Do you sit alone in the cafeteria? Are you routinely mocked for your choice of wardrobe? Ed Sheeran says you should consider yourself lucky.

The singer, who's got rap and hard metal skills to boot, was honored at the American Institute for Stuttering's Freeing Voices Changing Lives Benefit Gala on Monday (June 8), and told The Hollywood Reporter that he intended to speak to the power of weirdos.

"Having things that make you different help you become an interesting person," he said. "Most of the people I knew that were normal in school are all pretty dull right now—they go to the gym four times a week and look at themselves in the mirror a lot, but they don't really have a lot to say."

In a subsequent speech, Sheeran pointed out that he, himself, suffered from a stutter as a kid, but that constant recitation of the tracks on Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP helped him to correct his verbal cadence: "My Uncle Jim told my dad that Eminem was the next Bob Dylan — it's pretty similar, it's all just storytelling — so my dad bought me The Marshall Mathers LP when I was nine years old, not knowing what was on it. I learned every word of it, back to front, by the time I was ten. He raps very fast and melodically and percussively, and it helped me get rid of the stutter."

Either way, he assured a crowd, the condition is nothing to be ashamed of.

"I wanted to not necessarily to shed light on stuttering or make it a thing, but stress to kids in general to just be yourself, because there's no one in the world that can be a better you than you," he insisted. "If you try to be the cool kid in class, you'll end up very boring and doing plumbing for someone who apparently wasn't that cool. Be yourself. Embrace your quirks. Being weird is a wonderful thing."

Agree with Sheeran's endorsement of the abnormal? Share your thoughts on his words!

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