The Outsider Who Became a Researcher

IB Music Year 2. American School of the Hague - 2005

I have never belonged anywhere.

I don't mean that as a complaint. I mean it as a fact, one I spent most of my life trying to disprove before I finally accepted it as the starting point for everything I do now.

Before I graduated high school, I had attended eight schools across four countries: the United States, Benin, Swaziland, and the Netherlands. Every move was a new institution with its own unwritten rules, its own sense of who the default person was, its own particular texture of welcome that was never quite extended to me. I watched other kids seem like a natural fit. I watched friendships form around shared references I didn't have, in languages I was still learning, inside cultures I was perpetually a few steps behind. I became very good at observing. I became very good at performing.

What I was doing, though I wouldn't have called it this then, was cosplaying fit. I learned to read rooms. I learned which parts of myself to lead with and which to keep quiet. I learned how to seem like I belonged without ever actually belonging. What I didn't yet have the language for was that I was doing this with an intensity and exhaustion that went beyond social awkwardness or shyness — I was masking. Suppressing, adapting, and performing neurotypicality so completely that even I didn't know I was doing it. For a while, I was good enough at it that I could almost convince myself the gap wasn't there.

It was always there.

When I came back to the United States for college, I made a deliberate choice. I had spent nine years away from Black American culture, moving through Benin, Swaziland, and the Netherlands, and I wanted to come home to it. I enrolled at Howard University because I thought, maybe here. Maybe in a space explicitly designed for and by Black people, the gap would finally close. And there was something real there: a pride, a legibility, a sense of shared history that I had been starved of. But I still felt like an outsider. The years abroad had made me into someone who didn't quite fit the culture I had come home to. I transferred after this internal tension became untenable. I graduated from LSU carrying the same quiet awareness I had carried everywhere else: that I could be in a place without fully belonging to it.

There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from being in a space designed for part of you, but not all of you. I learned that presence and belonging are not the same thing.

The first crack in the "personal failing" narrative didn't come from a doctor. It came from fifth grade, when I began to understand that I was attracted to women. This was the late nineties. The only lesbian I knew of was Ellen DeGeneres. I had the feeling long before I had the language, and the language I eventually found didn't come with a community, a framework, or anyone who looked like what I thought I might be. I filed it away and kept moving. It would take years before I could name myself accurately, queer, and eventually more precisely than that. Still, that early experience of knowing something true about yourself that the world around you has no category for was its own kind of education.

The rest of the reframe came in pieces. In my late twenties, I was diagnosed with ADHD. It explained some things: the restlessness, the difficulty following through, and my brain constantly working. But it didn't explain everything. The exhaustion of constantly translating myself, the way social environments cost me more than they seemed to cost other people, the chronic sense that I was working harder than everyone else just to appear as though I wasn't working at all, that remained. It wasn't until my mid-thirties that I was diagnosed as autistic. That diagnosis completed something. What I had been doing all along wasn't performing; it was masking. And masking, at that level of intensity, across that many institutions, countries, and cultures, had a cost that no amount of mindset work would ever touch. None of it was a character flaw. It was information. It was my nervous system accurately reporting that the environments I was moving through were not designed with me in mind.

The diagnoses gave me language for my own experience. The research gave me a framework for understanding why that experience was never just mine.

I came to the study of structural belonging from two directions at once. I went looking for language to explain what I had always lived — and in the process, the research found me back, handing me frameworks that named things I had felt but never been able to articulate. Durkheim on social cohesion. Putnam on the erosion of civic trust. The literature on institutional design and those who are centered in it. What I kept finding, underneath all of it, was the same question I had been living with since childhood: who was this built for, and what happens to the people it wasn't? What does it cost to belong to a community?

Those questions are not abstract to me. They are the through-line of my life.

I am no longer interested in forcing myself into spaces not designed for me. That's not cynicism, it's clarity. It's freedom. What I am interested in is understanding how those spaces get designed in the first place, what it costs the people they exclude, and what it would take to build them differently. Not more warmly. Not more inclusively in the language of a values statement. Structurally differently.

The outsider makes a pretty good researcher. You spend enough years studying a room you were never meant to fit into, and you start to see its architecture very clearly.

If this resonated, stay in the room.

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