The Misfits Who Turn Out Alright
By: Paco Campbell
Published: Monday, November 17th, 2025
I didn’t write last week.
This newsletter is still new enough that skipping a week feels like I owe someone an explanation. So here it is: I needed time. Not because something dramatic happened — I just wanted to sit with what got me started in the first place.
Not the flashy tech origin story, but the quieter one underneath.
So this piece is… for me, first.
If any of it sounds like you, then it’s for you too.
Big words, small chaos
I’ve always loved big, precise words.
“Sycophant.”
“Ubiquitous.”
“Facetious.”
They feel like choosing the right tool for a very specific job.
And then I try to spell them.
“Capricious” is my personal nemesis. My bilingual brain insists on a decorative little “cs” in the middle, as if the word wants to feel fancy. I know it’s wrong. My fingers disagree.
English wasn’t my first language, so some chaos is expected. The rest? Wiring.
I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until thirty.
Now, approaching forty, I’m reasonably confident I check enough autistic traits to make several evaluators nod knowingly.
None of that surprised me — it just gave me vocabulary for things people misread for years.
“Su hijo no va a llegar a nada.”
In second grade in Mexico City — an era before mental health had a name in most homes — my teacher pulled my mother aside with the confidence of someone issuing a verdict:
“Your son will amount to nothing.”
Not because I struggled academically.
I finished my work early.
Then I helped the kids next to me.
Then I got bored and restless, which in that environment meant “misconduct.”
At my school, conduct didn’t just get you scolded; it determined whether you were allowed to reenroll the next year. Every spring came with reenlist vouchers — literal cardstock slips, different color each grade, the kind of bureaucracy that thinks it’s ceremony.
Mine was always conditional.
My parents had to come in and “promise improvements,” though no one could articulate what, exactly, needed improving. It was a circle of adults addressing a problem none of them had the vocabulary to describe.
I wasn’t misbehaving.
I was being misunderstood by people who were certain they weren’t misunderstanding anything.
But I didn’t know that then.
What I absorbed was: You’re too much and not enough at the same time.
Before labels, there were stories
Long before I knew terms like ADHD or autism, I had movies.
Not as metaphors.
Not as analysis.
Just as universes where misfits weren’t erased.
Characters thrown into systems that didn’t suit them.
People whose instincts didn’t align with expectations.
Outliers who weren’t broken — just out of place.
Those stories were the first thing that made my wiring feel imaginable.
Sometimes that quiet recognition is enough to keep going. And maybe this is why PacoPacket uses the silver screen as vessels.
Growing into a shape no one expected
As an adult, I ended up in cybersecurity — architecture, of all things.
Which is funny, because my brain has never been a tidy filing cabinet. It’s more like a multiverse running on shuffle.
But somehow, the field fit.
Pattern-recognition, the thing that got me labeled “disruptive,” became a strength.
Overthinking became analysis.
The bilingual brain became a natural bridge across people who don’t speak the same conceptual language.
I also grew into how I look.
Before I had tattoos climbing up my neck, piercings you can spot before I say a word, or hair in colors that don’t occur in nature, I already felt like the odd man out.
The aesthetics didn’t create the misfit — they just made the internal truth visible.
People sometimes stiffen during the first few minutes of talking to me, trying to place the accent. Then comes the classic:
“So… where are you from?
I mean, originally.”
It’s rarely malicious.
But it’s always a reminder that belonging is not automatic.
Then they hear me speak about something I care about, and the assumptions fall apart in real time.
There’s relief in that.
And a little humor.
And a quieter kind of peace — the kind you get when being yourself is no longer a negotiation.
Not a triumph — an understanding
I’m not telling this as a “look how far I’ve come” story.
Life never resolved itself into a neat arc.
There was no one breakthrough moment.
There were years of friction, masking, burnout, and trying to retrofit myself into shapes that were never designed for me.
And yet… I reached a place where I understand myself.
Where I have words for how I think.
Where I no longer see my oddness as a liability.
Not because everything is perfect.
But because I finally stopped fighting who I am.
My teacher was wrong — but proving her wrong was never the goal.
The goal was simply to understand myself well enough to stop believing her.
If this sounds like you
If any of this feels familiar —
- finishing early and being scolded for it
- the bilingual brain juggling worlds
- the “Where are you from… originally?” fatigue
- the late diagnosis
- the years of “too much / not enough” messaging
- the feeling of being the only one like you in the room
— then here’s what I want to offer, plainly:
Your oddness is not something to overcome.
It’s the key.
It’s the map.
It’s the doorway into a life that fits you.
Being at peace with yourself — having the vocabulary for your wiring, understanding your patterns, recognizing yourself in others’ stories — that’s the real turning point.
And knowing that other people with similar struggles turned out alright? Sometimes that’s all you wish for your twenty-first.
I didn’t have that luck.
But maybe you, dear reader, do.
You might just be the kind of misfit who turns out alright.