Otrovert. It’s a small, slightly odd word, and the first time I read it, something in me quietly exhaled.
Let me tell you why. For most of my life, whenever someone asked, “Are you an introvert or an extrovert?”, I answered with a shrug and a half-laugh. “Depends on the day,” I’d say. Or, “A bit of both.” People nodded politely, the way we do when an answer doesn’t quite land, and the conversation moved on.
But the question stayed with me, the way small questions do. Because “a bit of both” never felt true. It felt like a lazy answer to something I couldn’t name. A bit of both would mean I’m a blend, a mixture, some neat fifty-fifty. What I actually felt was something else, as if I had walked into a room where everyone was asked to stand on the left or the right, and I had quietly stayed by the door, not because I was shy or unwelcome, but because neither side was quite mine.
Then I found the word again, this time with its story. A psychiatrist, Dr Rami Kaminski, had used otrovert for people who enjoy others, who like conversation and friendship and even a good crowded evening, but who don’t feel a pull to belong to the group. Who like connection more than membership.
I remember reading it and feeling something loosen in my chest. Not “this is me, I’ve been diagnosed, case closed.” More like someone had finally set a small lamp down in a corner I’d been sitting in for years.
I don’t want to explain the word to you. You can look it up, and the people who study these things will say it better than I can. What I want to do instead is sit with the feeling behind it. Maybe you’ll recognise it. Maybe you won’t. Either way, let’s wander through it together.
The Door, Not the Wall
Have you ever noticed how some people walk into a gathering and immediately know where they belong?
I’ve watched this my whole life, and I’m always a little fascinated by it. There’s a certain ease. They find their people, a cluster of shoulders turned inward, a shared joke already in progress, a vocabulary that doesn’t need explaining. They stand inside the circle, and the circle holds them.
I enjoy those circles. Truly. I’m not standing outside with my nose pressed to the glass, wishing I were in. I love the laughter, the stories, the way a good conversation can make three hours disappear. I can be warm, funny, curious, and present. People often tell me I’m easy to talk to.
But I’ve often found myself standing slightly to the side of it all. Not far. Just enough that I can see the whole circle instead of only the faces turned toward me. And there’s a strange comfort in that spot. From the edge, you can see how the group breathes. You notice who speaks over whom, who laughs half a second late, who is quietly performing the version of themselves the group expects.
I don’t say this with judgment. I do it too, sometimes. We all do. Belonging asks a small price, and most of us pay it without noticing: a slightly sharper opinion, a slightly louder laugh, a “yes, exactly” when the truth was “well, sort of.”
What I’ve noticed about myself is that I find it hard to pay that price. It’s not that I’m too proud or too principled. I simply can’t seem to make my body do it. Something inside me goes quiet and stubborn, and I’d rather stay at the door, where I can come in and go out as myself.
Maybe that’s what being an otrovert feels like, at least from the inside: a door, not a wall.
Connection Is Not the Same as Belonging
This is the part I’m still turning over, like a smooth stone in my pocket.
For a long time I assumed connection and belonging were the same thing, two words for one experience. If I felt close to someone, surely I belonged with them. If I belonged somewhere, surely I was connected.
But the more I look, the less true it seems.
Some of the deepest connections I’ve felt happened with people who belonged to nothing I belonged to. A stranger on a long train journey, sharing tea and half their life story before getting off at a station I’ll never visit. An old neighbour who disagreed with me about nearly everything and still showed up with food when I was unwell. A friend whose beliefs sit in an entirely different corner of the world from mine, and yet when we talk, something true passes between us.
And I’ve also felt the opposite. I’ve sat in rooms full of people who shared my views, my language, even my favourite books, and felt a quiet, unnameable distance. We belonged to the same thing, yet I couldn’t feel the person across from me. We were bound by a label rather than by each other.
Maybe that’s the difference. Connection happens between two people. Belonging happens between a person and a group, and groups, however warm, tend to ask for something. Loyalty. Agreement. A certain way of being. Not always loudly, but it’s there, like a quiet gravity.
I don’t think belonging is bad. Many people find shelter in it, and I’d never want to take that from anyone. But I’ve wondered whether some of us are built to receive connection without being able to absorb belonging, like a plant that drinks water beautifully but doesn’t do well in a crowded pot.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve started to suspect that it’s possible to love people deeply and still not want to wear their colours.
