Alex was lucky: he wasn’t attacked on the street like a few of his friends were. But people would frequently slam the door in his face or even personally escort him out of the building. Sometimes, the snubbing came as a relief. He hated door-knocking, and several rejections in a row were a good excuse to go try a different building or part of town.

One day, a local invited Alex and his missionary companion to a school play. As soon as they entered the auditorium, the local leader of a far-right political party walked over and glowered at the two missionaries’ Bulgarian friend. “We don’t want them here,” he said in Bulgarian.

More than a decade later, Alex still remembers the tense moment. “That was my first experience of feeling like,” he said, “this place is out to get me.”

Emma, Joi, Vivienne, and Alex all saw the downside of feeling like outsiders in their environment—as have so many others. But as we’ll see next, there are also some hidden advantages to being unique. Sometimes it just takes a while to stumble upon them.

PART TWO

THE WEIRD ADVANTAGE

Chapter 5

Creativity

For much of my life, all I wanted to be was normal. I wanted to be as American as my classmates; later, I wanted the privileged background of my peers in journalism. I wanted a past that when I explained it to people, no one asked “why?” about any part of it.

Or maybe—in exploring Christianity, or Judaism, or even Russian language classes later—what I was seeking was a rudder. I wanted a group, a home, an identity. People wouldn’t be able to blow me over, I thought, if I had something firmly tethering me to the ground. It could be a boisterous bunch of aunties with unpronounceable soups, or a long lineage of stoic “Jr.”s and “the III”s. Any kind of posse would have been fine. Without one, everyone was always able to say what I was supposed to be like, and I had no standing to argue.

There are a million little signals we get that suggest difference is inherently bad. “Living in interesting times” is supposed to be a curse. Interestingness, according to this bit of apocrypha, is inferior to normalcy. Boringness is tranquility, and divergence will inevitably hurt. For people who are considered interesting, that is often the case.

But probe a little deeper, and you find that being weird isn’t always difficult. Even when it is, there are moments of glory amid the turmoil. Almost all of my interviewees could pinpoint certain skills they honed, strengths they cultivated, or lessons they learned from the interesting times they lived in.