Why belonging is built through alignment, not proximity

Most people think loneliness is a math problem. More friends. More invitations. A busier social calendar. But what if loneliness has nothing to do with how many people surround you? What if it's actually about whether the people around you understand who you are?

In this solo episode, Tonya Kubo reflects on her conversation with Alicia Shidler and unpacks one of the biggest misconceptions about belonging: that proximity creates connection. Alicia's story of leaving California for rural Michigan demonstrates that being physically close to people isn't the same as feeling known. Instead, belonging comes from finding people who share your values, understand your priorities, and make space for you to be fully yourself.

Building on that conversation, Tonya explores how intentional living often challenges the expectations of others. Whether it's choosing a different lifestyle, raising a family differently, or pursuing goals that don't make sense to the people around you, living in alignment with your values can feel lonely at first. But that discomfort often becomes the pathway to finding the people who truly understand you.

Tonya also examines the role community plays in that journey—both online and offline. Drawing from Alicia's experiences navigating homesteading groups and her own work as a community strategist, she explains why healthy communities aren't defined by their size but by their purpose, consistency, and ability to make people feel safe enough to participate. Because belonging isn't about collecting people. It's about finding the ones who feel like home.

You’ll hear how:

• Loneliness is more about alignment than physical proximity
• Feeling understood creates deeper belonging than simply being included
• Intentional living often challenges the expectations of others
• Online communities can become powerful places to build meaningful connection
• In-person and online communities each serve different but equally valuable purposes
• Strong community leadership creates trust through consistency and accountability
• Silent members are often paying the closest attention before they choose to engage
• Clear purpose and healthy moderation help communities thrive
• Authenticity helps you recognize the people who truly understand you
• Belonging begins when you stop trying to fit in and start living in alignment with your values

Episode Highlights

[01:12] Why loneliness isn't simply a numbers problem

[04:05] Alicia's move to Michigan and how alignment replaced proximity

[07:50] What Tonya's front yard garden revealed about other people's assumptions

[11:40] Why intentional living often makes others uncomfortable

[15:05] Online communities aren't a consolation prize—they're often where belonging begins

[18:45] What healthy communities do differently to create trust and safety

[22:15] Why silent community members may be paying the closest attention

[25:20] Finding your people by living authentically

Resources & Mentions

• Episode 028 – What If It's Not Normal… But It Works? with Alicia Shidler
• Sustaining Humanity by Phil McKay

Meet Your Host

Tonya Kubo is a community strategist, marketing consultant, and rebel with a cause: helping people find the place where they truly belong. For nearly two decades, she’s built online spaces that feel less like comment sections and more like chosen family. She’s the fixer you call when your Facebook group has gone straight-up Lord of the Flies and the bouncer at the door of internet nonsense. As the host of Find Your Freaks, Tonya brings together unconventional thinkers and bridge-builders who know “normal” was never the point. Her favorite spaces? The ones where the freak flags fly high.

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What’s Next

Next time, Tonya sits down with Jen Mackinnon to explore what it means to belong in two worlds at once. Together, they unpack the unique challenges of balancing career and homeschooling, building community at the intersection of both, and why choosing a practical path doesn't mean settling for less—it means creating a life that works for your family.

There are people who are not making themselves known, but they are paying close attention, and they're evaluating, and they're back to belonging. It's not about proximity, right? It is about alignment. They're checking.

Are you in alignment? Is there unity in everything you say and do, right? Is your moderation consistent? Are your rules real? Are they enforced? Do people who cause problems, do those problems get handled? Do those people get excused? You can't pretend that long, okay? They're watching. They're waiting. They're looking.

Do you mean what you say? We're wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in. I'm Tanya 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. Most people think loneliness is a math problem. More people equals less lonely, right? Very simple.

Big network, active social life. If you're surrounded by family, you must be fine, but that's not actually how loneliness works. You can be in a crowded room and feel completely alone.

You can move away from everyone you've ever known and still feel connected than ever before. Alicia Shidler did that. She left California where her family was, where she grew up, lifelong friends, everything familiar, and moved to a homestead in rural Michigan.

By most people's calculations, that should have been isolating, moving from a city out to the middle of nowhere, but it wasn't. And the reason it wasn't is the point of today's episode. We have been sold a version of belonging that really is just about proximity and numbers.

