A Misfit’s Quest for Belonging
Growing up early, people pleasing as a trained habit, and learning to belong as myself.
When my favorite baseball team, the San Francisco Giants, embraced the nickname miSFits during their 2010 World Series run (emphasis on the “SF”), I latched onto it like it was tailor-made just for me. I was fifteen, nerdy, awkward, and convinced myself “misfit” wasn’t just a phase. It was the true embodiment of who I was at my core. I went to a private high school in San Francisco surrounded by students from affluent families whose lives looked nothing like mine. I also didn’t exactly have what people mean when they describe “a regular childhood,” whatever that is.
My parents separated when I was four and eventually divorced. My younger brother Chad was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) when I was six and never learned how to speak. For five years, my paternal grandparents were my legal guardians. Most of my extended family, especially cousins around my age, lived either in Los Angeles or the Philippines. I felt alone and different. “Misfit” felt like the easiest explanation for why.
The kid who became the backup parent
I can’t speak for everyone, but when you grow up as the older sibling of a brother with ASD, you learn early that love can look like responsibility. Feeding him. Bathing him. Making sure he didn’t reach onto someone else’s plate at a restaurant. Keeping him regulated and well-behaved. Ensuring he was calm, safe, and not overwhelmed. Doing all of that while you’re still a child yourself. Even when I was eight, I knew this wasn’t a universally shared experience. I also know it shaped me in ways I’m grateful for. It taught me responsibility. It taught me how to care deeply for someone outside myself. However, that doesn’t mean there weren’t drawbacks. As an adult, I sometimes struggle to advocate for my own needs. I avoid conflict and I people-please. With hindsight, it’s hard not to notice how early those habits were instilled. How do you learn to say, “I can’t do this, I’m eight years old,” when the adults around you are stressed and asking you to help? Maybe it really could have been as simple as saying that. But the narrative in my head didn’t sound like that at all. It sounded more like: Mom/Dad/Patricia (my stepmom) are already under a lot of pressure. Don’t add to it. Be the “perfect” kid. Do well in school. Don’t ask for more than you need. Make life easier for everyone else. I tried to act like a little adult. But the truth was: I was just a kid who wanted to be a kid.
Belonging as an adult is harder than I expected
I’ve worked on myself a lot since then. I’ve made real progress toward healing and forming more secure attachments (shout out to my therapists over the years). Still, there are challenges that remain. I often want to be alone, and I hesitate to make new friends. “Putting myself out there” still feels like touching a hot stove: I can do it, but a part of me expects it to hurt.
Since moving back to the Bay Area in late 2023, I’ve gone to over 100 events connected to the SF tech/AI world such as hackathons, company launch parties, networking events, and happy hours. I’ve met some brilliant and inspiring individuals, and I’m grateful for the friends I’ve made along the way. Yet I’m still trying to understand how to be an active participant in a community that’s constantly in motion. San Francisco is the AI capital of the world, full of startups, venture capitalists, founders, and influencers. That energy can be exciting. It can also feel transactional. Sometimes it feels like people are scanning the room for leverage, not genuine connection, and that just isn’t for me. At the end of the day, I’m not an AI entrepreneur, venture capitalist, futurist, or a tech bro. I’m just a nerdy guy who loves science, likes staying current with AI and making YouTube videos, had a difficult childhood, and wants something that’s simultaneously both simple and surprisingly hard: A sense of community in the city where I was born and raised (SF).
Putting my name back on the front
Last year, I changed my username on most social media platforms from “AstronoMisfit” to “kylekabasares.” I’d used that handle for years, and letting it go felt weirdly emotional. I did it because of a few questions I finally asked myself: Am I a misfit because I truly am one, or because I’ve spent years fixated on that identity? What if I chose to accept myself, flaws and all? It sounds a little silly that it took me 7+ years to ask those questions, but “misfit” felt safe. It provided a ready-made explanation: Of course, you feel out of place Kyle, you’re a misfit. My full name didn’t feel safe, and I didn’t even like saying it loud for others to hear. “Kabasares” is not a name most people pronounce correctly on the first try. (For the record, it’s Kab-uh-SAR-rez.) I won’t bore you with the endless mispronunciations I’ve heard in my life, but I got tired of hearing my name butchered so often that I started avoiding it altogether. Ironically, switching to my real name online made me more comfortable in my own skin because with a high degree of certainty, I’m the only person in the world with my exact name. That means I get to set the example and just be me. Sure, it comes with a little pressure, but it also feels like an honor. (Also: putting a “Dr.” in front of it doesn’t hurt.)
