The peril and promise of being an outsider

Who do the weird kids grow up to be?

Aug 07, 2025

This email comes to you in four parts:

An I-almost-died-of-embarrassment story from 5th grade
I’m still sitting with my fear 😰
Thoughts on why being an outsider is a gift, actually (eventually)
What being a weirdo freak has taught me about emotional sovereignty 💪 and how we heal the world

Being an outsider extracts a heavy price in the form of shame, self-doubt, and loneliness. But exile contains alchemical seeds. It can force you to build resilience, and become your own source of truth and authority. It can grant you access to a wisdom that can only be found in the margins.

Of course, it doesn’t feel like that at all when you are 10. 😆 So let’s start near the beginning…

A story from grade school

One day in 5th grade, a soon-to-be-ex-friend of mine managed to weasel out of me that I liked her brother. Or maybe she just pressed me with, “You like him, doooooon’t you??” until my face turned red. I can’t remember.

But I do remember this: her brother came up to the table where I was sitting at lunch and loudly announced in front of the entire cafeteria, “My sister said you like me!”. 😱😱😱

I can’t remember what happened next because my brain stopped processing coherent thoughts. 🫠

So that was mortifying, but then not too long after that, he found out I was an atheist and told me he couldn’t talk to me any more because I was a witch.

Which was absurd—I wouldn’t become a witch for another 7 years! 1

The kids in the town where I grew up were apparently taught that “atheist” meant “devil-worshipper” and “sacrifices babies at midnight on full moons” or something. 🤷🏼‍♀️

I can laugh about these stories now, but the reality is that as a kid, I learned to not trust a single soul.

I was a weirdo at school but I was also a weirdo in my family. At school I was too smart (and, let’s face it, too autistic), and at home I was too emotional. It felt like any time someone found out something precious and real and true about me, they would use it to hurt me.

I was a very unhappy, scared, and lonely kid. 😔

So as I continue to push at the boundary of my comfort zone of staying in my safe little corner of the interwebs where nobody really pays attention to me, I continue to run into THE FEAR.

Yes, I’m still sitting with my fear.

Right now it’s about emailing my list.

Not you guys— the fact that Substack makes me email everyone every time has gotten me over my fear of emailing this list, but I have other lists that I have avoided for sooooooo long that now I have to do a, “Hey, remember me? I exist! I’m cool!” kind of email.

And my inner-child brain is like “OMG you are begging for attention and you will be smacked down so you better just not”.

I found a teacher-of-email-marketing2 who has the kind of down-to-earth, you-can-do-this vibes that I just want to mainline into my brain—but it’s still hard to get myself to watch her videos even though she is funny and not at all scary. Because learning leads to doing the thing, and doing the thing is scary.

I have so much fear in my nervous system y’all. 😰

This is why even though I like to write and teach and overshare on the internet, and I have a lot to say, I have never fully leaned into actually building a platform. Because visibility still scares the shit out of me.

But I’m fired up to do it now, which means I have to work through all the things that stopped me before.

And it’s not really fun. It feels like crap. I sit there and feel small. I feel vulnerable. I feel exposed. I feel like I really want to do anything else right now.

But what I want to accomplish is on the other side of this fear-mountain. 🏔️So I am just gonna keep climbing, one not-very-fun step at a time, until my body gets used to the new elevation.

And I know it will, because nervous system work is not rocket science. It’s not a complex system—it just wants bad things to not happen again, but its pattern matching is ridiculously broad.

So every time it thinks, “Wow, sending this newsletter is just like when we were 10”, I just have to patiently sit with it until it can realize that no, it’s really not. I’m not 10, I’m 44. I’m not being forced to participate in an institutional education system full of mean kids and ineffectual adults who were all socialized to see me as an agent of the Devil (apparently).

In fact, this situation is almost nothing like that! 😆 It really is kind of silly, but this is the hardware we all have to work with.

How is this a gift?!?

I was listening to Chani’s weekly astrology update and she pointed out that this week is all about outsider energy and what it brings to the table:

What would somebody living on the margins say about this situation, this setup, this scenario? Because people that live on the outskirts or people that live on the margins, or people that are outsiders, rebels—whatever you want to call them, us—have a lot less at stake. People that want to live in the center and reap all the benefits from being in the center where the power is are not going to want to risk much because they want to remain in the center. So those that are on the outskirts already have a better vantage point because they’re not being coerced or they’re not being muddied. Their perspective isn’t being muddied by wanting something from the center.

And it made me realize I need to reframe this whole conversation I am often having with myself about being autistic, being bullied, and my current struggle with my fear of reminding people I exist.

Because the truth is, I would never trade my life now for being a normy, and I have no interest in living inside the bubble of conformity I was excluded from.

Outsiders see “normal” from a very different perspective—we see what is wrong with it. And since we don’t get the benefits of being part of it, we don’t mind experimenting with being different—with being ourselves. We build out whole worlds of diversity and difference and delightful weirdness.

We are the artists, the writers, the poets.

We are the ones at the edges who create the culture that the world is evolving towards.

The road to being able to embrace who I really am with complete self-love and self-acceptance and self-support wasn’t easy, especially because I was never given any model for how to do it. I really had to figure it out the long, slow hard way.

But now that I’m here, it is so much better than “normal” could ever be. I finally became my own person—I belong to myself. And I would not trade that for anything.

I have learned outsider ninja skills.

It’s not just my childhood of having hippie atheist intellectual parents in a rural Republican Christian town. Or being autistic, being gifted, being unable to stop myself from speaking the truth that I saw, no matter how many times it pissed people off.

I have a long list of “Here is another way I’m different” experiences. I used to have a sinking feeling every time my inner drive for authenticity would reveal yet another way that I’m a giant freak. It used to feel like a burden to be so different.

But the final boss fight was marrying a prisoner. Being a prison wife was a masterclass in alienation. Childhood bullies can’t hold a candle to the brutality of the comment section on any news story about a prisoner.

That experience stripped away any remaining sensitivity to judgement I still had to what people think of me and my life choices. My fucks given meter isn’t just at zero—it broke.

Here is what I have learned about emotional sovereignty.

A felt sense of safety and belonging doesn’t come from fitting in. That kind of safety is always conditional. If you can lose it, it’s not yours.

The feeling of being your own person comes from self-love and self-permission, along with fortifying the inner fuck you to any form of judgement that tries to undermine your certain knowledge of your inherent awesomeness.

I made this graphic to illustrate it:

So besides taking itty bitty steps up the mountain, I’m reframing my backstory as the Hero’s Journey it was. And I’m honoring the Outsider Archetype and the wisdom I’ve developed from living it.

Healing is not about overcoming pain, it’s about creating wholeness. And what I know about the Outside is that we have everything that the Inside is missing because it devalued it and kicked it out of the circle of legitimacy.

And it’s up to us to learn how to value and legitimize ourselves, and stand in the knowledge of the value that we are, and make visible what they tried to make invisible. We are the missing piece the world needs to be whole, and as such we are really fucking valuable. 💚