Why people don’t stop hiding because they want to, but because it finally feels safe to be seen.

Most communities don’t fail because people stop caring.

They fail because too much care is required from too few people.

In this solo episode, Tonya Kubo explores what actually makes a community sustainable and why the traditional, leader-centered model quietly sets communities up to collapse. What looks like strong leadership often creates hidden fragility, where everything depends on one person showing up, holding it together, and carrying the weight.

Drawing on Stacey’s real-world example from a military spouse community, Tonya breaks down what happens when belonging is built into the structure instead of assigned as a responsibility. Instead of hosting and managing every event, Stacey’s model distributes ownership, allowing members to create, lead, and sustain connection themselves.

Tonya also challenges one of the most common assumptions in community-building: that disengagement is caused by apathy. In reality, it is often the opposite. People care, but when the burden is too high or the ownership is not shared, they step back instead of stepping in.

If your community feels dependent on you, or if you have ever wondered whether what you are building could last without you, this episode offers a powerful reframe of what it takes to create something that actually endures.

You’ll hear how:

• Communities don’t fail from apathy, but from uneven distribution of labor
• Burnout in leadership is often a design flaw, not a personal failure
• Self-sustaining communities differ from self-running ones
• Stacey’s model distributes ownership without losing structure
• Communities built around personality are inherently fragile
• Purpose-driven communities create continuity beyond the founder
• Delegating tasks is not the same as transferring ownership
• Shared responsibility creates stronger, more resilient belonging

Episode Highlights

[01:40] The realization that Tonya had been wearing a mask without noticing

[03:50] Why we hold back when something doesn’t feel “worth the effort”

[06:30] The difference between fitting in and actually being seen

[08:45] The shift that happened after discovering Ellie Trier’s work

[11:10] The story of a friend whose honesty revealed something deeper

[13:50] What happens when someone doesn’t try to fix or reframe your truth

[16:20] Why you can’t force someone to remove their mask

[18:30] How safety changes the cost of being honest

[20:40] What it looks like to model real acceptance

[22:10] The invitation to show up fully so others can do the same

Resources & Mentions

• Episode 022 – Neurospicy and Never Alone with Eli Trier
• Zuzu’s House of Cats

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.

Support the Show

If Find Your Freaks matters to you, help us keep it ad-free by buying us a coffee (or two!). Every dollar goes to production so more weirdos can find their people.

You can purchase Find Your Freaks merchandise online through Abilities and Attitudes.

Let’s Stay Freaky

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What’s Next

We love to talk about community. How to build it, grow it, sustain it. But next time, we’re going somewhere a little unexpected. Tonya sits down with bestselling mystery author Michelle Chouinard to explore the minds of people who obsess over red herrings, stay up all night chasing clues, and cannot rest until they solve the puzzle. But this conversation is not just about mystery writing. It is about curiosity, connection, and the way stories bring people together.

I was wearing a mask. Not intentionally, not trying to be fake, but you know how it is, right? That mask you put on when you decide that whatever is being said right, it's just not worth the fight. The mask can only come off when the person willingly lets it go.

And that can only happen when the cost of keeping the mask on finally outweighs the cost of taking it off. Ellie's guests don't drop their masks because of the weather, the recording environment, or because she pushes them with investigative reporting tactics. They drop them because Ellie is unguarded herself.

She is fully present in the moment and genuinely curious the moment they get on screen. And that's something you can't engineer. You can't fabricate that type of radical acceptance.

You can only model it and reinforce it. We're wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in. I'm Tonya 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.

For years, I thought I was the only person who approached community the way that I do. Like, not the only person building community, especially building online community. Obviously, there's hundreds if not thousands of us just in the US and North America alone.

But the only person who believed what I believed about how connection between humans happens. In person and online. That you can't manufacture it.

Shortcuts don't work. At least not in the long run. That the thing that most community builders are optimizing for, growth, engagement, retention, that those are outputs, not inputs.

