Weird family members are best for our character development – that’s my takeaway from the first day at the Write in Armenia international camp.

I often see words getting misused for the sake of comedic exaggeration. Sometimes I think, “My family is so weird,” but when asked for concrete examples, I struggle to justify it. I know you might be thinking, “Lena, it’s not that deep.” I would have, too, but I want to see what comes out of this idea.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, weird means “not natural” or “unusual.” But after hearing others talk about their emotionally unavailable parents and extraordinary uncles, I wonder:

Why are such people considered weird if they are so common?

In Armenian, we call people “abnormal” as an insult, but perhaps it should be a praise instead. Oh, your dad never praised you? I know at least 20 others with similar dads. Oh, your dad is emotionally available and praises you? That’s impressive and extraordinary.

It’s common to see at least one emotionally unavailable parent in our families. I guess it’s a legacy of the turmoil and chain of events that people in Armenia experienced: Soviet oppressions, wars, and education disrupted with social and economic struggles.

Listening to Asli Perker, even before the session started, was captivating. The person who jokingly said, “Don’t have children,” within minutes of meeting us, made me reflect deeply on my family and the role they played on my character development .

I took a picture of this plant/tree because at first I thought that they grapevines and they looked very similar to the ones at my grandparents’ house. It made me remember how my grandpa and I would sit under the grapevines and learn maths. The first books I read were about the horoscope, because that’s the books my grandpa read daily. So funny, that despite being exposed to maths and astrology early in my life, I like neither at this point.