Julia does chase after whatever money is left in the sport. She gives pretty much whatever speeches people ask of her, including, once, a forty-five-minute talk on asphalt. She got really close on a big deal with a large tech company, but her contact there left.

Both Julia and Danica Patrick44 have suggested that it’s harder to find racing teams that will throw their support behind female drivers. “Teams are more likely to assume a guy will do well until he proves he won’t,” Julia says, while a woman isn’t assumed to do well “until she proves over and over again that she will.”

Because of how difficult it was to raise funds, when I emailed Julia in the summer of 2018 to try to arrange a visit, she had no races set up. “It’s a huge bummer but my unfortunate reality right now,” she wrote.

She was staring down a long season without getting into a car.

One reason it’s hard to be “the different one” is that to our brains, there’s something intoxicating about the familiar. American actors are more likely to win Oscars than BAFTAs, the U.K.’s film award, while British actors are more likely to win the British award. (“A creation is most likely to be regarded as outstanding when artists are seen by perceivers to be ‘one of us,’” the researchers behind that study concluded.)45 In fact, perhaps the biggest psychological myth in pop culture is that opposites attract. While this would be good news for the attractively challenged, it’s unfortunately not true. Research has consistently shown that instead, in both friendships and romantic relationships,46 people seek out people who are almost exactly like themselves. Spouses and friends may very well become more similar to each other over time, but they start out resembling each other, too. People try to find others with the same backgrounds and beliefs in order to befriend or date them. One study found that pairs of friends even exhibited similar neural activity when watching videos, especially in regions of the brain that are associated with emotions, attention, and reasoning.47

When Chris Crandall, the University of Kansas professor, discovered that friends are similar on about 86 percent of hundreds of different variables,48 including personality, beliefs, and behaviors, he acknowledged in a news release49 that this is not necessarily a good thing:

“Friends are for comfort, taking it easy, relaxing, not being challenged—and those are good things,” he said. “But…you also need new ideas, people to correct you when you’re loony. If you hang out only with people who are loony like you, you can be out of touch with the big, beautiful diverse world.”

Because of this tendency for people to cluster with others like them, it is more difficult to find acceptance and friendship in an environment where you’re the different one. No one, unfortunately, sees themselves in you.

“Khazan…is that? What nationality is that?”