The Sacred Gifts of the Outsider 

If you have lived your life as an outsider, as a slightly odd or different person, if you are a loner, one who lives at the edge of the mainstream, you have suffered. Yet there also comes a time to row away from all that, to experience a different vantage point, to emigrate back to the land of one’s own kind. – Clarissa Pinkola Estés

I have rarely belonged in my life.

Wherever I’ve gone, I’ve always felt like the outsider looking in.

Even when I have found a morsel of “insiderness,” it has constantly been amongst the misfits, weirdos, black sheep, and those who are introverted, neurodivergent, or highly sensitive. The deep feelers and deep thinkers.

Perhaps you can relate. Perhaps you know the strange sort of melancholy that comes with being an outsider. One who, in the words of writer and philosopher Colin Wilson, “sees too deep and too much.”

But despite how alienating it can feel to not fit in, to not belong, being an outsider comes with sacred gifts often not accessible to the insider.

In the above quote, Clarissa Pinkola Estés talks about experiencing a different vantage point and moving back to “the land of one’s own kind.” That’s my goal in this article: to help you find a new way of seeing and valuing your outsider nature. Because what you have is a gift.

The Sacred Gifts of the Outsider 

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. – J. Krishnamurti 

It hurts to be the eternal odd one out, to be the square peg in the round hole, to feel like a stranger in a strange land. 

So much of the deepest loneliness we can experience as humans is to feel like an exile amongst our own kind. Whether self-induced or externally inflicted, being an outsider is not for the faint of heart.

In fact, it often takes tremendous courage to choose authenticity over belonging; to be true to our deeper instincts, even when we don’t know who we are or where we’re going yet. All we know is that we don’t want to live out the same old boring life script handed to us by parents, social media, or society.

As someone who has been an outsider her whole life and has spoken to many outsiders through lonerwolf, which is for outsiders (in case the name isn’t self-explanatory enough), here’s what I’ve learned are the sacred gifts carried by outsiders:

1. Outsiders understand the true nature of belonging

Strangely, as an outsider, you’re more likely to grasp the deeper nature of belonging than the average insider. (By the way, I define an insider as someone who either naturally belongs or desperately seeks to belong.)

True belonging starts first with the self. If you don’t belong to yourself, if you don’t understand yourself and what makes you unique, you can’t authentically belong. If you don’t embrace yourself in all your weirdness, you quite simply can’t belong. If you haven’t explored your inner world, understanding what makes you tick, you can’t truly belong.

Why? Because true belonging requires self-awareness, self-understanding, and self-acceptance. In two words: inner work. It demands living from an authentic self. Without these qualities, we default to a socially fabricated false self. And you can’t authentically belong when you’re living from a false self.

In the words of Brené Brown (emphasis mine),

Being ourselves means sometimes having to find the courage to stand alone, totally alone… So as I dug deeper into true belonging, it became clear that it’s not something we achieve or accomplish with others; it’s something we carry in our heart. Once we belong thoroughly to ourselves and believe thoroughly in ourselves, true belonging is ours.

2. Outsiders see through the lies and delusions of society 

Insiders who flock together in their crowds are more likely to fall into the trap of groupthink: the tendency to make judgments and decisions based on pressure or popularity, not what is true.

Groupthink is responsible for so much suffering in the world. It’s responsible for so much narcissistic, irresponsible, and cruel behavior. From the recent TikTok trend of mothers terrifying their small children by showing them a ghost filter and filming it for strangers (which is fucking stupid and abusive if you ask me) to people justifying the genocide in the Middle East and the murder of 20,000 children, groupthink destroys critical thinking and replaces it with delusion.

Being an outsider gives you a different vantage point. Removed from the intoxicating pull of groupthink, you see things as they are, in the brutal, often uncomfortable light of day. (Of course, outsiders can be wrong in their judgments and misguided at times. But they’re less likely to be due to their distance from groupthink’s influence.) It’s a painful but powerful gift.

3. Outsiders have deeper empathy for the plight of others

Being on the outside looking in gives you a deeper understanding of those in a similar position. If you mostly experience love, acceptance, support, and belonging in your life, how can you put yourself in the shoes of those who haven’t experienced that? It’s much harder.

Outsiders find it a lot easier to identify and empathize with the “other weirdos” and exiles out there because they’ve been there. They are there. This is why outsiders often make the most empathetic teachers, therapists, caregivers, professionals, and, in general, human beings.

4. Outsiders are more creative and plugged into the muse

To enter the deeply creative state that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “flow,” you need to step outside of the crowd into a place of focus and solitude. You need to be an outsider. 

Being an insider means you are pulled in many directions. It’s hard to be creative when your life is focused externally and when you care about maintaining the status quo. 

Creativity, on the other hand, is by nature subversive. It breaks through boundaries; it questions, it looks at things upside down and inside out. It’s weird. It’s the unicorn in the crowd of sheep. It’s the person dressed as a banana doing the chicken dance in the posh gala. You get my picture.

5. Outsiders are more spiritually aware

This might sound self-aggrandizing, but is it … if it’s true? Look at most of the mystics and sages of the past, and you’ll notice one unifying theme: most of them were outsiders. 

They would wander off to deserts, caves, mountains, and the wilderness to be with themselves and the Divine. They would receive visions, messages, and other ‘downloads’ that they would then pass on to others. Sometimes, entire religions would be formed around these outsiders’ insights. 

When we look at the archetypes of the wanderer, seeker, witch, shaman, hermit, healer, mystic, and sage, we see that all these are faces of the spiritual outsider. All are on a quest to reconnect with the Divine in one way or another. All need to be on the outside looking in, or, as Jesus said, to “be in this world but not of this world” to achieve their objectives.

Spiritual awareness requires that distance. It requires us to leave behind the skin of the insider and embrace the role of the outsider. This is the path of the lone wolf, the way of the outsider.

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Being an outsider can feel like a curse or a blessing, depending on the angle you look at it from. What’s important is that you take responsibility for the narrative you create about it.

Yes, being an outsider comes with many downsides. Outsiders have shadows like anyone else. In some ways, they suffer more. 

But in other ways, we outsiders experience more depth of thought, feeling, and spiritual insight. We may feel a lot of alienation, but we also have the ability to find more authentic self-belonging, which leads to truer connection with others.

These connections may be smaller – maybe one or two people accept us – but those ties are often deeper than the plentiful but shallow-rooted ones created by insiders. 

Tell me, what is your greatest challenge as an outsider? What is your greatest gift? I’d love to hear in the comments.