Never Fit In? What It Means to Be an Outsider After 50
A gathering with a group of ladies recently opened up a topic in my mind that I thought I had long since put to rest. They were roughly my age, with similar backgrounds, so there was definitely a shared history of sorts. But that's where it stopped for me.
Does fitting in still matter as we age?
For many of us, the pressure to fit in never really disappears. It just changes shape. At school it's about being one of the girls; later it's the right marriage, the right home, the right way to dress; and now it's looking young. What later life can bring, for some of us though not everyone, is a stark realisation of what trying to fit in has cost us. And with that realisation comes a chance: to stop needing to fit in, and even to stop living life as expected. That is one of the real freedoms of getting older.
Why some of us never fit in
In their individual ways the ladies were lovely and interesting, and the conversations flowed. And yet, despite all the warmth in the room, I sat back and saw myself do what I have done since I was a little girl. I withdrew, because so much of the conversation was in conflict with what I believe is important.
It brought up a lot of memories of my own struggles with fitting in, as a child and even as a more mature woman. What it all comes down to for me is that my interest in the materialistic side of life has always been limited, and as I've grown older this has pretty much become who I am. I've never cared about fashion, make-up or, for that matter, boyfriends as such. That's a very different stance to have in life, and one that I'm proud of. I'm a deeply philosophical person. My interests lie in the big questions, and I'm a watcher: I watch human behaviour and take my understanding from that.
I remember watching my friends at school spending their time in the library plucking their eyebrows and putting on lipstick, and asking myself: why? Their fixation was on being attractive to boys. Mine was on my dream of being successful, of going out into the world and doing great things. Getting married was never part of that dream.
What this has done is make me very much an outsider, but not in the negative sense it is often portrayed. I'm someone who hasn't really felt the need to belong, except when I allow myself to be in situations where it becomes highlighted, where the conversations are not really of interest to me. Now let me be clear: I'm not saying I'm better, or that the other ladies were less than. But it brought to the surface the often difficult childhood you have when you don't fit in.
And yet, in spite of my complete lack of interest in those things, I found myself doing what I've always done: questioning my own perspective. Should I pay more attention to my appearance? Should I care more about being thinner, or more attractive? Should I be more interested in men than I am? Why? Because my view is so often treated as if there's something wrong with it. Not something to be admired, not something other women could take a lesson from, but proof that there must be something wrong with me.
Why do so many women feel they never fit in?
I wrote my book, How Did I Get Here? A Guide to Letting Go of Your Past and Living in Alignment with Your True Self, in 2023. At the time I thought it would serve as a guide to picking yourself up after the traumatic ending of a relationship. But as the years have gone on, and that part of my life is truly in the past, I've come to understand that its message was much more than that.
The book takes the reader on a journey in three parts. Part one asks the question in the title: how did I get here? Part two answers it: this is how you got here. And part three asks the question that matters most: what will you do with the rest of your life?
It begins with how we forget who we are. Peer pressure, the pressure of society, our education: we are moulded into the shape society wants us to be, and our need to fit in makes us conform. We are all such individuals, so unique, and yet somewhere along the way we let that uniqueness give way to our tribal instinct to be part of it all.
What is an otrovert?
An otrovert is a term coined by psychiatrist Dr Rami Kaminski in his 2025 book The Gift of Not Belonging: How Outsiders Thrive in a World of Joiners to describe people who feel like outsiders in any group, even when they are well liked. Unlike introverts, otroverts are not shy and don't find socialising draining. What they lack is the urge to belong to a group, so their self-worth isn't tied to the group's approval.
Kaminski describes the otrovert as someone who is socially capable, warm and highly empathic, yet lacks the communal impulse to lose themselves in a group. That missing communal impulse is something I recognise in myself. Even now, when I still see the fixation on looks going on, especially in my generation, I find myself asking the same question I asked in that school library: why?
I sit somewhere in the middle of the two, because I certainly find being around people for too long exhausting, and my solitude is where I am renewed. But it's Kaminski's point that otroverts don't outsource their self-worth that really made sense to me, because that is the very thing I've struggled with most of my life. The pressure to be liked, to fit in, to be one of the girls, has caused me many hours of self-questioning, even as a young girl. Perhaps I was lucky, though, because my mother was a bit of a rule breaker herself. She made some light suggestions but never tried to squeeze me into any tight boxes.
