Real Life Adventures of the Pagan Variety

I had friends in town yesterday. They're some of the oldest friends I have, and some of them I hadn't seen in something like a decade. We were at the wine bar, drinking six different varieties and a sangria, and just sort of passing them around, with me drinking a large portion because all my oldest friends are lightweights and I'm the one with a religion based on revelry, when M turns the conversation to religion. She's semi-recently discovered that her family is actually secretly Jewish and converted under duress sometime after the Inquisition, so she'd gone back to being Jewish like her ancestresses, and it's freed her mentally and spiritually. A lot of what she had to say jives with what I've been thinking and what led me to an Earth-goddess-centered spirituality, so I was open and understanding and sharing info as I am wont to do in such situations-- which is to say, in the semi-defensive philosophical sense, rather than just jumping in an being all pagan up in someone's face. I hate when people do that to me, and I don't want to do it with others, and it's just polite to keep religion and politics on a more philosophical level then it is to be attack-ish about it, which does not help people to understand where you're coming from.

This is all good, and I'm happy for her, and I agree that faith means so much more when you find it yourself.

Then, we started talking about how we were raised, and T, the girl I've only just met, said something about her family being really conservative, and I sort of agreed, and M went straight to 'and you're Wiccan, right?'. It was unexpected, and I was a little drunk, and I couldn't find the place to start explaining that ten years ago I was Wiccan, and I've since moved on and consider myself more of an Ecclectic Heathen now. Which would have led to a conversation of what that even means, and since I don't follow any path but my own, it would have been... freeform. I like my spirituality that way, but I don't think people who don't know anything about neopaganism want their explinations that way. They want markers, definitions, facts, structure to hang things on, and that's great, but that's not how I work, and it's not how i can make it to make it understandable. ::sigh::

I don't mind Big Important Conversations About Faith, but when they broadside me when I'm a little tipsy, I always flub the answers and can't seem to distill over a decade's worth of adding and editing to create an easily-understood soundbite of what I am. It started as Wicca, and it morphed with eastern philosophies and native american ideas, mixed with mythology and an anthropology degree, got mooshed around and pared down with alot of my own personal experience both with other pagans and with myself, in my own head, and it came out as this system that works for me, and that I hope is cohesive enough to pass down to my children if they're of the witchy sort and want it, but might not even make sense to anyone outside my head.

Am I weird? Am I missing an easy way to tell people what I believe?