For a lot of people, finding your tribe is the thing you wait your whole life for. After years of being the odd one out, you finally land in a room where everyone is wired a little like you are. My version came years before I had any words for it. I built a creative agency and slowly realized I had assembled a whole crew of people who worked the way I did. I was not hiring for neurodivergence. The term was barely on my radar, and my own diagnosis was still a long way off. I just had a feel for who clicked, who lit up, who belonged in the mix, and, just as reliably, who never quite fit no matter how good they looked on paper. I did not have the language. I had the instinct. (I told that story in The ND Team That Saved My Agency Bacon .) So when I talk about finding your tribe, I am not talking about finally getting to drop a mask. I was never much of a mask guy. Hiding who I am has always felt like more work than just being me, and most days I genuinely do not care enough to bother. People have read that as ego. It is not. I just stopped keeping score of what others thought a long time ago. The relief was something simpler: looking around a room and realizing I was not the only one. That the way my brain worked, the thing I had never bothered to apologize for, was suddenly the whole point. And here is what nobody talks about. Once you are inside that tribe, it gets disturbingly easy to become exactly as brutal as the outsiders you never tried to fit in with. Even in the creative agency world. Maybe especially there. This is about what happens when the outcasts become the gatekeepers, and how to tell when your tribe is lifting you up or quietly chewing you out. The Sweet, Wild High of Finding Your People The First Time It Clicked I remember the first real brainstorm where it clicked. We sprinted through ideas, jumped five logical steps with no warning, half-finished each other's thoughts. Nobody blinked. If anything, people picked it up and ran somewhere even stranger than I would have. It was not that I could finally be myself. I had always been myself, loudly. It was that for once, being myself was not slowing the room down. It was the engine. It was glorious. It was home. The power of shared experience cannot be overstated. Most of us, the neurodivergent, the awkward, the former weird kids, go through life slightly (or spectacularly) out of step. Suddenly you are in a room full of people who know exactly what "forgetting your train of thought mid-sentence because two new trains showed up" feels like. Who knew the comfort that comes from not needing to translate your brain before you speak? You get addicted fast. The high is real, like a sugar rush for your soul. You finally stop holding your breath. The Gravity of Belonging There is safety in a tribe. A lot of my crew had spent years being told "not like that," and you could see what it had done: the second-guessing, the rehearsed sentences, the smile-and-nod through every meeting. For them, the tribe was the first place they got to drop the mask. They got to say the thing out loud, risk the weird, and know that someone would not just catch them, they would ride the wave with them. Do not underestimate how intoxicating it is to stop pretending. That was real for a lot of them, even if it was never my particular struggle. I just got to watch people exhale. Now, here is the flipside. The Dark Side of the Treehouse: When the Tribe Gets Teeth "We Eat Our Own, But Politely (Usually)" It is easy to imagine that the torment stops once you have found your people. But humans are, well, humans. In every oasis, conflict blooms. See, the thing about tribes built on shared "outsider" status is that solidarity only stretches so far. Once you are inside, there is a pressure to stay inside, and to protect the boundaries of the group. It is not always mean-spirited or deliberate. Sometimes it is insecurity. Sometimes, let's face it, it is just good old-fashioned ego. The culture shifts. Suddenly there is an unspoken rulebook for what counts as "tribe" and what smells like "other." Micro-codes pop up: how to joke, when to interrupt, who gets heard. Somebody comes in with a different energy, maybe too neurotypical, maybe just a bit off rhythm, and the rest of the room closes ranks, even if they do not mean to. Here is the part that should have tipped me off sooner: it was never really about neurodivergence. I knew people more ND than any of us, wired further from center, who still bounced right off the group. They did not match our rhythm, our volume, our particular brand of chaos. The tribe was never "people like us" in the broad sense. It was people who were our flavor of weird. We just did not say that part out loud. I have watched it happen in agencies, in open-source communities, even in parent groups for "quirky" kids. The same snark, the same dismissive eye-rolls start to show up. Gatekeeping, but with a sticker that says "Anti-Gatekeeper" on it. "You Think You Had It Bad?" (The Suffering Olympics) Another flavor of this? The Great Trauma-Off. Forgive me, but I cannot count how many times I have seen the "who was picked last in gym class most" competition play out around a Slack channel or lunch table. Somehow solidarity gets twisted into one-upmanship over who suffered the most, who is the most misunderstood, who is the truest form of "us." You will hear the jokes, sometimes funny, sometimes sharp enough to sting. (My personal favorite: "I was so weird in high school, even the chess club thought I was too much.") We laugh, but sometimes the edge cuts a little deeper. Because hidden behind the jest is a real hierarchy, a pecking order based on how convincingly you can prove your outsider bonafides. Ironically, the club of the misunderstood starts to require misunderstanding as a badge of honor. And if you