I know I've said that before here on the show, but today I really want to unpack it. This is a hill I am going to die on. If people are around you, if you're invited to places, if you have a full calendar, everybody assumes you belong.

You're a social butterfly. Life must be great. You have this huge network, right? You're connected.

You're fine. Belonging isn't proximity. It's alignment.

It's that feeling that the people around you actually see you. They don't just tolerate you. They don't just conclude you out of politeness, but they actually get who you are, what's important to you, and why you do things the way you do.

Alicia lived in California near family her whole life. She was nothing if not surrounded. And yet the life she wanted, a garden, chickens, goats, and intentional food choices wasn't something that the people around her understood.

Now, they didn't fight her on it. They didn't tell her she was stupid. They didn't disinherit her, kick her out of the family, the family estate as it were.

They just didn't get it. And there is a particular loneliness that comes with being loved by people who probably wouldn't say this, but kind of inside their heads think you're a little crazy. So when Alicia and her husband moved to Michigan, they weren't running toward family, running toward community, like a lot of people who move.

They were running toward a life that they wanted, that didn't exist yet, that they had hoped to build together. You know, the property, the space, the ability to actually do the things that they had been talking about for years, all of that motivated them to move. And community was something that they had to build from scratch.

And yet, you know, Alicia's not homesick, wasn't homesick, right? She doesn't talk about her home in Michigan as rural as it is, as being isolating. She describes it as the place that she finally feels she has room to be who she actually is. The people who found their way into her life there share her priorities in a way people back home didn't even understand.

And I think that's what happens when you stop optimizing your life for proximity and you start optimizing for alignment. It's the whole purpose of the show here, right? We call it Find Your Freaks, right? Because when you find your freaks, you are optimizing your life for alignment and not just focused on who happens to be nearby. You get to decide where you belong, right? Other people can extend their welcome, but they can't give you belonging.

That's an inside job. Alicia knew what she was looking for. She moved 2,000 miles, as it were, to get it.

And she's less lonely now than when she was surrounded by people who loved her but didn't understand her. Now, this interview took place a little more than a year ago. Alicia is actually one of the first people that I interviewed for the podcast.

And initially, this interview was supposed to be part of launch week. But some circumstances changed that made it more appropriate to go out now. And one of those circumstances is me and my life.

Because my interview with Alicia, along with this book, which I'll hold up now for our YouTube viewers, this book, this book, if you can see it, Sustaining Humanity by Phil McKay. Get it? It's tiny. You can read it.

It's easy. But this book, along with my conversation with Alicia, played a major part in combination with a decision that I have made in my own life for the last several months. My family and I, but mainly me, me and my oldest daughter, are converting our front yard into a victory garden, right? My oldest has this vision that she has had since she was five years old in Girl Scouts, thank you Girl Scouts, of having a yard with food that is accessible to anybody who walks by and wants it.

Her vision is that, you know, no fence, no gate, anybody walking by could freely help themselves to whatever is growing there and happens to be ripe at the time. Now, we live in a suburban neighborhood. We live in a very large, like, large city in terms of geography and population, but because it's such a big geographic space, it doesn't feel huge.

It feels more suburban. So this isn't a homestead, right? I cannot raise livestock. Even if my husband were to let me have chickens and rabbits and goats, he wouldn't.

But even if he would, like, my neighbors aren't going for that, nor is the city and code enforcement going to go for that either, right? So it's not, I'm not aspiring to be Alicia. We couldn't be Alicia if we wanted to. But even this very small, very safe, and I would argue modern, like I said, suburban version of this choice confuses the bejesus out of people.

In fact, when I mentioned this online back would be, I'm trying to count months, probably eight months ago, several friends immediately said, oh, your neighbors are going to be furious when you start attracting unhoused people to your neighborhood. In fact, some even drove by to say like, oh, we're just trying to check out the situation and see if any unhoused people are pitching tents yet. You know, not, oh my gosh, what a cute idea.

Oh my gosh, you and your daughter are bonding. This is going to be so sweet. The thing that she has been talking about since she, you know, she was five for like 10, 11 years, you're actually on board with helping her make that into a reality.

Not like, oh my gosh, I can't imagine what you are going to be teaching the girls or what you and your husband are going to learn or how much fun you're going to have or any of that. The only response we got initially was about danger as if hungry people are people to fear. Now let's be fair.

