Their stories, though wildly different, tended to follow similar trajectories. Each person I met faced an acute realization of their outsider status, followed by a period of reckoning with their difference. In most cases, they experienced a change—of mindset, of setting, or even personality—that enabled them to find happiness, or at least contentment. Some of them ended up seeking out people just like them, while others were happy to be eternal sore thumbs. But all of them have found some measure of success, despite being no less unusual than when they started. What they learned in the process may prove helpful to anyone who’s felt they can’t quite break through to the “in” crowd, regardless of what’s keeping them out.

As I met with and learned from my interviewees, I attempted to cure my own insecurities by putting into practice some of their strategies. I also dug deep into the psychological research on social anxiety and nonconformity, and, because it was 2019, I used an app. These measures have all helped, as I’ll describe, to varying degrees.

Here is the conclusion I came to: It’s good to be a weirdo. Being different from other people around you confers hidden advantages that can help you in life and in work. It also behooves you to live and work among weirdos: Groups are smarter and more powerful when their members hold a diversity of views. If standing out makes you uncomfortable, as it did me for many years, there are ways to smooth your reentry into Normville while still staying true to your weird roots. These strategies and life hacks, which I learned from the people I interviewed, can be applied by those facing a wide array of social challenges, even if they’re otherwise perfectly normal. Many of us might want to lead a group of people in an unconventional direction, gain a new perspective on our problems, or simply make more friends. My interviewees—people who have had to do all of those and more in the most extreme of circumstances—are the ideal teachers.

Before we set off on our journey, I have a few notes to readers:

All of the people I feature are unique because of some combination of their identity and where they happen to live or work. (A Muslim may be considered “weird” in certain parts of America, but would not be in Pakistan.) Because I focus on this binding tie—the condition of being an outsider—in some cases I will discuss people who have suffered different levels of adversity within the same chapter.

I don’t mean for this grouping, however, to imply that I consider the low-level unease of, say, a white immigrant to be equivalent to the obstacles faced by people of color or those living with rare medical conditions. Being laughed at by preteens and being discriminated against for centuries are simply not comparable experiences.