Sunny is one of those shows that sounds chaotic when summarised but unfolds with a surprising confidence. Rashida Jones plays Suzie Sakamoto, a grieving woman in near-future Japan who’s paired with a homebot her husband secretly built before he and their son disappeared. What follows is a slow-burn blend of grief, mystery, sci-fi, and dark humour—held together by a steady emotional core rather than special effects. As Suzie unravels the truth of her husband’s life, she crosses paths with Mixxy, a quirky cocktail waitress played by the musician Annie the Clumsy. And it’s through Mixxy that the show dips into an underworld of bot-hacking, secrets, and unexpected human connection.

I didn’t watch Sunny expecting a lesson in alignment. It’s a genre-bending series that never quite settles—and yet, in the middle of its quiet strangeness, one character stayed with me long after Season 1 ended. Annie the Clumsy. Yes, that’s her actual performing name, and strangely, beautifully, it tells you everything.

Her real name is Anna Tanaka. “Annie” came naturally, but “the Clumsy” was shaped by lived experience. As a teenager working in the UK, she was the waitress who dropped glasses, knocked over beers and navigated life with a kind of sincere awkwardness. People called her clumsy; eventually she embraced it as truth rather than insult. Even as she grew more grounded and less accident-prone, the name still fit—not as a literal description but as an honest portrait of her presence. The gentle awkwardness. The slight tilts. The unpolished rhythm. The quiet refusal to pretend she’s anything other than herself.

And when she plays Mixxy in Sunny, that same essence comes through. A little chaotic. A little messy. A little too earnest. She feels like someone who brings her edges into the room instead of sanding them down. It’s oddly disarming. Oddly refreshing. Oddly aligned.

Watching her made me think of someone closer to home: Debbie Jollie, who deliberately calls herself The Stammering Communicator. Another name that shouldn’t work but does. Another woman choosing to fold a perceived flaw into her identity rather than hide it. Debbie’s stammer is not a weakness she “overcame”; it’s part of her story, part of her rhythm, part of the reason she communicates with such intention and, ironically, such clarity. She challenges the smooth-talking myth and reframes communication as courage, presence and truth.

These two women—one on a streaming series, one from Trinidad and Tobago, (currently in Viet Nam), are practicing the same principle: integrating what the world might call a flaw and using it as part of their signature. Annie keeps “the Clumsy” because it is hers. Debbie keeps “The Stammering Communicator” because it honours her experience and transforms it into wisdom.

Alignment isn’t the removal of quirks. It’s the recognition of them. It’s the willingness to stop auditioning for someone else’s idea of perfection and instead honour the parts of ourselves that have been telling the truth from the beginning.

It makes me wonder how much brilliance gets trapped behind the parts we’re trying to hide. How much energy we waste smoothing ourselves out. How many gifts sit untouched because we think they’re too rough, too odd, too unbecoming.

Maybe the thing we’ve been trying to fix is the very thing that makes us unforgettable. Annie isn’t impactful because she’s clumsy, and Debbie isn’t memorable because she stammers. Their power lies in integration, in the coherence that comes from owning every part of themselves.

You don’t get remembered for being perfect. You get remembered for being real. And real is always aligned.

Strategic Alignment Prompt

What’s one part of yourself you’ve been taught to hide or “fix” — and what might shift in your work, relationships, or leadership if you allowed that very trait to become part of your signature instead of your shame?

About Giselle

I’m Giselle Hudson — writer, possibility thinker, musician, Organization & People Development Sensemaker™, and MCODE Legacy Coach. I help leaders and soul-driven professionals decode the deeper patterns shaping their business, work, identities, and results especially when it look like a performance issue but it’s really misalignment in disguise.

If something in your life or business feels off and you can’t quite name it, message me. Sometimes one conversation is all it takes to see what’s really going on.