But I'm not gonna lie, it has long felt a lot like spitting in the wind, right? The people saying community building was nothing more than simple mathematics had bigger audiences than me, fueled by much bigger ad budgets. So when someone would repeat the recycled nonsense about bigger communities are better, or how there's just no money in this niche, or that niche, I just finally at some point, stopped pushing back. I'd nod, smile, just let the conversation move on.

And somewhere in my work with Rachel, I found out that Ellie and I had been thinking about online belonging and relationship building almost exactly four years in parallel without ever knowing the other one existed. And I remember sitting with that for a moment and going, huh, and then feeling relieved. Not like the kind of relief that's like, oh my gosh, thank gosh, I'm not crazy.

But the kind of relief that you feel when you realize that you just let out all your air after holding your breath. Maybe like you didn't even know you were holding your breath, you know, that kind of feeling. And that's what today's episode is about.

Today's episode is about what it actually feels like when the mask comes off, either your mask or somebody else's mask, and what is possible in that moment. Before we get into it, though, I want to take a moment for the people who make this show possible. If you support Find Your Freaks at tanya.link slash coffee, you are literally the reason I get to have the conversations I get to have on this show, like with Ellie in episode 22.

So thank you. Thank you for funding this passion project of mine. And today I'm especially thankful for Chris Duran, our newest monthly supporter.

If you want to join her, all you have to do is buy me a coffee over at tanya.link slash coffee. And you know what, just know that we're always so appreciative. So let me tell you about a mask that I didn't realize I was wearing until I took it off.

When this show started, I showed up to record the way that I thought I was supposed to write makeup, hair, accessories, camera ready, as they say, because I'm a woman who makes her living being visible on the internet. And there are very clear, very unspoken, not always unspoken, oftentimes spoken quite loudly expectations about what that's supposed to look like. And I just met those expectations without ever questioning them, because it just felt like what you do, right? Can't be a female creator without having hair, makeup, and you know, worrying about what you look like from about here up.

Gotta be dressed up at least from the neck up, they say. But lately, if you watch the video version of the show, like you're watching the show right now, you may have noticed something different. No makeup.

Hair, right now it's pulled back into a ponytail with a little bit of frizz. I'm like looking at myself right now. The frizz is less than usual.

But sometimes I look like I stuck my finger in a light socket, or as my youngest says, doing my best impression of Einstein. But these days, I just show up as myself, whatever I however I look, whatever I'm doing before I have a chance to come over here and hop on the mic is what I look like when you see me. And the thing is, that I've come to terms with, is that you don't listen or watch this show for my looks, right? You're here because you're searching for belonging of your own, or because you like me love a really good human interest story.

And I don't need lipstick, eyeshadow, or styling products to make any of that happen for you. In fact, I'm a better host delivering better content. Now, I would argue that I was before, because spending less energy on my appearance leaves me more energy for the conversations we're having, I get a double my prep time, because I don't have to worry about getting ready.

I just like I said, I get on the mic when I have something that I feel like is important to say. And speaking of energy, this reminds me of a visit that I had with a close friend, probably over a decade ago, she had recently left her career to become a stay at home mom after her third child was born. And a few months into that, I had the opportunity to be the very first person from her old life to pay her visit, I went and we had coffee on my lunch break.

And the moment I walked in, I could see that she was next level exhausted. Like mom to mom, we know when the bags under your eyes are from sleep deprivation. And we know when the bags under your eyes are from feeling like you're carrying the weight of the world.

And there's nobody offering to share that burden with you. See, my friend knew that she was supposed to be living the dream, right? Like we gave her going away party at the office. And all of us working moms talked about how she was so lucky, right? So lucky that she and her husband had made some choices to make it possible that she could stay home with their kids.

No more daycare bills for them. She made that choice deliberately. It was planned.

She loved her kids. And she was lonely to the very depths of her bones. She said so herself.

