Sensitive Creatives & the Black Sheep Gospel.

Most of my life I’ve had the experience of feeling like an outsider, looking in. And without doing anything terribly rebellious, I’ve also often felt like the Black Sheep at different times in my life. I know many sensitives feel like I do.

Our stories are different, but our experiences are similar. But often, we can’t quite pinpoint why this labeling happens. 

We may be shy, but end up getting a reputation for being difficult. Or we may be generally accommodating, but then one day, something happens that causes us to put our stake in the ground for something we hold dear.

However it comes about, this experience of feeling like the outcast can be very difficult.

We all want to belong, and feeling we’ve been shunned, exiled even, just because of who we are, can feel disheartening. 

It’s only in the past few years that I’ve started seeing the words Black Sheep not as a marker of rejection, but as a mark of uniqueness and individuality. The flame of our truth, our integrity is still alive. Being scapegoated often simply means we’re around people who are blind to who we are OR whose values are a complete mismatch for our own. 

Once we’ve accepted this reality without internalizing the sting of not belonging, we can start walking and find other Black Sheeps who jive better with us. 

It’s in this frame of mind that I’ve been rereading Toko-pa Turner’s little gem of a book Belonging. In it, she talks about the good, healthy side of what people dismiss as “rebelliousness.” When we stand out & differentiate ourselves, we give up the anchors of false belonging for belonging to our own selves. 

Instead of amputating parts of ourselves to “fit in,” we claim the luminous Black Sheep.  

Here is Toko-pa Turner’s manifesto for black sheeps, which she calls The Black Sheep Gospel. 

1. Give up your vows of silence which only serve to protect the old and the stale. 
2. Unwind your vigilance, soften your belly, open your jaw and speak the truth you long to hear. 
3. Be the champion of your right to be here. (especially useful for sensitives & sensitive creatives, emphasis mine.) 
4. Know that it is you who must first accept your rejected qualities, adopting them with the totality of your love and commitment. Aspire to let them never feel outside of love again. 
5. Venerate your too-muchness with an ever-renewing vow to become increasingly weird and eccentric. 
6. Send out your signals of originality with frequency and constancy, honouring whatever small trickle of response you may get until you reach a momentum. 
7. Notice your helpers and not your unbelievers. 
8. Remember that your offering needs no explanation. It is its own explanation. 
9. Go it alone until you are alone with others. Support each other without hesitation. 
10. Become a crack in the network that undermines the great towers of establishment. 
11. Make your life a wayfinding, proof that we can live outside the usual grooves. 
12. Brag about your escape. 
13. Send your missives into the network to be reproduced. Let your symbols be adopted and adapted and transmitted broadly into the new culture we’re building together. 

I love that she has 13 points to her manifesto, 13 sometimes being considered “unlucky” in different cultures. It serves us to remember that just as every number has inherent value despite the projections people might put on it, we also have inherent value no matter what others project onto us. What others may call weird are the individual markings of our soul-skin, the feathers that declare the spirit of exactly who we are.