Thirsty for the Marvelous
On Mystics, Misfits, Inner Knowing, and the Quiet Rebellion of Becoming More Yourself
I am a fangirl for the mystics.
Philosophers I admire enormously. They are the cartographers of ideas, painstakingly mapping the intellectual terrain. But the mystics? The mystics walk off the map entirely and come back describing the landscape from the inside.
A philosopher asks: what is truth? A theologian asks: what is God? A mystic says: come sit. Be still. Let’s see if we can illuminate the divinity within.
Mystics across every tradition and every century keep circling the same idea: the boundary between you and everything else is considerably thinner than it looks.
Meister Eckhart said things that made the Church nervous because they sounded less like doctrine and more like direct contact with God. Rumi wrote “the drop becomes the ocean, and the ocean becomes the drop.” Emily Dickinson, not formally a mystic but absolutely flirting with the edge of it, wrote “I am nobody! Who are you?” and somehow the paradox of nobodiness contained everything.
Their authority came from inner knowing, not external validation. And the invitation was always the same: don’t take my word for it. This is something you can experience.
I was around sixteen when I first encountered M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. I reference it often because it has been a guiding light through many seasons of my life.
He opens with three little words. “Life is difficult.”
And then he writes that this is a great truth, one of the greatest truths, because once we truly see it, we transcend it. Once we truly accept that life is difficult, life is no longer difficult. Because the fact of its difficulty no longer matters.
It’s been decades since the first time I read those lines and I can still feel the echo of the original hit of truth hum in my bones.
Those words are the opposite of comfortable, yet somehow completely liberating. Someone was telling me, plainly and without apology, not to expect otherwise. And in the same breath telling me that acceptance, real acceptance, not resigned tolerance but genuine acknowledgement, was the portal through which difficulty loses its power.
I meditated on that for years to come. Into my twenties I started realizing that most of my dissatisfaction with life came from unmet expectations. And rather than look for who had failed to meet me there (in the proverbial ‘there’), I came face to face with the fact that I was the one who had formed the expectation in the first place. If I set the expectation, then I could also temper my response to the disappointment when and if that expectation wasn’t met. A massive a-ha for an early twenty-something.
It’s worth sharing that I have done most things backwards in my life. Societal constructs never managed to get their claws into me and poison me with their expectations. From a very early age I understood that my life was my own and I have fought to stay clear-eyed and intentional with my autonomy.
In my twenties and already divorced, I refused—completely and without apology—to absorb anyone’s verdict that I had failed. I tried. I relished in the trying. And when I cut my losses, I felt nothing but gratitude for what that relationship had taught me about myself. I still feel immense gratitude for my divorce.
Approaching thirty, a solo parent, I flipped the bird to what society decided a single mother should be. Namely, helpless and quietly searching for another man to give my life meaning and allow me to blend with my peers. I was not interested in that narrative. Not even slightly.
I set myself up, by most conventional measures, for an extremely challenging life. And I want to be honest about that rather than smooth it over with the benefit of hindsight. It WAS challenging. It required a particular kind of doggedness that I’m not sure I’d recommend to everyone.
But here’s the thing about walking the unconventional path; when you can’t rely on the conventional map, you learn to navigate by inner knowing. You develop, out of sheer necessity, a relationship with your own intuition that people who stayed on the prescribed route sometimes never get around to cultivating.
The mystics, it turned out, were excellent company for this kind of journey. They’d been showing the way for centuries.
Once I pondered that mystic and misfit sound similar.
As a lover of words, I found that amusing. I also realized I saw myself in both.
The mystic rebels because traditional thinking isn’t expansive enough. The misfit rebels because society’s rules are mind-numbingly limited. Both want more. Not excess, not accumulation, but possibility. The sense that the edges of the known world are not the actual edges of the world.
We once thought the earth was flat.
And believed no one could run a mile in under four minutes. Then Roger Bannister did it, and within a year, several others had too—as though the limit had existed only in the collective imagination.
Lightning was once a divine spectacle, terrifying and untouchable. Then Tesla and Edison turned it into something you flip on with a finger. Humans watched birds for millennia from the ground. Then in 1903, the Wright brothers lifted off at Kitty Hawk and everything that was impossible was suddenly a mere matter of engineering.
It was, at one time, wildly accepted that personality and intelligence were fixed. Then neuroscience uncovered neuroplasticity and the story shifted from “you are what you are” to “you are what you practice” and even “your reality is shaped largely by your beliefs about said reality”.
Every single one of these began the same way. A widely accepted limit. A few dissenters with inconvenient curiosity. A leap that looked unreasonable… until it wasn’t.
I have always been drawn to the dissenters. The ones with the inconvenient curiosity. The ones who looked at the edge of the map and thought what if we just kept walking?
All I have ever really wanted to do is talk about this stuff. The big questions. The inner landscape. The mystics and the misfits and the moments where something shifts and you feel truth reverberate in your bones. The places where philosophy meets lived experience → meets the profound.
I have spent my whole life as a listener. An observer. A shoulder for tender hearts to cry on. And I mean this with every fiber of my being—it is the privilege of a lifetime when someone trusts you with the specifics of their inner world. When I consider how vulnerable it can be to simply exist, I’m in awe that we show up and keep trying. The occasionally hilarious awkwardness of being a soul in a body is one of my favorite things and I often think I am the human experience’s biggest fan.
But I also know that it can be extremely lonely to be wired the way some of us are wired. To move in patterns that are slightly, sometimes blatantly, counter-culture. To find the mystics more compelling than the mainstream. To be quietly defiant in a world that rewards loud compliance.
Anaïs Nin wrote—and I return to this constantly—“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me.”
I read that and I think, yes. Exactly that.
The Rebel Joy Society exists because I wanted to build a meeting place for people who feel that way. Who are curious and quietly defiant. Who are drawn to the mystics. Who have done things backwards and refused the verdict of failure. Who are, in whatever specific and imperfect way, thirsty for the marvelous.
I truly want this to be a space where you don’t have to explain yourself before you’re allowed in.
You’re already in.
You always were.