These are people who care about me. They care about my family, right? They're not trying to be mean. They're not trying to discourage me.

Really what they're doing is projecting their own discomfort onto my yard, onto my choices, onto the people they imagine showing up at it, right? They're thinking like, oh my gosh, worst case scenario. And you know, when I think about Alicia and our conversation where she's talking about her family members who are in the medical field, who like think she's lost her mind because she doesn't cook with seed oils and how she handles it, right? And she says, you know, I'm not going to convince them. So she doesn't waste her breath.

She doesn't even try, right? This isn't a you're either with me or you're against me sort of thing. She's like, you know what? They'll see how I live. They'll make their own judgments and we will all move on, right? Their opinion of how she wants to live doesn't really have any bearing in how she's living and she doesn't expect how she's living to have any bearing on them.

You know, there's a patience. I mean, if you've listened to the episode, if you haven't, you really should. There's just a quiet, patient acceptance that Alicia has that is really beautiful because what I got from her and what I hope you get from her is, you know, she just has this willingness to just live without needing everybody's approval.

And you know, when I compare that to seeing how uncomfortable some people are by our little front yard project, I realized how much that has nothing to do with my front yard. It has nothing to do with what we're doing. It has to do with their own beliefs about who is hungry, what kind of person is hungry, and what hungry people may do out of desperation and whether those people are safe.

And that's not up to me. Just like Alicia has decided that people who know her and how they feel about how she lives isn't really up to her. And you know, this idea of intentional living, because I really think that is the crux of Alicia's story, right? She is making very intentional decisions about how she lives, how she raises her children, and what she's doing.

You know, intentional living to any regard makes you inconvenient to some people, because a lot of people just don't think about anything, right? They just kind of go about their day not really thinking about what's next, taking each moment as it comes. And being inconvenient to others, I think it's important to point out that doesn't necessarily mean you're doing anything wrong. Sometimes it means that you're just holding up a mirror that they don't want to look at.

And where I think some of us go wrong is we think it's our job to make them look in the mirror, but it's not, right? It's not our job to make them look in the mirror, but also it's not our job to necessarily put the mirror down, right? We get to keep holding it up if we want until other people with the same mirror find us, or we find other people holding up the same mirror. And then we're like, hey, you, me, we should chat. We seem to have a lot in common.

And that brings me to another point. I'm going to carry this silly metaphor of mine just a little bit further, if you'll indulge me. You know, you might not find your fellow mirror gazers where you live or work, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

There's a persistent assumption I have found, at least in my work, that in-person community is the gold standard. An online community is some kind of consolation prize, right? You do online stuff because you can't find real people nearby. It's viewed as a substitute, as a proxy, not the real thing, and definitely not nearly as good as the real thing.

And my conversation with Alicia totally tears that apart, right? She has found online community to be much more rich with the resources and the supports that she needs as she's going from being an urban Californian to a rural Midwesterner. So when it's come to finding community and resources and advice and help around food and health and homesteading, she had to go online to get that information long before she even picked which state she was moving to, right? Before she decided whether she was going to have chickens or was she going to get chickens and then goats, goats then chickens? Was she ever going to be brave enough to get a cow? When she was back home figuring out food allergies and all of these other things, it was online community that was there for her while the people in her real life really didn't see how canola oil had anything to do with how her family's health and well-being was. So in this case, and I think for a lot of us, even me, right, the online spaces are not a backup plan, right? They often, for many of us all over the world, are a primary source of the knowledge and community we need because the people who understand us and especially certain aspects, you know, if you're dealing with health issues, if you have a specific industry you're working in, if there's a major life change you want to make, right? Many times the people who understand you or the people you're really comfortable being honest with are scattered across the country if not across the world.

They're not clustered in your little neighborhood. So online and in-person communities, spaces, friends, they're not better and they're not worse. They're just different tools for different things.

One example that Alicia gave that I thought was so brilliant is that, you know, her church small group in Michigan shows up with equipment when she needs a field plowed, right? When she needs something big done on the farm because they've all got that stuff and they understand how to do that because they live in similar spaces. But it's her Facebook groups that helped her figure out how to acclimate from California to a cold Michigan winter, right? You need both. Alicia needs both this in-person community and she needs her online community.

