As a writer and an ordinary person, I try to embrace the curious, the odd, and the exceptional. I sometimes feel like the odd one out, like a black sheep, quirky and a little out of step with the mainstream. I believe that’s what ordinary is.

For many of us the black sheep feeling, that sense of not being like everybody else, is there all of the time. It is unsettling how the very things that set us apart also leave us feeling like outsiders. While being someone who doesn’t always fit in, who says the unexpected thing, gets things a bit wrong, can be a lonely experience, you, like me may not choose to change and become a paler kind of sheep. 

Anne J Murphy