To the younger me and to anyone who’s worn the word “misfit” as armor
If I could talk to a younger version of myself, I’d want to offer the following pieces of advice.
1. Being unique doesn’t make you a misfit. You might not fully understand or appreciate the parts of yourself that set you apart yet. Some of those parts might even hurt. But your experiences, especially the painful ones, can still be valuable. Not because pain is noble, but because it teaches you what you care about, what you notice, and what kind of life you want to build.
2. Be yourself, but also give yourself permission to become a better version of yourself. Sometimes that looks like therapy. Sometimes it looks like practicing honesty, learning to ask for help, or letting people get close without needing to “earn” your right to belong.
3. You don’t have to prove you deserve connection, and you don’t have to be perfect to be loved.
The Giants’ miSFits nickname from 2010 will always make me smile. But these days, I’m less interested in donning that nickname and more interested in belonging as myself.
I Was a Writing Minor Once
2023 marks 10 years since I started my journey in higher education. As an undergraduate at the University of California, Merced, I initially started out as a mechanical engineering major. Given my increased interest in both math and physics during the last two years of high school, it was a practical choice. Yet, after a few weeks of interacting with other engineering majors, it soon became apparent that we did not have a lot in common. While tinkering on car engines, building robots that fight, and flying remote-controlled drones were all interesting in their own way, I was captivated by more abstract topics like Euler’s identity and Schrodinger’s cat. It was from this realization that by the end of my first year, I had abandoned any notion of becoming a mechanical engineer and promptly switched my major to physics in hopes of becoming a theoretical physicist (not that that panned out either).
My sophomore year saw another dramatic change in academic pursuits. I started the year by declaring a minor in Writing. As a high school student, I had enjoyed writing essays in my English and History classes and had hoped to bring somewhat of a balance to my now STEM-heavy education. I also was partially inspired to do this to follow in the steps of my grandfather (now deceased) who was a journalist by training and had written for Filipino newspapers in both the Philippines and the United States and had covered the Vietnam War on site. Initially, I had grown to like my writing classes very much. I always felt my writing was a bit stale and flavorless (perhaps you who read this agree?) in comparison to my high school peers, and thought it was starting to blossom into something one might even call eloquent. I recently took a glance at some old writing assignments during this period and found I had started writing fiction about a serial killer (I watched way too many TV crime shows in middle school and high school), and a fictional story starring the great mathematician Leonhard Euler (so much for a break from STEM). It was fun to write creatively and let my imagination roam. A seemingly infinite number of ideas and stories, from fantastical to unexotic could come to life with the click of my keyboard. All appeared well, as I had finally settled what my academic major and minor would be, or so I thought.
If you wanted to know why I ended up switching my minor from Writing to Applied Mathematics, the only explanation I can provide is, “the heart wants what it wants”. At some point in my writing classes, I found myself growing bored, and as a way of entertaining myself, I would start scribbling down and solving math equations in my notebook. The joy of solving a mathematical problem was a feeling that not even my enjoyment of writing could parallel. The writing classes at that point also required us to perform, in my opinion, tedious exercises that I did not see value in. In hindsight, I probably should have just been a better writing student by bearing through the monotony, but that 19-year-old version of me had other plans. He wanted to go all-in on physics and math, and so that brief period as a Writing minor came to an end.
Is there a lesson to all of this? Maybe it’s to not give up on something so easily. Or maybe it’s to go with your gut. Would my life be dramatically more different if I didn’t switch my minor? I’ll never know for sure. I do know, however; that having the Applied Math minor reinforced a lot of the physics I learned and served me well when the mathematics got “turned up to 11” in my graduate physics courses. In the end, the person we are is simply the product (Or maybe the sum? Can a mathematician get back to me on this?) of the decisions and indecisions in our respective lives. Perhaps, in another life, I stuck with the Writing minor and used that in tandem with my physics major to become a science writer for a magazine immediately after I graduated UC Merced. Or maybe I ended up becoming a best-selling science-fiction novelist (not likely)! Regardless of what I could have been, I just try to accept who I currently am: an ever-changing human in an ever-changing world, just trying his best to navigate the journey that is his life.