>>Better to be "cured" and "normal", or better to be "yourself" and "weird"?<<
Typically there are two standards by which a person’s mental/emotional fitness or ‘normalcy’ are measured. A person is deemed ‘normal’ or mentally/emotionally fit if he (or she) has the abilities to achieve deep satisfaction from his life's work, and if he (she) has the ability to form and achieve deep satisfaction from personal relationships.
On count one Andy was more mentally fit than most of us. He achieved deep lasting satisfaction from his work. Yes, he was weird, but that weirdness was not threatening or harmful to him. By this measure, he was far better off to be weird and himself—brilliant and successful, than to be ‘cured’ and ‘normal’. And he was right, if he were ‘cured’ of his weirdness he would NOT have been able to do what he did. This was probably also true of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Edgar Allen Poe, Lenny Bruce, Jim Morrisom, David Lynch, Oliver Stone, and on and on. His weirdness WAS part of his art and creativity, just as he expressed to Tom Cottle.
But on count two of the mental/emotional fitness test, Andy probably showed signs of a person in trouble. By the time he died at 35, he had never married. He had had almost no exclusive personal relationships, other than one in college that produced a daughter, whom he didn’t even stick around to see the birth of, and a relationship with Lynn Marguiles, where apparently there was no attempt to make their relationship monogamous. He loved his family deeply, but the relationship was always strained. So also with his friends. Absent from his life were any deeply satisfying, exclusive relationships upon which he could always depend.
So, on balance, Andy was right. His ‘weirdness’ contributed hugely to his talent and the quality of his work. But at what personal cost? Ironically, Andy’s weirdness may have robbed him of depth and satisfaction in some aspects of his own life, but it contributed mightily to a whole lot of happiness in others-- then, now, and for centuries to come. If Andy had been offered, consciously, this trade-off, I think he would have chosen the exact path that he actually took.