Equally valuable just for different things and, you know, I found the same to be true for me. When it comes to what grows well in my area in the month of June or in the month of July or in the month of August, I talk to my friends who happen to have gardens here because they can tell me. When I'm talking about like issues with our soil, right? I'm talking to my friends here because they've got the same soil.

They're dealing with the same thing. But when I'm talking about how to maximize my space so that I can feed my family, I can grow enough food to feed my family and share food with others in our community, I'm going online because nobody in my town shares that passion that I have for doing that. Both valuable.

I need both. I just need them for different things. You know, Alicia is not an online community manager.

She's not a strategist but she gave a great playbook of what works and what doesn't work in community building online from her perspective and I think it's important to chat about that. You know, she talked about joining multiple chicken groups and the dramatically different experiences she had in each and as we were talking, you could track those experiences and the differences to how the communities were run. What worked for her were groups.

She's a Facebook fan so almost all of her communities were on Facebook. They weren't on different platforms and you know what worked for her were groups that were searchable. They used keywords and had their content highly organized.

They had key resources pinned to the top of the group. You know, the featured post section. They made it easy to get answers to common questions especially those beginner questions without having to ask.

They had moderators who were present and responsive who enforced the rules consistently, right? It wasn't like, oh, I enforced the rules on Monday but I don't enforce them on Thursday. Oh, this person can do get away with this one thing but that person can't. She very easily could see what the written and unwritten rules of engagement were in in the groups that she favored.

She found that the groups were sized appropriately for their topic and she found that the shared purpose was clear and the moderators protected that shared purpose. Hey, we are all here for this purpose and anything outside of this purpose doesn't belong here. Now, what didn't work and she had a longer list of things that didn't work than things that did but I'll sum up.

You know, what didn't work were groups that were so large. Either groups that were so large or it's really the ratios that were off, right? It was not enough moderators or admins to manage the size of the group so that the rules became unenforceable. Spam was constant.

It was just too unwieldy or admins who refused to delegate and kind of disappeared, right? They got overwhelmed and they just took off and let the group just become a little bit of a lord of the flies. No accountability when members cross lines. She had a situation where somebody in the group didn't like something that went on in the group and was targeting her on her personal profile and like that's not okay but the moderators didn't do anything about it and that's a group she left immediately, right? Like as soon as that happened and she realized that the moderators and admins were not going to protect her, she was out and it wasn't because she was necessarily scared.

It's just like if you're not gonna protect me, why should I continue participating with my whole self here, right? A community that doesn't protect its members isn't a community, right? It's just a crowd. I always say to be a community you have to have first of all you have to have a leader. There has to be somebody in charge.

There has to be a way for members to connect with that leader. There has to be a way for members to connect with content or you know whatever the topic is of the group and there has to be a way for members to connect with each other around that topic or that leader depending on the focus of the group. There's a social contract in communities and it's imperative that everybody in the community honor that social contract.

The only person or people who can enforce the social contract are those in charge and they need to not shirk that responsibility. The other thing that I have found is that this homestead gardening, grow your own food, what else can you call it? Maybe like this self-sufficiency sort of space can get really clicky, right? There is a particular flavor of gatekeeping in communities built around lifestyle choices in general I would say that kind of feel countercultural, right? It's like if you're not doing it the right way, if you're not a purist then you're not really committed and if you're not really committed then you can't be part of the cool kids, right? And I hear about this a lot of times like in health and fitness spaces where it's like okay so if you're not getting up at 4 a.m every single day cold plunging and downing your like all-natural electrolytes and you know using red lights in your home so your home looks like a lizard aquarium then you don't really care about health and wellness. You're not really optimizing your life and you know I've seen it the same way it's like okay well it's not enough to just grow your food, right? There's spaces where you like you're not allowed to till, right? There's a whole segment of the world who believes in no-till gardening and there's other people who are like I just want stuff to grow, right? There's the anti-pesticides, there's the pro-pesticide people, there's the anti-insecticide pro-insecticide people and herbicides and all of that sort of stuff and people get very entrenched, right? If you're not 100% with me you're 100% against me and you know Alicia's way of navigating this very similar to mine, right? She calls herself a hoverer.

