But for most people, realizing you are on the periphery of your group can, in itself, lead to significant unhappiness. Misfortunes, the superstition goes, come in threes, and for whatever reason, so do the sad statistics on bullying. In studies, it only takes three minutes of ostracism177 by total strangers for people to start feeling bad emotionally. About a third of kids are bullied,178 and about a third of them grow up to have what one researcher calls “adult post-bullying syndrome,”179 a condition marked by struggles with trust and relationships, mental illness, people-pleasing, and addiction. And about a third of all depression among eighteen-year-olds can be explained by childhood bullying.180

Most of the people I interviewed were happy to be pursuing their solitary path. But some nevertheless found it at times painful to be on their own.

Emma, Part II

When Emma Gingerich left the Amish, she did not know who the president was. During her first few weeks with the family that helped her escape her order, she learned to take a shower in running water, to shave her legs, to apply deodorant, and what contact lenses were. At her first-ever haircut, a hairdresser lopped off twelve inches. The family that had helped her escape the Amish handed Emma off to some acquaintances in San Benito, near the Texas-Mexico border. There, she quickly felt the pain of being ripped from the only social group she’d ever known.

Emma was, at that point, a natural-born American citizen with no Social Security number or birth certificate. She had to learn to drive, got a job at Dollar General, and then someone stole her truck out of the parking lot. No one had ever told her to lock her doors.

After long days of work, she struggled to keep her eyes open to study for her GED. She started college, but it took her about two years to learn English. All day, her brain rang with the unfamiliar sounds emitted by her professors.

She had not known what sex was, yet within the first seven months of her new life, she was raped twice by a laborer who worked at the subdivision where she cleaned houses. She would cry and ask God why he was putting her through all this. In 2010, four years after her escape, as she was sobbing herself to sleep one night, God seemed to listen. She heard a voice say, “I’m here.” She opened her eyes and saw Jesus standing in her doorway. She fell asleep and awoke the next morning with a renewed sense of strength.