If you have ever sat in a warm room full of good people and felt yourself step back, it may not mean you are shy, or difficult, or doing it wrong. It may simply mean your sense of who you are was never meant to come from the group. That isn't a failing. For many people it takes most of a lifetime to see it as a gift.
What does trying to fit in cost us?
Some of us, not everyone, come to a stark realisation of what trying to fit in has cost us. And the cost is dramatic. Kaminski puts it starkly:
"This urge to belong subsumes all that is distinctive about a person once they become a member of the hive."
For most people, he says, that sacrifice is made easily and instinctively. For those of us who were never built to belong, it isn't. Forcing yourself to fit in becomes a performance, and a performance is exhausting. It takes the energy you could have spent thinking freely, creating, and building a life that is your own.
That is why his point about self-worth matters so much. For most people, how they feel about themselves rises and falls with the group's approval. For the otrovert, as Kaminski's publisher puts it, "your self-worth is not conditioned on the group's approval." It holds steady, even when the room turns away. And for women especially, learning that can undo years spent measuring ourselves against a standard we never chose.
I wish there had been more of this kind of thinking in the world when I was growing up, because the general line about life went one way and one way only. The popular girl had to look a specific way. She didn't need to worry herself too much about the bigger questions in life, or even too much about education. A successful woman was pretty, found her husband early, got married and cooked well, while of course looking the part. More like an accessory than a fully functioning human being with her own mind, her own dreams and her own right to be.
It is of course much more out there today, but we are still a long way from showing young people that they are unique, and that each and every one of us has our own purpose or path to follow. Sometimes that means showing up in a simple pair of jeans without much plaster on our face. And that requires us to have less desire to belong, and to be comfortable with that.
Later life is the opportunity to stop all of that: the need to fit in, and even the need to live life as expected. For me, that has meant accepting that I am not, and have never needed to be, someone who is around people all the time.
Why does later life make us question who we've been?
In my book I make the point that when something traumatic comes along in our lives, it makes us sit up and pay attention, and often it leads us back through our lives. Richard Rohr writes about this in Falling Upward. He describes the first half of life as building a container: the rules, roles and structures that help us belong. The second half is about discovering what was meant to go inside it. Very often, he argues, it takes a fall, a loss or a failure to make that shift possible, and what lies on the other side is what he calls the True Self. When this happens in later life, we can use it to unpack everything that has passed.
For me, that moment came in Nepal, after my divorce, as I grappled to forgive myself. As I wrote in the book:
It dawned on me that in order to stay authentic and true to ourselves, we must bear in mind that life is finite and too precious to be lived as if we have an eternity.
That is what a fall can do. It strips away the container long enough for you to see that much of what you built it from was other people's idea of who you should be.
Getting older is not the same as growing up
The part of my book on ageing opens with Maya Angelou. In a 1990 interview with The Paris Review, she said:
"Every human being has paid the earth to grow up. Most people don't grow up. It's too damn difficult."
Most people, she went on, simply get older. They honour their credit cards, find parking spaces, marry and have children, but they don't truly grow up.
Ageing is no longer the traditional, linear life it once was. As I put it in the book:
Your attitude towards ageing is crucial in maintaining a positive outlook as you age. It is not about distracting yourself from the inevitability of death, but rather being grateful for every moment of life and making the most of the time you have left. And it is pointless to waste time on regret.
And yet so much of what passes for ageing well today is a fixation on the body and on looking young. It is the newest version of fitting in, and in some ways the most demanding, because it asks women to spend the second half of life trying to look like the first. It is not something that takes up space in my thoughts.
What will you do with the rest of your life?
That's the question my book ends on, and these days my own answer is clear. I don't care about make-up. I don't care what other people think about my dressing up, or rather my lack of it, and I certainly have no interest in a relationship with a man, or in men's attention in the way women are expected to want it. None of this is because I'm angry or disappointed. It's because my life is now full, and it is truly aligned with my true self, as I put it in my book. A lot of that has come from letting go of having to fit in, from being more than comfortable in my own company and, of course, from purpose: the writing, the creating, the understanding. The girl in the school library who wanted to go out into the world and do great things never really went away. She just had to stop worrying about fitting in first.
So I'll leave you with the question from the end of my book, with one small addition: what will you do with the rest of your life, now that you no longer need to fit in?
The book: If this piece rang true, How Did I Get Here? goes further into how we lose ourselves to other people's expectations, and how to find our way back. Find out more about the book
The membership:
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