I would use the term lurker, right? Where you kind of go into a group and as the newbie you sort of sit back and you consume, right? You go there, you get your questions answered, you're looking in the resources, you're reading people's posts, you're reading comments, you're seeing how the group responds to questions. Is this a mean group that slaps your hand every time you ask a question without searching at first? Is this the kind of group that acts like you're an There's one group I'm in that's about growing berries in my particular garden zone and you know somebody will post a picture of their berry plant and they're like what's going on with my raspberries and there are at least 10 people who will say, have you tried google? How about googling instead of wasting our time? It's mean, it's nasty. So you know what? I don't post anything in there.

Why? Because I know I don't know and I knew I could google it or ask somebody else but good golly, I'm in this group to learn stuff and I'm gonna ask here because this is the highest concentration of people growing berries in my garden zone that I know but not everybody does that. Some people jump in and they start asking questions, they get their hands slapped, they get their feelings hurt and they bolt. So you know for Alicia, she watches before she participates, she gets a feel for the room because she doesn't want to invest her time, her energy in a space that isn't going to value that time and energy and in many cases she shared that she uses a lot of groups just as databases or libraries, right? Searching them for resources, finding what she needs and then leaving and she doesn't ever feel obligated to perform as a member and so for anybody listening who has a community of any sort, I want you to think about that.

Think about the fact that you have some people who will never make themselves known because that's just not the place, it's not the purpose the group serves for them regardless of the reason you set up the group and you know as a group leader, that may not be my favorite thing, right? Because I like to have conversations with the people in my group and I like to do all these things but as a group member in some of these spaces, I get it. I get it. You know, I would rather somebody go take the approach of sitting back, watching, observing, getting the resources they need and sort of tiptoeing into a space than going all in and then dismissing it because of one off comment.

You know, like everything that Alicia does, right? Her approach to community just like her approach to life and living is intentional. It's slower, it's deliberate and she knows what she wants and she seeks to get it and when she can't get it, she looks for it somewhere else. So think about that.

I'm not saying that you know you have to resign yourself to that. I'm not saying to design around it. I'm just saying keep in mind whether you're posting to social media, you're running a community of some sort, that more is caught than taught.

There are people who are not making themselves known but they are paying close attention and they're evaluating and they're back to belonging. It's not about proximity, right? It is about alignment. They're checking.

Are you in alignment? Is there unity in everything you say and do, right? Is your moderation consistent? Are your rules real? Are they enforced? Do people who start or who cause problems, do those problems get handled? Do those people get excused? You can't pretend that long, okay? They're watching, they're waiting, they're looking. Do you mean what you say, right? So group leaders either do the work or they don't. Members who are careful will eventually figure it out and that's all.

So just because people don't comment, don't make themselves known, doesn't mean that they're not paying attention. So to land the plane as it were, I think what is beautiful about Alicia's story and I do have the gift of recording this episode months after our interview so I've really had time to think about it, is that she's not lonely, right? And she, if anything, proves the point that loneliness isn't about the number of people around you. It is about feeling seen, feeling heard, more than anything being understood.

And I would say accepted. Accepted and understood. And it comes from, you know, in her case specifically, right, being very clear about who she is and what she values so that she has learned over time to recognize her perfect people when she finds them.

And I think that is something that all of us could benefit from doing. Whether it's online, it's in person, it's around the corner, or it's across the nation. Sometimes it might start with Facebook group.

Sometimes a Facebook group about chickens, in her case. Sometimes it might start in a Reddit thread or a Discord or Harpy or anywhere else it could be. But the thing is, is it starts somewhere.

And as long as you are exactly yourself in all the places, I think you're gonna find your perfect people. You'll find the people who feel like home. Now, if you haven't listened to episode 28 yet, go do that.

Alicia is exactly herself for the entire conversation, which is increasingly rare. If you want to learn more about her or her family's business, you'll find all the links you need in the show notes, along with a link to the book I mentioned, Sustaining Humanity. And you know what, I think what I'll do is I'm also gonna add a few of the spaces that I've found helpful as I'm growing food for my family and community, just in case that's something that you want to explore.

But in closing, if this show has been a place where you feel a little less alone in your version of weird, please share it with a friend. As our listener base grows, so does what we can do with the show. I'll see you next time.

And until then, if you do anything, just let your freak flag fly. 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. Normal was never the point.