I’ve traveled to a new city not because I wanted to, but because I needed to. I’ve moved across the country by myself several times now. I’ve existed in millions of spaces, rooms, and restaurants where not a soul knew me. But I’ve also existed in millions of places where every single soul knew too much about me.
Where I grew up, when I share the stories of my youth, people are utterly shocked that such things happen in the United States. I’m constantly reminded how much of an anomaly I am— with my family, my peers, the people I went to school with, everyone I’ve crossed paths with.
I find myself feeling more alone when I share the reasons that I am an anomaly, but these are just facts about myself. I’m very keen on behavior, on minor flinches, on that split second of true emotion sandwiched between two masked ones. So when I share why my life has been curated to keep me not on a pedestal but at a completely different table from everyone around me… it hits different.
I feel like I’m inspiring. I motivate people. I exude creativity onto others. But what’s left for me? I crave learning others’ anomalies.
It’s an exhausting thought— to lie normalcy with death in a world of sameness.
I remember the first time I spoke to a licensed therapist. I watched his eyes cower, flinch, smile, and even laugh as I shared the strange phenomena that has been my life. This is my normal, but when I look at what’s actually considered normal, I sit alone, wondering how I became so strange, or if perhaps I was just this strange from the beginning.
I wish more people spoke. I wish you spoke more. I wish you wrote more. Perhaps I feel like an anomaly because I’m still only beginning to share who I am behind the big hair and red nails. Or maybe I just haven’t heard the right people speak yet.
It’s a difficult thing— offering others creativity, stories, absurd notions, and anomalies while quietly starving for one in return. Maybe that’s why I dove headfirst into the internet so young. I found the anomalies that enriched me by wandering as the digital man on Google Earth streets and devouring countless stories on socials and blogs.
It’s hard to meet anomalies in real life. Maybe I’m not near them, or maybe they’re a lot like me— scared to share, scared to talk.
So that’s why I left the small city in Tennessee, just for a minute. I’m craving anomalies. I’m craving extravagance. I need my version of normalcy.
That is to say, I’m not in an extravagant city, but it is new. Greenville, SC, is peaceful and quaint, surprisingly busy, and, more importantly, there isn’t a soul here who already knows who I am. I can exist as an anomaly while the people around me make guesses about who I am.
For being a Z-rated celebrity, I’ve dealt with an unusual amount of “paparazzi.” Growing up in a town that thought camouflage was a color on the color wheel, I was the firecracker who refused to change herself to please them. And for all the right reasons, I grew into an anomaly.
The lesson that standing on your morals could cost you those around you was ingrained in me very early. I’ve always known true right from wrong. Small towns in seclusion, communities in seclusion, make it dangerously easy to lose that definition—especially when everyone around you is screaming one way or the other. But I never did. I became the outlaw.
As painful as it was, that became the core of why I will not back down; why I am so confident in my values, my morals, my decisions. I was sixteen and couldn’t go to the coffee shop, Walgreens, or walk the school halls without someone snapping my photo to blast online, ridicule, or keep tabs.
So, as I switch cities and travel between places that have yet to discover what a true firecracker anomaly I am, I’ll keep blazing the trail I believe in. Because when the hell have I ever backed down? For fuck’s sake, I took my boss to court last year for a protective order after he attempted to physically harm me.
Don’t fuck with me.
Woman Compulsively Overshares, But People Somehow Still Don’t Know Anything About Her
This little city in Tennessee has started to get to know me—through friends, through my attitude, my loud mouth, and stilettos. It’s fun letting a new city slowly acknowledge your existence. I’ve been escaping down to Atlanta quite routinely for work, but the acknowledgment there hits different.
Consistently, I’ve gone to shake someone’s hand on set, or at another professional setting in Atlanta, and before I can share my name with them, I’m cut off by them announcing that they already know me.
After the seventh person, it clicked: maybe I’m as much of an anomaly on the outside as I am on the inside.
I’ve let my inner anomaly spill out into my fashion and overall style. To say the least, I love equally confusing and impressing people. So no, I haven’t been in any movies. The notable editorials and runway shows from my short-lived modeling career had my name scrubbed after I personally audited every photo online when I stepped into business.
Yes, I emailed and called every photographer and publication myself because I was determined to be taken seriously. And to fill you in—excuse my French—my titties are apparently extremely high fashion. I never did anything provocative or revealing, but yeah… my side boob is in a lot of those old photos. (I also had black hair back then—I wouldn’t even recognize myself.)
I’ve never truly taken little steps. I’ve never placed one foot in front of the other on the chronologically society-agreed-upon ladder. Every single time I have jumped from the bottom of the ladder, up several steps. I don’t know what those first three steps actually look like—they could be silver, black, or maybe even rusted and rigid?
I skipped through high school and went into college early. I left college early for my career. And now, as I’m still figuring out how exactly to catapult my writing and creative side, I know that the advice I’m going to be given is probably not the advice that I need to follow.
Many things I’m god-awful shit at. Many things I’m okay at. But for some things, I am an anomaly.
I’m writing this rant because I don’t want to stay one of the few who openly share what makes them an anomaly, not when I know you have powerful, beautiful, incredible anomalies inside you too.
I think the world would be a better place if we shared our reasons. What makes us special? Isn’t that what makes the world move—inventions, discovery, the future?
I’m tired of being an anomaly, but mostly because I haven’t heard from the rest of you.
I’ve been making great strides in my writing career; I’ve somehow been able to consistently earn money, network new gigs, and continually grow in my written collection in the worst freelancer market known to us in the past few decades.
Last night, over a Southern soft serve dessert, someone asked me what got me into writing. Per my routine, I started telling them how I launched What Sheridan Said as a way to open up and finally start writing again—but mid-sentence, I cut myself off and realized I’ve actually been writing this whole time.
I suppose I’m a bit sensitive to my ladder and anomaly analogies because I was told earlier this week by a family member to get a real job. Though this is a different kind of leap.
I’m certain I won’t be standing at the bottom of the ladder, carefully stepping onto the first step as everyone expects. Because over the past ten years, I’ve built an incredible written collection.
So maybe we aren’t always anomalies. Maybe we’ve been climbing the whole time—placing our feet from the ground to the first rung, and then the next. It’s just that we couldn’t see it; we didn’t know we were on the ladder. We didn’t know that part of the story yet.
But there’s my argument again for us to talk, share, and speak more. Because maybe sometimes we aren’t that much of an anomaly. Maybe it’s just that not enough of us have told our stories yet.
xo,
Sheridan Guerrette
WhatSheridanSaid.com
Life Behind the Artist: Wed at 9/8C
