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She made me feel like I mattered. And that, that’s what belonging is. It’s not about being included.

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It’s really about being expected. It’s someone saying, of course you’re here. We have been waiting for you.

We’re wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in. I’m Tonya Kubo, and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras.

Because around here, what makes you weird, makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point. We all know what loneliness looks like.

The widow who never gets any visitors. The kid who eats lunch alone. That quirky guy who walks awkwardly into a room and instantly knows he doesn’t belong.

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But here’s what we don’t talk about enough. People, by themselves, are not the answer. You can have proximity without presence, surrounded by people and feeling alone still.

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Or like an outcast, you can have attention without connection. That’s a reality no matter where you live, what you do, or how much money you have or don’t have. Celebrity suicide rates alone prove my point.

And while I’m still here, I’ve lived that contradiction myself. I’ll tell you the whole story in a moment, where I was 29, in a hospital bed, a known community newspaper editor and columnist, visible and important-ish, but feeling like I could disappear without a trace. My name’s Tonya Kubo, and this is Find Your Freaks, a show about what happens when we stop hiding who we are, boldly own it, and start searching for the people who get us.

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The ones who don’t just tolerate our weird, but recognize it. Maybe because it looks a lot like their own. I have spent most of my professional life helping people build community, online and off.

But I didn’t start out doing this work because I was Miss Congeniality. I didn’t get here because I was captain of the cheerleading squad or crowned prom queen. I got here because I’ve known the deep ache of feeling equal parts too much and not enough.

Being surrounded but still unseen. And once you have found that kind of invisible, you start paying attention to who gets left out. Who’s overlooked? Who’s maybe always invited, but never truly expected or welcomed? Who, when you look around, you don’t maybe notice they’re missing? So let’s rewind for a moment.

The year was 2007, and I was managing the editorial production of a small chain of community newspapers. I led a local support group. I wrote a lifestyle column that landed on 20,000 doorsteps every single week.

Strangers would stop me in the grocery store to chat as if we were old friends. But then I got sick. Emergency surgery kind of sick.

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I found myself sliced open, stapled back together and recovering in a hospital about 90-ish minutes from home. But it may as well have been across the country. I was in pain, drugged up, scared, completely alone.

But not alone in the technical sense. Hospitals are always full. They’re busy.

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They’re loud. You’ve got nurses and roommates and machines and the steady churn of checking your vitals and other types of care. And still, I had never felt more isolated in my entire life.

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This wasn’t the first time, though, that I saw how powerful belonging could be or how easy it is to get it wrong. See, in college, I had this roommate who would DJ punk shows. So, like, I’m not cool, but I like to think I’m cool adjacent.

And she would book these scrappy bands who were willing to drive anywhere for a few hundred bucks, a floor to sleep on, and a stage to play on. In our apartment, it was the floor. Now, over the course of about a year, we hosted half a dozen bands.

Sometimes five or six guys stretched out across our living room, kind of like cats in their favorite sunspot. But here’s what shocked me. When she was making arrangements, the guys very rarely would ask if we had space.

They would find out she had a roommate, and they were very quick to be like, whoa, whoa, is she okay? Will she feel safe? Is she going to go someplace else because she’s not comfortable with us staying there? And, you know, this was, like, the 90s. Things were different then. But that kind of care and consideration even now still floors me.

Like, these weren’t guys who had some kind of trauma-informed care training, right? They didn’t have PR degrees. They weren’t involved in social work. They were tatted-up musicians living on whatever they could scrape together and the generosity of others.

And yet they understood something sacred. Belonging doesn’t mean taking up space at someone else’s expense. They weren’t just looking for where they belonged or what they could get.

They were trying not to rob anyone else of their place. And honestly, it was the most human thing I had ever seen up to that point. Didn’t happen in a church.

It didn’t happen in a community center. It happened in a meh apartment in a somewhat okay side of town. Now, fast forward a few years into 2007, and I’m stuck in that hospital bed, hours from home, no family in town, and friends and colleagues quite honestly too busy with their own lives to be able to make the drive out to see me.

And to be fair, I wasn’t really that much company anyway. But on day three, that drug haze cleared just enough for curiosity to set in. I posted to an online message board I favored in search of some information.

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Had anyone heard of this hospital? What town was I in? What was near to me? The next day, I had more than a hundred replies. And I had one private message from someone named Debbie with two I’s. She lived nearby actually, and she asked if I was up for a visit.

The next day, she was in my hospital room. Bright red hair, loud laugh, blue eyeshadow, fuchsia lipstick, and a personality as big as the hospital itself. And such kindness.

She brought socks to warm my feet, lip balm for my chapped lips, and a water bottle for the one day we had hoped that I’d eventually be allowed to drink water. She didn’t know me. She didn’t owe me.

But she showed up, and she kept showing up my entire hospital stay. She’d wheel me through the halls, threatening to race my neighbors. She’d let me cry.

She’d let me not talk. I could sleep, doze off, wake up, pick back up the conversation. She didn’t just fill a seat in my hospital room.

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She made me feel like I mattered. And that, that’s what belonging is. It’s not about being included.

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It’s really about being expected. It’s someone saying, of course you’re here. We have been waiting for you.

It’s not about what you produce. It’s about who you are and whether people see you as someone worth knowing, even when you have nothing to give. That’s why you find affinity groups for members in large churches and employees in large organizations.

You’ll find groups for moms, for expats, for queer folks, creatives, caregivers, cancer survivors, even neurodivergent people oftentimes have their own communities within communities. Subsets of groups focused on specific identities, not because they’re exclusive, but because they’re trying to find each other. They’re creating containers where it’s safe to exhale, where they can take the mask off.

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Because there are certain challenges mothers face that only other mothers understand. The same is true for cancer survivors, queer and trans folk, teens, empty nesters. When it comes to belonging, we as individuals are not looking for everyone.

We’re looking for our people, right? The right someones. And that’s what this show is all about. The search for the space where we can stop performing and start connecting.

Where our weird isn’t the cost of entry, it’s the common ground. Now this podcast is not always going to sound like this episode. Some weeks you’ll hear conversations with people who found belonging in unexpected places or who foster that belonging for others.

Many who live very differently from you or me. I’ll put on my curiosity hat and dust off my reporter’s notebook and start asking questions. Other weeks it’ll be just us exploring the messy beautiful mechanics of what makes connections stick.

Sometimes the stories will be funny. Sometimes they’ll be hard. Sometimes what makes them unique will simply be how very ordinary they are.

But they’ll always be honest. This show isn’t about brand building. It’s not about business or marketing.

It’s about being human and finding the other humans who see you. Now if anything I’ve shared has landed with you today, if you’ve ever felt invisible in a room full of people, if you’ve ever wanted to stop shrinking but didn’t know where to expand, you’re not too weird. You’re not too much.

You just haven’t found your freaks yet. But they’re out there. And I hope this show helps you find them.

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Subscribe. Follow. Leave a review.

Share it with the person or people who get you. And if you’ve got a story of your own, I’d love to hear it. Find me at findyourfreaks.com or wherever you like to hang out online.

That’s it for this episode of Find Your Freaks. To help more weirdos find their way here, subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re craving connection, join the freak show at findyourfreaks.com. What makes you weird makes you wonderful.

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Normal was never the point.