And probably without meaning to, in fact, I don't even think she knew what she said until she said it. I also think that she got to the point where she was too weary to pretend. And I didn't give her a reason to take it back.

I didn't act shocked. I didn't argue with her, remind her of her why, or suggest that she made a mistake when she left the company where we worked. I just sat with her, let her talk about whatever she wanted to talk about.

And once she confessed her loneliness, what I found interesting, or at least when I think back on it, what I think is most interesting is everything else that came bubbling out. Like she had broke the seal, so to speak. The complexity of being needed by everyone yet feeling seen by no one.

The way her husband and oldest would come home at the end of the day and her world got bigger, right? The house got fuller and it got more demanding. And yet she still didn't have any more attention on her and her needs than she had when they were gone. Her mask, as I think about it, was a performance of contentment, right? The one that says, I chose this, so I am not allowed to struggle with it or admit that it's hard, right? I'm lucky.

Other women would give their right arm to be me, so I can't complain. I can't let anybody know that this isn't the dream I thought it would be 24-7. And a lot of us wear that particular costume, don't we? Or mask.

Looks different for you versus me versus somebody else, but it's still a mask. And so if you haven't listened to episode 22 with Ellie Trier, you've missed hearing firsthand what happens when you build an entire body of work around making it safe for people to be exactly who they are. For example, guests on her podcast, Zuzu's House of Cats Presents, often go way deeper than they planned.

In fact, Ellie is just that person, right? She is that person that there's just something about her that has you saying things you never thought you'd say. And afterward, her podcast guests almost always email her apologizing for info dumping on her, or they're suffering from a vulnerability hangover, and they're apologizing for that. And she said on the show that she lives for the moment right before that email, the moment where they're thinking, oh, I said too much.

Is this okay? And for Ellie, it always is. Ellie's guests don't drop their masks because of the weather, the recording environment, or because she pushes them with investigative reporting tactics. They drop them because Ellie is unguarded herself.

She is fully present in the moment and genuinely curious the moment they get on screen. And that's something you can't engineer. You can't fabricate that type of radical acceptance.

You can only model it and reinforce it. So think about my friend, the lonely mom. She didn't open up to me because I delivered the right script.

She opened up because I showed up without a script. I walked in. I had no agenda.

And when she shared what was hard, I didn't give her, you know, vague words of encouragement. I didn't show her the latest inspirational meme. I didn't try to fix it for her.

And in the absence of me trying to give her encouraging platitudes or fix her problem, she found enough room to tell the whole truth. And that's the thing we don't realize about masks, especially those of us who pride ourselves on community building. You can't pry a mask off of someone.

The mask can only come off when the person willingly lets it go. And that can only happen when the cost of keeping the mask on finally outweighs the cost of taking it off. Our job as friends, community builders, or humans who genuinely want real connection is to make that cost calculation a no-brainer.

So everything I've talked about so far involves a quiet kind of unmasking, something that's a bit more internal, maybe even invisible. The mask I stopped wearing, you know, that contentment costume my friends stopped wearing, my bold opinions about community building and belonging that I no longer hold back. But Ellie, Ellie's next level.

She takes that all the way to the extreme. She has this art collection called Things Men Have Said to Me Instead of Hello. And I will warn you before you go Googling this, it can be triggering if, I mean, it talks about some things that can be described as nothing other than outright like misogyny, sexual harassment.

It's intense. Let me see how I can describe this. She saved screenshots from her online dating life, like the most graphic, creepy, outright bizarre opening messages she received from men.

So like the first message a man would send her. And instead of deleting them or laughing them off the way I have done in the past, the way a lot of my friends do, because we feel like as women we're expected to, she blew them up, like monumental scale, and rendered them into mixed media in the form of these art pieces that feature things like lace and vintage jewelry, safety pins, pearls. She plays with these symbolic feminine materials as she uses them to communicate a deeply unfeminine, if not misogynistic, message.

