There was a boy in my school who could not sit still. Teachers called him problematic. They made him stand in corners. They wrote notes to his parents. They said he would never amount to anything because he could not pay attention for five minutes.
I met him again twenty years later. He had become a filmmaker. Not just any filmmaker—one whose work made you see the world differently. I asked him how. He laughed and said, “My mind was never inattentive. It was just attending to things that weren’t in the textbook. While the teacher explained geography, I was directing films in my head. Seven different films, sometimes, all at once.”
His flaw was his gift. It had always been his gift. We just couldn’t see it because we were looking for the wrong things.
I think about this often. How we spend our lives trying to fix the parts of ourselves that might actually be our greatest powers. How we sand down our edges to fit into shapes designed by people who never understood us.
My friend Shirin cries at everything. Sad films, happy films, advertisements for phone companies. She cries when she sees old people eating alone in restaurants. She cries when children laugh too joyfully. People have always told her she is too sensitive. “You need thicker skin,” they say. “The world will destroy you.”
But Shirin writes poetry that makes strangers weep. She captures emotions so subtle that most people don’t even know they feel them until they read her words. Her sensitivity is not a weakness. It is a antenna tuned to frequencies others cannot detect. What looks like fragility is actually profound receptivity. She feels more because she is more. And because she feels more, she can make others feel.
I know a man who has never been comfortable at parties. He stands in corners. He struggles with small talk. He leaves early, exhausted by interaction. His whole life, people have tried to fix him. “Be more outgoing,” they said. “Network. Socialize. This is how success works.”
He ignored them. Instead, he watched. From his corners, he observed human behavior with the intensity of a scientist studying rare specimens. He noticed things—the way people’s smiles don’t always match their eyes, the small cruelties hidden in polite conversation, the desperate loneliness beneath confident surfaces.
He became a novelist. His books understand people in ways that feel almost intrusive. Readers ask, “How do you know exactly what I feel?” The answer is those years in corners. Those parties he hated. His discomfort made him an observer. His observation made him wise.
Anxiety is another quality we pathologize. The anxious mind sees danger everywhere. It imagines worst-case scenarios. It prepares for disasters that may never come. “Relax,” people say. “Stop worrying so much. You’re making yourself sick.”
But I know an anxious woman who runs a crisis management firm. She is exceptional at her job because her mind naturally maps every possible catastrophe. While others are blindsided by problems, she has already imagined them, prepared for them, developed contingency plans. Her anxiety, channeled properly, became strategic brilliance. The same quality that kept her awake at night now keeps companies from collapsing.
The perfectionist never finishes anything because nothing is ever good enough. The overthinker cannot make decisions because every option requires exhaustive analysis. The stubborn one refuses to compromise. The obsessive one cannot let things go.
These are all labels we use to describe problems. But every one of these problems contains a hidden capability. The perfectionist produces work of extraordinary quality—when they finally produce it. The overthinker arrives at conclusions of unusual depth. The stubborn one persists when everyone else has given up. The obsessive one masters subjects others only skim.
I am not saying suffering is good. I am not saying we should celebrate our pain. I am saying that the qualities which cause us the most trouble often contain our most precious abilities. The child who cannot fit the mold may be the adult who changes the world. The person who feels too much may be the artist who helps others feel at all.
Society has designed templates for acceptable humans. We are supposed to be attentive but not hyperactive, sensitive but not emotional, social but not exhausting, confident but not arrogant. We are supposed to fit into neat categories. Check boxes. Normal distributions.
But the most extraordinary contributions to human civilization have come from people who fit nothing. Einstein could not hold a normal job. Van Gogh was considered mad. Emily Dickinson barely left her room. Their abnormalities were not obstacles to their greatness. Their abnormalities were the source of their greatness.
The question is: do we have the wisdom to see this in ourselves? Or do we spend our entire lives trying to fix the very things that make us unique?
I wasted many years trying to be someone else. I tried to be more outgoing, more decisive, more normal. I tried to sand down my edges until I fit the template. It never worked. I only became a poor copy of people I was never meant to be.
Then, slowly, I began to wonder: what if my edges were not flaws? What if they were features? What if the things I had spent decades trying to eliminate were actually the things that made me valuable?
This is a terrifying question. It requires us to reject what we have been told our whole lives. It requires us to trust ourselves more than we trust the world’s judgment. It requires us to believe that we might have been designed correctly, even when everyone says we are broken.
I cannot tell you that your weaknesses are secretly strengths. I do not know you. I do not know what you carry. But I can tell you this: the parts of yourself you hate the most deserve examination before elimination. They may contain something you need. They may contain something the world needs.
The boy who could not sit still became a filmmaker. The girl who cried at everything became a poet. The man who hated parties became a novelist. The anxious woman became a strategist.
They did not succeed despite their flaws. They succeeded because of them.
Perhaps you too are carrying a gift disguised as a wound. Perhaps your strangeness is your purpose. Perhaps the very thing you are trying to fix is the thing you should be cultivating.
We are all broken in some way. But broken things let light through in patterns that whole things cannot. Broken things create shadows and reflections that perfect surfaces never will.
Maybe we are not meant to be fixed.
Maybe we are meant to be ourselves—completely, unapologetically, with all our edges intact.
Maybe that is enough. Maybe that is more than enough.
Maybe that is everything.