I’m currently mainlining Rachel Bloom songs, started looking up reviews of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend in preparation for a rewatch, and found this interview with her in the New Yorker, ostensibly about her Netflix special but featuring some digressions that set off the “one of my people!” buzzer.

Did you feel that in your twenties, when you were developing “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”? Because you had success pretty early.

Yes, but I always felt not-cool. The first song I ever did was “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury.” It was, like, O.K., all these pop songs are about, I want to be with a hot guy dancing in a club. That’s never been me. It’s much more me to fetishize an old science-fiction author, because, honestly, that’s more my type. But then nerd culture got really cool in, I don’t know, 2006, 2007. Everyone was wearing those chunky nerd glasses, and so suddenly nerddom became the norm. It’s the reason Comic Con is now called “a celebration of the popular arts,” or whatever.

Are you saying, “You’re appropriating my culture when you talk about nerd culture”?

But here’s the thing, I’m not a huge comic-book expert. The thing that I was obsessed with growing up was musical theatre. So all of the other kinds of adjacent nerd cultures, when I enter into them, I love them. I think that the part of my brain that loves sci-fi and fantasy is the same part that loves musical theatre, because it’s all asking, What if? What if the world were like this? What if people sang? What if people had hot-dog hands? It feels like the same muscle to me.

But I don’t know. I have impostor syndrome with a lot of things. Like, I’m Jewish, but I was raised really secular. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” is a very Jewish show; that is a combination of my experiences and the experiences of Aline [Brosh McKenna, the show’s co-creator] and other people. I wasn’t bat mitzvahed. My family didn’t even really celebrate the holidays. We did Hanukkah, and that was it. But I was still an other, because Jews were a minority in my town, so I felt different.

And, also, the way my brain works—when I get obsessed with something, it’s all I do. Right now, I’m doing a binge of “Everybody Loves Raymond.” I gravitate toward stuff that’s comforting sometimes, as opposed to the new show everyone’s talking about. I’ve always felt kind of like an out-of-touch fortysomething. So actually, coming into that is interesting.

What you’re saying reminds me of a chapter in your book, where you describe your obsession with musical theatre being completely alien to the kids you grew up with. And you decided, O.K., this is my thing. I’m going to get really good at it. And then you get to N.Y.U. to pursue theatre, and suddenly you’re with your kind of person, and so it’s not your identifying characteristic anymore. Is that a version of the impostor syndrome you’re describing?

Yes. There’s a part of me that’s kind of lone-wolfy, and I think that sometimes I used excuses, like, “Well, I’m just a musical-theatre kid, people don’t understand me.” But then when you’re around musical-theatre kids and they don’t understand you, what’s your excuse? It’s something I’m still working through. I mean, to quote “Dear Evan Hansen,” there is a little bit of me that always feels “on the outside always looking in.”