On the Gift of Not Belonging

I found this a little disappointing. I thought it would be a book about misfits, and it is, just not in the way you’d expect. Kaminski pitches the idea of a new category — of personality trait? characteristic? I’m not sure how to describe it. His starting point is that most people seek belonging in some form: introvert or extravert, we like to have a group to identify with, and it bothers us to be excluded. I assumed that experience of being outside the group, often not by choice, would be the center of the book. But Kaminski instead proposes otroverts — people who don’t care about group identity at all. They have little trouble with acceptance; most of the time they’re likable, respected, welcomed with open arms. They simply aren’t interested in joining the larger group, because they don’t feel much identification with it. So the binary stops being introvert and extravert and becomes otrovert and joiner, and the book is about the otrovert’s particular experience and how to understand yourself if you are one, or understand a loved one if you aren’t.

To his credit, “otrovert” isn’t a category meant to fit everyone, which is the usual risk with books like this. Reading it, I decided I wasn’t one — though the quiz in the appendix tells me I am. Might that itself be another way of resisting group identification? I’m not sure, but even when I tell myself I stand outside and observe, I act in ways that say I want to be included, and I feel the sting of rejection when a group I want to belong to leaves me out. So it isn’t clear in my case. The book is quite surface-level, a reasonable introduction to the concept but in need of more substantive psychological research; Kaminski writes more as a clinician than a scientist, which is great for the general reader, though it leaves me questioning how durable the concept really is. Even so, it may speak to people trying to find themselves, and it’s a very quick read.