To pursue her bachelor’s degree, Emma moved to Stephenville, Texas, a small town between Fort Worth and Abilene. There, Emma struggled socially nearly as much as she did among the Amish. She had trouble trusting people. When she finally made a friend, she turned out to be an insecure girl who sought constant reassurance of her status as a “best friend.” It wasn’t terminology Emma was familiar with. What’s the difference between a friend and a “best friend”? Emma felt like she was constantly trying to please her, a feeling she remembers alternately as “cowering down” and “treading water.”

At times, she felt like people could see through her business-casual separates and envision her wearing a long dress and bonnet. She speaks with a subtle, but noticeable, Germanic lilt. People ask her all the time where she’s from, and sometimes she’s too exhausted to explain it all. Even finding a new church was difficult. Emma is still a strong Christian, but she found the Baptist church she encountered in Texas too insistent that she attend every Sunday, or even twice a week.

I first met Emma in person a few years ago, when I interviewed her for an Atlantic article about her use of technology.182 At the time, I noticed that she seemed to have dueling impulses about whether she needed more personal space, or less. For a while, whenever someone knocked on her front door, she would scream.

The negative consequences of social exclusion were a subtle but inescapable part of what my family and I experienced in Texas. Texans’ friendliness is the best thing about the state, but like too much Sweet ’N Low, in overlarge quantities it carries an acrid note. Polite concern about which church you go to and “how y’all doin’ tonight” can slip into outright nosiness—or even a vague insinuation of superiority. Cashiers at grocery stores often ask my parents, who both have heavy accents, “Where y’all from?” They then proceed to guess countries—Germany! France!—that are inevitably wrong. This is not rude, per se, but it is yet another reminder to my parents of how glaring their outsiderdom is.

At one point, in high school, I got a job selling clothes at a men’s clothing store. I liked the job. Many of my fellow cashiers were boys from other schools in the area, and it was a chance to interact with them on neutral territory. Decked in my mandatory khaki pants, I hoped to recast the shopgirl version of me as slightly cooler and slightly less good at math. Slightly less Russian, even.