MAYBE YOU AREN’T AS WEIRD AND STRANGE AS YOU THINK. But if you are, it could be a great thing — because the strangest people in the world invent things, they think outside of boxes that haven’t yet been made, and they often help us all to feel less strange as a result.

I born into two rich and vastly different cultures that rivaled and revealed what was real, but I sometimes felt “less than” — and other times I felt “more.” And I have always been referred to as different — weird, strange. But these words are now music to my ears because I know that strangeness leads to a more authentic, and adventurous, life.

I suppose Michelangelo knew that he was odd while painting the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. Surely, lying on his back for hours to paint frescoes about God and Adam on a ceiling, even as church leaders threatened his life, couldn’t have made him feel what we might today call “normal” or “accepted” — but boy, did her ever end up with a masterpiece.

When Shakespeare was writing “Much Ado About Nothing” and “MacBeth” I expect it may have occurred to him that no one had ever written anything like that before. But he wrote on anyway — and writing plays so original and incredibly odd at the time might have even inspired him to continue to his next works.

And I assume, quite unabashedly, that when Einstein was pondering the theory of relativity he wasn’t nervous about whether it might ever actually lead to anything earth-changing, or worried that if it did his peers might scoff at him, at his weirdness, in cafés and salons.

When I was about nine years old I had a dream about what I now refer to “this theory of strangeness.”

I was visited by songwriter Cole Porter, writer Mark Twain and comedian Groucho Marx, while Vivaldi played the violin as Sophia Loren danced the tango for the pleasure of many men, including my father.

I skipped about here and there toward a table of French artists, then past a bench of nude Ruben-esque models, and eventually sat myself down at a picnic with Frida Kahlo and Jesus Christ. We ate exotic fruits and pheasant, drank funny drinks that spilled from the cascading trees, and smoked funny-smelling cigarettes like my elder siblings.

What I remember from the dream is a feeling of peace, and that none of the floating characters thought that I was strange at all. On the contrary, they seemed to whisper effortlessly that I needed to attempt to be even stranger — but only if that was what I desired.

After that dream — which frankly was not any weirder than the reality of my life — I blossomed.

I began wearing black berets like I believed a 1920s philosopher might wear, even in the heat of thick, smoggy and hot Southern California summers. I wrote in backward cursive like Leonardo Da Vinci, spoke in an English accent like Alastair Cook (and, on every other weekend, like John Cleese).

Sometimes I even pretended I was Scarlett O’Hara at lunchtime while at school, entertaining many fine suitors as if I were at a barbecue, letting the surfers fight over me by offering me their lunches of bologna sandwiches and Twinkies.

I remember moments from childhood when other children pointed at my siblings and me and laughed, mocked and sang cruel songs — not just because we were of mixed race, but because we were the children of rebel artists.

My mother is a Japanese fashion designer who used to make clothes for Cher, Mick Jagger and Raquel Welch, homemade designs spun from antique kimonos that she would custom sew for these oddsters in her Hollywood shop in the 1970s as I sat in a playpen, eating a peach and singing nursery rhymes on an endless loop.

My father, a Russian-Irish Jew, once traveled with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac along the sweeping, romantic hills of San Francisco; part Beatnik, part poet, he later became a painter and taught art at UCLA, where he never felt he belonged because of its stifling politics and retentive qualities. Today he is a full-time artist, content as long as he painting.

As my family moved back and forth between the shores of Hawaii and California, I always prepared myself for the kids at new schools to comment about how weird our motley our crew was. But in all honesty, I enjoyed it and came to expect the stares (and sometimes near brawls) whenever my family set foot in a new town.

This goes back generations, with my great-grandfather, a newspaper publisher in Oklahoma, being shot on a street after he wrote a controversial editorial about American Indians; to my father, who is an artist who paints what he sees, regardless of whether his brutal honesty may disturb others. And now it extends even to my own creative daughters, who believe that what is truly strange is anything that is dishonest, and that being real is the only reality worth living.

The older I get, the more strange I feel in a land of strangers, but somehow this feeling is comforting, too. It means I am alive, and it means that I might be inspiring someone in a way that they have may have been waiting for for a long time.

I am filled with awe and refreshing splendor when I hear of a new idea, something odd and weird and fruitful at its very core. And perhaps owing partly to that life-changing dream of my youth, as well as to my eccentric and brave family who are never afraid to stir the pot with their most passionately strange desires and thoughts, I seem to be thriving.

This is a dilemma that is both warranted and wanted, and though being different can be lonely at times, it is inevitably fueled and filled with passionate moments — moments that are indescribable and worth their every indiscretion, every social beating.

On this note, I will have an adventure of the mind and the heart today, writing a short fiction piece about childhood that is so sentimental that writing it may just ruin its very pristine memory, and reveal moments that I do not care to revisit. But this is the wonderful brilliance and miracle, the gift of allowing yourself to be different — rather than indifferent.

And the person you owe this gift to above all, without question, is yourself. Because you are the first person who speaks up, who says strange and perhaps-brilliant things, then puts these things into action in a way that a thousand people together might do if given half the mind to.

And that is the only way that you learn to help others to do the same.

Francesca Biller is an award-winning investigative journalist, author, comedian and speaker. Her work has been published internationally for print, radio and television, with two new books to be released in 2015. She lives in Benicia and has two talented daughters, Rose and Jade. She can be reached at francescabiller10@gmail.com.