You might be relieved to find, as I was, that it’s actually advantageous to be different, and that there are ways to turn your weirdness into a superpower. The stories of the individuals in this book hold valuable lessons for people facing all of these weird situations, and more.

It can be hard to visualize “weird.” (Like that other thing, you know it when you see it…or at least when you don’t get the baby-shower invitation all your coworkers got.) For me, the peculiar nature of my family’s immigration journey was what lodged me between identities and caused me, until very recently, to feel deeply uncomfortable in my own skin. It was what made me, for lack of a better word, weird.

Every year during my middle school years, my family moved to a different Dallas suburb right as school was letting out for the summer. The initial move was for my dad’s new job, but that threw us into a prolonged house-hunting slog that I still struggle to understand. Each house we hunted happened to be in a different school district of the sprawling metroplex. This meant I never knew any of the other kids in my neighborhood before embarking on a long stretch of unscheduled, summer sitting-around time. I had to take care of my toddler brother anyway, so entire months would pass in which I wouldn’t talk to any kids my own age. We had a small collection of DVDs that my mom got for free from work, including the little-seen Matthew Perry vehicle Fools Rush In and the movie adaptation of Get Shorty. I would carefully ration them out so that I had one new one to watch every week until school started.

When the school year began, I found there were usually other outcast-type kids—think intense manga fans—but they seemed able to join forces, creating their own mini-society of oddballs. I, meanwhile, never encountered another Russian immigrant kid like me. I rode the bus alone. I spent almost every evening alone. Since I didn’t have an iPod yet, I spent a lot of time talking to myself—a habit that unfortunately has stuck.

For a while in high school, I decided to see what I was missing and joined a rural, evangelical Christian youth group. I began to spend hours each week scouring the Bible in search of loopholes that if read a certain way, allowed for sex before marriage. I would highlight all of these potential provisos and drag the Bible to my pastor’s house, whose wife would sit me down with a plate of underdone brownies and explain why no ma’am, Jesus never did say you can have sex just ’cause you’re super in love. To be clear: not a single human being alive on earth had expressed even a passing interest, at that point, in having sex with me. But I wanted to have my argument airtight just in case.