How to embrace being weird, according to Kate McKinnon

Kate McKinnon was teaching us about the joys of being unconventional long before she rocked scribble-inspired eye makeup and a Flock of Seagulls-esque hairdo as Weird Barbie in last year’s blockbuster flick Barbie. Her decade on Saturday Night Live gave us wild, riotously funny portrayals of characters both real and imagined, from pop culture icons to an oddball dancing lady in Central Park. Now, the comedian, writer and actor aims to encourage young people, specifically middle-grade readers, to boldly embrace what makes them different with her debut children’s book, The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science.

Motivated to write a whimsical, fictional tale inspired by her own childhood, McKinnon began working on the book well before she first appeared on SNL. The lessons woven throughout the quirky story all stem from her experiences growing up feeling “so odd” yet empowered by her parents, who, McKinnon tells Yahoo Life, “celebrated every one of my little eccentricities.” Embracing that weirdness has now become a strength — and it's something we can all learn from. Here's what McKinnon wants people to know.

Lean on champions of your weirdness

Just like her characters in Millicent Quibb, McKinnon remembers being “so weird” at 12 years old. “I wore flannel only, and I had such a big space between my two front teeth that people thought I was missing a tooth," she says. "And I had a pet iguana, cockroaches, newts and salamanders and fish, and I was obsessed with The X-Files and aliens. I wanted to know everything. I was in love with the world and with nature, and I was so alive, and I just loved it.” But she also wondered how she would “survive” because she felt “so odd.”

The answer to that question turned out to be leaning on her parents and friends, who reveled in what made McKinnon different. “My parents were so funny and so quirky, and they made it possible for me to take [my eccentricities] even a step further,” recalls the comedian. “They let me take home the lobster claws from the seafood restaurant and do all kinds of science experiments in the house, take apart the VCR and go get the takeout in a tutu. My mom let me dress as Peter Pan for an entire year. They just encouraged me at every turn.”

McKinnon feels that she would have been the “black sheep in any other family,” but in her own family, she fit right in. “[My parents] gave me the courage to tune out all the other messages I was getting and just do my thing,” she says. “And even in adulthood, my mom encouraged me to keep being a comedian against all odds.”

She admits she was also “so lucky” to have “a gaggle of weird friends” with whom she's still close. “We egged each other on,” she says. “We dressed as fairies one Halloween, and we made our own costumes, and we just got into a lot of like homespun, old-school mischief in our town. We were always having little adventures.”

Do your best to reject pressure to be someone you're not

Looking back at her childhood, McKinnon’s grateful she was able to figure out who she was as a kid before facing certain pressures that come with being a public figure. “It wasn't really until I started looking at stuff about myself on the internet as an adult that I truly felt beleaguered by other people's expectations,” she notes. “I'm so unspeakably glad that I didn't have access to that until I was an adult, and my persona and my brain were already formed.”

It’s for that reason that she feels for tweens these days who are “getting messages from TV, from TikTok, their teachers, their parents” that they need to act a certain way that might be at odds with who they truly are. “It's more important than ever to help remind young people that they are good enough the way that they are and that they should just stay the course and be themselves, despite what everyone says in real life and now online,” points out McKinnon.

You'll never be 'too much' for the right people

Although McKinnon was fortunate to have had the support of her family and friends, she did have moments in which she felt whatever she was doing was “too much or too big or too weird or too something.” But ultimately, she realized that whatever she was doing that “felt like too much” was a gift. “[That] usually ended up being the thing that really connected with people throughout my life,” she says.

It’s also a lesson that led McKinnon to write her new book. She remembers that sitting in the writers’ room at SNL informed “the experience of having some wackadoo idea” and running with it. "Having the balls to follow through on something that people might not like became one of the themes that I was trying to write about all along," the Emmy winner says.

Celebrating your true self can be truly inspirational

McKinnon’s eccentricities have become what she says she loves best about herself. “It has become the thing that I’ve tried to share with younger generations and that I have been able to contribute to the world in whatever small way,” she says.

In the end, tapping into and flaunting what makes you distinct gives others permission to do the same — and can make a real difference. “I do think that whatever makes a person different is ultimately the thing that is going to help heal the world,” says McKinnon. “It really has a part to play in that. It's so important to be you. You don't heal the world by pretending to be something you're not.”