I was watching CNN earlier when Obama called Zohran Mamdani extraordinary. The word stopped me. Because what struck me about Mamdani wasn’t polish or pedigree. It was the absence of performance. He speaks in plain English. He says what he thinks before it gets filtered. He connects, because he’s not managing an image while he’s talking to you.That’s not extraordinary. Or it shouldn’t be. That’s just what a human being sounds like when they’re not performing.
The extraordinary is really just what should have been normal. The performers, the polished ones, the title-holders who spoke in careful, managed tones — they were the anomaly. We just forgot, because we were trained to expect it from people in those rooms.
Here’s what I think is actually happening: the script is flipping. Not all at once. The cracks are showing. People are exhausted by performance. They can feel it even when they can’t name it. The managed cadence, the strategic pause, the “I’m so passionate about” opener that lands hollow every single time. Something in people’s nervous systems knows. They’re just not always conscious of what they know.
This is where I think neurodivergence matters more than most people realize. Neurodivergent people, a lot of us, spent decades being told our way of showing up was wrong. Too much. Too direct. Too honest. Too weird. We were penalized precisely for the thing that is now becoming the signal people are hungry for. We were trained, painfully, to perform. To mask. To fit ourselves into the architecture of a world that was built by and for performers.
Some of us bent. Some of us broke. Some of us got very, very good at performing while grieving something we couldn’t name.
The thing is, we were conditioned, even the authentic ones among us, to perform in order to survive. Now the filter is starting to separate the genuine from the performed. Including performed authenticity.
That last part is important because there’s a whole ecosystem of performed authenticity out there. The wellness vocabulary. The yoga mat. The “I’m so intentional about my energy” crowd who speak the language of realness while their soul is running the same old software with a new interface. Most people with a functioning gut instinct can feel the difference, when they slow down enough to listen to it.
The lonely part, the part we don’t talk about much, is that this kind of perception can feel like a superpower you didn’t ask for. You see the seams in people. You feel the gap between what someone is saying and what’s actually moving underneath it. That’s not always a gift. Sometimes it’s just isolating.
The world hasn’t always been able to see what you see, and you learn not to say so.
That’s shifting too. Slowly. The people who have been quietly, stubbornly, exhaustingly real, who never quite fit the performance, who said the thing before they could stop themselves, who led with feeling and paid the social tax for it, their time is coming.
Not because the world suddenly became kind. People are beginning to feel the cost of the alternative. The performances are getting harder to sustain. The filtered, managed, polished version of leadership and connection is starting to feel like what it always was: a costume over a void.
You don’t have to be extraordinary. You just have to be willing to be actually, unfashionably, inconveniently real.
That’s the script now. You just have to believe it.
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