do not have the right flavor? There is a quiet but definite "maybe this isn't for you." We all claim we want community, but as soon as we have it, we start drawing borders. How Brutality Wears a Hipster Hat "Just Kidding! (Except, Not Really)" Remember that feeling of being on the wrong side of an in-joke in school? That "ha ha, get it, never mind" moment? The same dynamics show up in adult tribes, just wearing better shoes. In creative agencies, this can be vicious. The culture of snark is both a defense mechanism and a badge. A joke at the newbie's expense is "how we show affection." Roasting someone's pitch idea is "how we make it better." But intent does not always equal impact. I have lost track of how many brilliant ideas got buried under a pile of "constructive" wit. How many junior copywriters stopped raising their hand because their analogies were not "tribal" enough. And yeah, I have been the one on both the giving and receiving ends. It is amazing how fast the warmth of belonging turns into the heat of exclusion, even if everyone is smiling. It is the difference between a mosh pit and a stampede, both chaotic, both full of energy, but only one where anyone is checking who just hit the floor. The Ritual Hazing of "Paying Your Dues" One thing tribes love? Rituals. Even if we claim we hate them. Show up to our shop, especially back then, and you would quickly find which hoops you were expected to jump through before you earned a real voice. For some it was showing up to the Thursday night karaoke. For others it was the unofficial "see if your jokes land in the group chat" gauntlet. Underneath all of it was a real test, even if we never said it out loud: could you take a joke at your own expense, keep up when five people talked at once and nobody finished a sentence, sit in the absurdity without flinching? We were sizing up whether you could handle us. If you did not pass? You got to be "that person," the one nobody is quite sure is worth fully inviting in. Ironically, it was the same feeling we all hated back when the real bullies were at it. Not fitting in, except now with craft beer and inside memes. And here is the part I did not want to admit for years: to a lot of people on the outside, we were an obnoxious frat house. Loud, inside-joke-y, convinced our chaos was the good kind. That was a pretty fair read, honestly. At the time it offended me. I would think, they just do not want to get in here and play, they do not want to be creative with us. But that was not it. We were genuinely hard to play with if you came from outside our world. The door was technically open. The room behind it just ran on a frequency not everyone could tune into, and we did not do much to help them find it. And lest you think I am sitting up in judgment, god no. I ran these hazings myself, sometimes just to see whose sarcasm reflex matched mine. It is baked into the structure. As soon as we stop thinking about it, it becomes the culture. The Complicated Joy of Collective Chaos "We're All Messy, But That's Not an Excuse" What do you do when your safe haven becomes a little bit, sharp? Do you leave? Do you call it out? Can you even see it happening while you are soaking in it? In a recent project sprint, we had this very discussion, between jokes about how many "neurodiverse" stickers you could fit on a MacBook. Someone asked, dead serious, "Are we as inclusive as we claim, or just picking who to be exclusive with?" The table got quiet, the way only a group of ADHD adults can before someone restarts the conversation with a tangential anecdote about frogs or Ikea furniture. But the question hung there. Turns out, inclusivity is not a state you arrive at, it is a practice. You do not get to say "we are the outcasts, so we cannot possibly be like them," because sometimes you absolutely are. The trick is to keep remembering: just because you feel safer does not mean you are "the good guys" by default. Empathy is work. Not a sticker or a brand. Is There a Solution? (Don't Wait for a Happy Ending) If you are expecting a "5 Steps to Avoid Becoming the Office Bully" list, sorry, I do not do clickbait formulas. (If I had a list, it would just say "Don't be a jerk," repeated 5 times, which, frankly, rarely works on its own.) All I can offer is awareness, a willingness to look at your tribe every once in a while and ask, "Who are we for, and who are we quietly against?" Sometimes all it takes is a check-in before a meeting. Sometimes you call out the snark, yours and others. Sometimes you make room for the quiet ones and do not mistake their reservedness for lack of fit. And occasionally, you apologize. (Yes, even if the intention was not mean. Especially then.) What I Try to Remember Now Look, nobody gets through life without bruises, especially those of us who grew up on the outside. Finding your tribe feels like finding water in the desert. It is magic. But magic is not always sunshine and sparkles. Sometimes it morphs into something a little darker, a little sharper, if you are not paying attention. The truth is, every tribe has the capacity to become a little brutal, sometimes matching the energy of the very bullies we all claim to hate. The only way out? Radical self-awareness. A dash of humility. More listening than talking (not easy, trust me). And maybe the guts to call ourselves out when we start closing ranks. So celebrate your tribe. Love them hard. But do not forget to leave the door open a crack for the next wave of weirdos, even the ones whose weird looks nothing like yours. If you have read this far, congrats, you are already thinking about it. That is the only first step that counts. Now go forth and be the kind of tribe you always wished you had found. (And hey, do not forget to laugh at yourself once in a while. Nobody likes a sanctimonious misfit.)