Finding Your People Without Losing Yourself

From childhood, I found myself seeking belonging in groups of girls and women, and it never quite worked out. To look at me, you might assume I'd fit in easily. I don't present in a way that signals outsider. But I'm on the spectrum, and social settings have never been simple for me to navigate.

What I do instead is observe. I pick up on patterns. I notice when what someone says doesn't align with what they do, when the warmth in a message doesn't match the energy in the room. I notice things people would rather not be noticed. That has made me an outsider my whole life. And it followed me straight into my professional one.

THE ALLURE

When I entered professional spaces in paramedical tattooing; competitions, retreats, industry events, I was looking for two things: to learn, and to find people who do what I do. Paramedical tattooing is isolating work. Your clients are vulnerable, the stakes are high, and most people outside the specialty don't fully understand it. I wanted to find people who cared the way I care, who took the ethics as seriously as I do.

What I found instead was a lot of conversation about how much money you could make. A lot of performance. A lot of things that felt superficial underneath the surface of community. I kept telling myself the superficial stuff was just noise. I stayed because the learning was real, and because some of the connections felt real too. That was the beginning of a confusion I would carry for longer than I should have.

PRESSURE BONDING

What I didn't understand then was the difference between pressure bonding and genuine values alignment. Intense shared experiences, like competitions, retreats, the financial stress and vulnerability that comes with putting your work in front of judges, can create a feeling of closeness that mimics real friendship. You vent to each other. You show up for each other. It feels like trust being built.

But sometimes what's actually happening is two people managing the same stressful situation in proximity. The bond is real, but it's circumstantial, not foundational. When the pressure lifts, or when something happens that requires more than shared stress to navigate, you find out quickly what the relationship was actually built on.

I had people in these spaces who leaned on me heavily, emotionally and professionally. I supported them through both. I gave from a genuine place. And when a moment arrived that required even the smallest act of solidarity, the kind that would have cost them nothing but a little social discomfort, I got crickets. Not even a private message. Just silence.

Silence in that moment is not neutrality. It is its own kind of answer.

That specific kind of loss is hard to name. The intimacy was real. The need was real. What wasn't there was the capacity to reciprocate when the direction of need reversed. And that is something nobody warned me about when I entered these spaces.

THE VALUES TEST

Nobody announces a values test. You don't see it coming. Mine arrived when someone in a position of power used a slur - publicly, and more than once. I said something. The people around me, including those I considered close, kept their heads down and went quiet. They were protecting their access to a space that, I would later notice, didn't even fully respect them.

That is the cruel irony of those kinds of group dynamics. The people who enforce the silence are rarely the ones who benefit from it. Staying quiet doesn't protect you. It just makes you smaller in a room that was already diminishing you.

I have been excluded from groups of girls and women my whole life. Each time, I have searched for what I did wrong. What I understand now is that I was never doing something wrong. I was doing something uncomfortable. I was noticing things, naming things, refusing to perform comfort I didn't feel. That has a cost in spaces built on performance. It is a values mismatch. And learning to see it that way changes everything.

THE RIGHT ROOM

When I was accepted into the Alliance of Medical Tattooing, I understood immediately what had been missing. AMT is concerned with ethics, with serving your communities, with being a straightforward professional. The credential requires a level of commitment to the craft. That is a filter.

The people who couldn't get in, or who wouldn't want to, are not my people. That is not a consolation. That is just an accurate thing I finally let myself know.

Belonging that costs you your integrity was never really belonging at all.

STILL BECOMING

I am still waiting for my turn to be noticed and appreciated by the right people. I am still learning what it means to take up the right amount of space after a lifetime of being nudged to take up less. I am still in the process of finding my people - not the ones who need me until they don't, but the ones who show up the same way I do, in the ordinary moments and the hard ones both.

If you are new to this work and you find yourself in rooms that don't quite fit, I want you to know that discomfort is information. You are not failing to belong. You may simply be in the wrong room. The right one exists. It is quieter, less glamorous, and it will ask more of you professionally and less of you personally. It will not require you to shrink.

Please wait for that room. It is worth it.