And in her own description, I mean, she'll tell you firsthand that the collection isn't about demonizing men. She has no problem with men. Not at all.

It's about asking a harder question, which is how did this become so normal that most women, when they hear about it, aren't even shocked. They just respond with weariness and like, yeah, that's how it is. Because they've been dealing with similar messages their whole life.

In fact, I have shared several pieces from the collection with friends, because almost every one of Ellie's experiences aligns with either something a friend has told me about or something I've experienced myself. And at first when I share it, we groan, we roll our eyes, we kind of laugh it off, but Ellie's work encourages us to go deeper than that. In fact, when I'm sharing it, I'm usually like, okay, I know when I told you this story it was really funny, but after reading this, I like, I can't believe that I blew that off like I did.

Or, you know, I can't believe we blew that off when that happened to you like we did. Because the words are nothing new, I feel like Ellie's collection reveals a pretty big impact that we have overlooked. And it's also a mask drop in like the largest possible scale, right? Ellie has named something that millions of women quietly, if almost embarrassedly, if that's a word, file away under, this is just how it is.

And by creating these large art pieces, she makes it impossible to look away. And what it creates, when you view it, is the same thing every mask drop creates, whether it's big or it's small. There's this moment of relief from those who have felt invisible, have felt like they were the only ones having that experience.

There's a moment of recognition from people who are like, yeah, you know, that didn't sit well with me either, but I, you know, like I didn't know any different. And then there's that exhale that comes with realizing that affected, like you're still holding on to a piece of that effect that you didn't even realize you were holding on to. And now that you've seen somebody else break it down, reflect like the harm in it, like that little piece gets healed.

By finding out she existed, thinking the same way that I did about the intrinsic worth of humans and everybody's right to belong made me realize like, maybe I wasn't like a sideshow freak in this space. If she was already out there saying the thing, like I was out there saying the thing and we hadn't met each other yet, maybe there were others like us working parallel to us and we just hadn't had the opportunity of our Venn diagrams overlapping. And if that were true, then maybe we really could change the perception of what belonging looks like online.

Maybe I wasn't spitting in the wind after all. And for you, because you're maybe a community builder, but probably not if you're listening to this show, what I want you to take away today is that the masks we wear aren't always elaborate costumes, right? We're not always intentionally faking it until we make it or acting the part that we want, right? Sometimes it's feeling like you're not allowed to hit record until your hair and makeup is camera ready. Sometimes it's pretending to be content when you're not, because you chose difficult circumstances and so you feel like you don't get to complain about them.

And sometimes the mask comes off, not because you're brave, but because you're just too tired to keep it on. And there just happened to be someone there when you took it off who didn't flinch at what was underneath. I would encourage you to be that person when you can.

And when you're the one who's too tired, let the mask come off in the hopes that you have been honest enough and shown up naked enough, as it were, that the person that is there when you let your mask come off won't flinch at what's underneath either. Because I do believe we all have someone in our life who is waiting to witness us. And if we don't, let this be your invitation to go find someone.

And if you haven't met them, good golly, reach out to me, reach out to Ellie. Ellie would love to hear from you. If you have a cat, she wants to see the picture too.

But I do believe that there's someone out there also who you haven't met who is going to find you without your mask and finally feel at ease. And that is worth showing up for, with or without lipstick. Now, if you haven't listened to episode 22, please go listen to it.

The full conversation is there. You'll get to know Ellie on a much deeper level. And like I said, you'll know how much she really wants to hear from you.

Now, you can find her at Zuzu's House of Cats, which is H-A-U-S for house, slash keep in touch. She doesn't do a lot on social media, so I would sign up for the emails. And if this show has been a safe place for you, if you've ever felt that exhale of recognition listening to it, we'd love to have you buy us a coffee.

We'd love to count you among our wonderful monthly supporters. Every cup keeps this going. And I will see you next time where I have another really amazing person to introduce you to.

And until then, 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.