyone else seemed to know instinctively.

This is probably why writing feels safer than speaking. Conversations move on before I’ve had time to work out what went wrong. Writing gives me time to notice. I can change the wording, add the joke or decide that the ugly part doesn’t need decorating. At least then, if I sound strange, it’s usually on purpose.

People tend to mistake that kind of choice for comfort. If you dress noticeably or write openly, they assume being seen must come easily to you. It doesn’t. Choosing to show something isn’t the same as wanting everything seen. The way I dress and the way I write both give me some control over the terms. Calling it attention-seeking gives me far too much credit for enjoying the attention.

I knew that writing about it publicly would change the way some people saw me, but I underestimated how easily explanation can become reduction. Once people know there’s a diagnosis, they can start treating every difficult moment as proof of it and every ordinary one as an exception. It’s an efficient arrangement, especially for anyone who’d rather understand a category than a person. I’d hoped disclosure would make me easier to know. Sometimes it only made me easier to summarise.

Even so, I wanted to write about it because, in my experience, most people have never even heard of schizotypal personality disorder. It was uncomfortable knowing that anything I explained could later be used as a shortcut, but silence came with its own problem. It meant letting clinical language and people who’d never experienced it speak for me. I wanted there to be at least one account from the person being described, even if becoming my own unpaid public awareness campaign wasn’t exactly a childhood ambition.

I don’t think every unusual thing about me needs to be defended as empowerment, either. I’m tired of treating every preference like evidence in some private trial about whether I’m doing personhood correctly. I don’t want my appearance turned into a courtroom where pathology argues with courage. Some things can just belong to me without having to become proof of anything.

So yes, I really am going out dressed like that. You’re not always going to know why, and I’m not always going to explain it. That’s partly why I wrote this instead. If someone wants to understand me, I’d rather they start here than with whatever colour I happened to put on my face that morning.