Sometimes the call is coming from inside of the house, my friends. In this week’s edition of Notes from the Wreckage, I tackle the special kind of hurt that comes from being betrayed by your fellow outsiders, and the damage of weaponizing acceptance.

ONE | When Weirdo Wounds Weirdo

One of the cruelest betrayals you can experience as an outsider is when another outsider turns on you. You know the type…someone who knows what it feels like to be the odd one out or the one who never quite fits. And yet, when power dynamics shift or social capital is up for grabs, they climb over your back to get there. They act like they never knew you. Or worse, like you were the problem all along.

It’s a different kind of pain when the people who were supposed to understand you weaponize their proximity to your pain. You let them into the sacred, messy, not-for-sale parts of yourself, the parts you’ve kept hidden because they’ve been punished so many times before, and they exploit that openness for clout, or credibility, or a better seat at the corporate table.
Too often in professional and social spaces, the desire to be accepted by a dominant culture leads outsiders to tokenize themselves. We smooth out our edges, rehearse the parts of our story that feel like “diverse value adds,” and erase the parts that make people uncomfortable.

And we’re not always doing this for the dominant group, we do it intentionally to each other, too. Instead of building trust and mutual power, some of our “otherness” becomes a form of performative jockeying: who can be the most relatable outsider? Who can be the most palatable “rebel”? Who can stay to the right side of comfort, unlike those “other” marginalized people who refuse to sellout. More on that below.

We mirror the behavior of the room, hoping another misfit might see us and offer a signal of solidarity. But in these spaces, kindness often becomes a currency. We trade our softness, our empathy, our emotional labor in the hopes that it will buy us a sense of belonging or at least buffer us from harm. But the exchange rate is brutal.

People are happy to take your support, your time, your sensitivity…and then turn cold the second they sense your usefulness has expired. Suddenly your boundaries are “too much.” Your taking up rightful space is “a distraction.” Your identity is “a team dynamic issue.” It’s betrayal as feedback.

This is especially painful in “progressive” workplaces or friend groups that claim to value difference. It’s easy to feel like you’ve finally found your people until they reveal that your inclusion was always conditional. They liked your weirdness until it got inconvenient. They loved your honesty until it started making them look bad. They leaned on your softness until they found someone else to sponge it from.

Here’s the thing: not everyone who comes from the margins has done the work to love themselves. And until they do, they will happily sacrifice other marginalized people on the altar of their own acceptability and proximity to whiteness and power. It’s not meant to be personal, but it’s still devastating.

If you’ve been on the receiving end of this kind of betrayal, you are not imagining things. You are not too sensitive. And you don’t have to keep being kind to people who show you they are only capable of conditional care.

And if you’ve done this to someone…if you’ve used another outsider or marginalized person as a stepping stone to get closer to comfort, own it. If you have betrayed someone’s vulnerability because you couldn’t accept the small ego death of being called out for doing harm…Apologize. Then commit to doing better.

Because the truth is, when we cannibalize each other to survive in spaces that already don’t want us whole, we become the exact thing we were trying to escape.
The antidote is discernment. It’s finding your actual people. The ones who don’t just tolerate you, but meet your truth with their own. The ones who don’t make your tenderness transactional. The ones who recognize that community isn’t about access. It’s about reciprocity, dignity, and the willingness to stay in the fight together, even when it’s hard.

Let’s stop making each other pay the price for someone else’s rejection. Let’s stop hurting the only people who know how we feel.

Let’s be better outsiders.

TWO | Not That Kind of Weird: When “Inclusivity” Still Polices the Edges

We talk a big game about creating space for difference, especially in our curated little corners of the internet, in “progressive” organizations, in the Slack channels labeled neurodivergent or LGBTQIA+ or BlackAtWork.

But let’s tell the truth: a lot of that space is still performative. A lot of it is still sanitized. It’s outsider culture with the edges filed down. It’s deviance that’s been through HR and Legal training.

Because we’re not actually told to be fully ourselves. We’re told to be quirky, but not disruptive. Honest, but never angry. Neurodivergent, but not inconvenient. Queer, but brandable. We’re encouraged to show up just enough to check a box or diversify a photo, but not enough to shift power or change the room. This isn’t inclusion. It’s management.

And here’s the rub: many of us learned to participate in this charade not from the people in charge but from each other.

Group life, whether it’s school, friend circles, workplaces, or movement spaces, teaches us how to self-police. If you’ve been the “too much” kid in the room, you know what I’m talking about. You learn quickly which parts of you are welcomed and which parts make people uncomfortable. And over time, you internalize that discomfort as shame.

Shame teaches you to edit yourself before anyone else gets the chance. To be your own bully before the group can reject you. To constantly second-guess whether your joy, your voice, your freaky ideas are going to cost you inclusion. This is survival strategy. And it works…until it doesn’t. Because eventually, it erodes the part of you that even knows who you are.

Even in so-called safe spaces, this dynamic persists. We reproduce the same systems we say we’re trying to dismantle. We say we want to ensure spaces are free from colonization, or white supremacy, or anti-blackness…and then we replicate identical systems of these harms and uplift performative, and often harmful, standards of success and professionalism.

We continue to uplift the most charismatic or socially fluent “others” and gatekeep the ones who don’t fit neatly into the identity aesthetic of the moment. Worse than that, we shame them for not being willing to change themselves to fit in “for the good of the cause” when our liberation is supposed to be the cause. We reward the mask, and punish the real.

Unlearning this shame is a radical act.

It means re-teaching ourselves that community isn’t earned by shrinking or softening. It means creating environments where someone having a panic attack isn’t treated like a personal failing, where a colleague being nonverbal doesn’t mean getting left out of decision making, where emotional expression isn’t a liability, and where arbitrary class and power structures aren’t still the “norm”.

True space for nonconformity means we stop seeing difference as a liability to manage and start treating it as a truth to honor. It means we stop tokenizing pain and start witnessing each other with reverence, even when that witnessing is uncomfortable. It means we tell the truth about our experiences without needing to make them palatable first.

And maybe, most radically, it means we stop trying to fix each other’s differentness, and start protecting it like it’s sacred.

Because it is.

—
xx JJ

Notes from the Wreckage originally publishes every Monday on my LinkedIn page.