Finding Our Weird: On Friendship, Belonging, and the People We Somehow Just Know

I had one of those conversations recently. The kind that rearranges something quietly in the back of your mind for days afterwards.

A friend I have known since my late teens, someone I have shared a multitude of hijinks and heartbreaks with, told me they think they might be neurodivergent. Then, within the same month, another old friend from that same era said something similar. Then a third.

At first I thought it was coincidence. Then I thought about it properly, and I realised it was not coincidence at all. It was something much more interesting than that.

The Friends We Find Before We Have the Words

Here is the thing that struck me. These are not new friendships formed after some shared diagnosis or identity label. These are friendships that started when we were eighteen, nineteen, twenty, long before any of us had the language for what was going on inside us. We did not find each other because we were neurodivergent. We found each other, and it turns out neurodivergence was quietly there all along, waiting for the vocabulary to catch up.

This is not the first time I have noticed this pattern in my own life. Long before I had the words to describe my own experience, I found myself surrounded by queer friends. I did not seek them out on purpose, not consciously anyway. There was no filtering process, no explicit search for "people like me." And yet there they were, again and again, the people I gravitated towards at parties, the ones whose company felt like exhaling after holding your breath, the ones I chose without quite knowing why I was choosing them.

Looking back now, I think something in me recognised something in them before my conscious mind had caught up. Call it intuition, call it a kind of relational radar, call it whatever you like. But there is a real phenomenon here, one that a lot of therapists and researchers who work with neurodivergent and queer communities talk about: we often find our people before we can name what makes us alike. The nervous system knows the shape of safety before the mind can explain it.

When the Going Gets Weird

There is a Hunter S. Thompson line I come back to often: "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." I love it partly because it is funny and a little bit unhinged, which feels appropriate given who said it. But I also love it because it captures something true about difference. When life gets strange, when the world does not quite fit the shape you were given for it, the people who already know how to live sideways are the ones who show you how it is done. The weird do not just survive the weirdness. They become fluent in it. They turn it into a craft.

That is what these friendships have felt like, in hindsight. I did not know I needed people who processed the world differently, who loved fiercely and awkwardly, who felt everything at full volume, who saw connections nobody else saw. I just knew I liked being around them. I felt like myself in a way I did not always feel elsewhere. Turns out that was not an accident. That was two nervous systems recognising a shared frequency, long before either of us had a name for the station.

Reclaiming "Weird"

I want to talk for a moment about the word weird itself, because I think it deserves better than the reputation it has been given.

Weird has been used as a small cruelty for most of my life. It is the word that gets said about the kid who does not quite fit, the person whose interests are too intense or too niche, the friend who stims or infodumps or cannot make small talk to save their life, the person whose gender or sexuality does not slot neatly into the boxes provided. Weird gets whispered. Weird gets used to keep people small.

But here is what I actually think weird means. I think weird means specific. I think weird means alive in a way that has not been sanded down to fit somebody else's comfort. The etymology of the word actually traces back to wyrd, an Old English and Norse concept related to fate and personal destiny, the sense of a thread that is unmistakably your own. I love that. Weird, in its oldest sense, is not about being wrong. It is about being unmistakably yourself.

So when I call my friends weird, and I do, often and with enormous affection, I do not mean it as anything other than the highest compliment I have. I mean you see the world at an angle nobody else sees it at, and I am so glad you do, because it makes the world bigger for the rest of us.

Belonging Without Explanation

Maybe this is the real gift of these friendships. Belonging does not always require explanation first. Sometimes it works the other way round. You belong, and belonging is what eventually gives you the safety and the context to understand why.

I think about the version of me at nineteen, sitting in a grotty room with these same friends, none of us knowing yet what we would each turn out to be. We did not need the labels then. We just needed each other, and something in each of us reached for something in the others without asking too many questions about why.

Years later, the labels have started arriving. Neurodivergent. Queer. Autistic. Whatever the specific words end up being for each of us. And what strikes me most is that the labels have not changed the friendships. They have just given us better language for something that was true from the very beginning.

Final Thoughts

I do not think we find our people by accident, even when it looks that way from the outside. I think there is a quieter kind of knowing at work, one that operates long before diagnosis, before language, before we have any tidy explanation for why we feel most like ourselves in this particular company rather than that one.

So here is to the weird ones. Here is to the friends who turned pro long before either of us knew what we were training for. And here is to reclaiming a word that never should have been an insult in the first place, because being unmistakably, specifically yourself was never the problem. It was always going to be the point.