Friendship Without a Flag
I have friends. Real ones. I’d like to say that plainly, because there’s an assumption that people like me must be lonely, or aloof, or secretly unable to commit.
But my friendships look a little different from the ones I see around me. They’re less like a village and more like a scattered constellation. Each friend is a bright point, and the lines between us are thin and personal. There’s no banner overhead, no shared identity that says we are this. I have a friend I talk to about books, another I only ever talk to about life’s heavier questions, another who makes me laugh until I forget my own name. They rarely meet each other. They’d probably get along, but I’ve never felt the urge to merge them into one group.
Sometimes I wonder if this makes me a poor friend, someone who doesn’t build a tribe, who doesn’t host the big gatherings or keep the group chat alive. Part of me worries that I’m withholding something.
And yet when someone I care about is struggling, I’m there. When someone needs honesty, I give it gently. I think what I offer is less a place to belong and more a place to be seen, one person at a time, without needing them to be on any particular side.
Have you ever noticed how much of friendship, in groups, quietly depends on having the same enemies, the same opinions, the same “us”? I’ve noticed it so often that it almost startles me now. A group laughs together at an outsider, and the laughter feels warm in the moment, but I always catch a small chill. I think, what do they say about me when I leave the room? And then, more honestly: what do I let them say about others when I stay?
I try to be better about that. I’m not always successful. But I find I can’t quite settle into the comfort of an “us” that needs a “them” to hold itself together.
Joining the Conversation, Not the Identity
Here’s something hard to explain to people who naturally belong.
I can sit in a conversation about almost anything and genuinely enjoy it. Politics, spirituality, parenting, books, cricket, the meaning of life. I’m curious about how people think. I like hearing why someone believes what they believe, and I’ll happily offer my own view if it’s wanted.
But I can’t, for the life of me, adopt the full package.
It’s as if every opinion arrives with a membership card attached. If you think this about one thing, then of course you must think that about another, and those people are with you or against you. And I stand there with my little handful of thoughts, thinking, but I agree with part of this, and part of that, and I’m honestly not sure about the rest.
That kind of answer rarely satisfies anyone. A group wants a clear signal. It wants to know whether you’re in. And “I’m in on some things, uncertain on others, and I’d rather not wear the jersey” isn’t a signal anyone knows how to read.
I used to think this was indecision. A kind of weakness. A failure to commit to anything. But lately I’ve been softer with myself about it. I don’t think it’s a lack of conviction. I have convictions, quiet ones, held close. I just don’t feel they need a flag to be real.
I suppose what I’m saying is that I can take part in a conversation without taking out citizenship in it.
The Loud Little Room We All Carry
And then there’s the internet, that enormous, restless, never-sleeping circle.
I don’t need to tell you what it’s like. You’ve seen it. Every event, every tragedy, every small human moment seems to arrive with an immediate demand: Where do you stand? Which side are you on? Say it now, say it loudly, or your silence will be counted against you.
I’ll be honest, it exhausts me. Not because I don’t care. I care a great deal, often too much. But because the format asks me to compress something complicated into something tribal. A feeling that has seven layers must become a single sentence, preferably one that signals clearly to the right people.
I’ve drafted posts and deleted them. I’ve watched a conversation unfold and felt that old familiar standing-at-the-door feeling, except now the door is a screen and the circle is a million people wide. I read and think; I understand what they’re saying. I also understand what the other side is saying. And I also think there’s something neither of them has touched yet. But that’s not a comfortable place to stand online. There’s no category for it. No hashtag for “I’m still thinking.”
Sometimes I feel a pull; I’ll admit it. A little ache to simply pick, to join, to be absorbed into the warm roar of a crowd that agrees with me. I can see how lovely that must feel. To be carried by a current instead of swimming your own small lap.
But when I try, something in me resists. I feel like I’m putting on a costume that doesn’t quite fit at the shoulders.
Perhaps you’ve felt this too, that small private tug-of-war between wanting to be part of something and wanting to stay true to the unfinished, undecided, sometimes contradictory person you actually are.
The Quiet Freedom
I want to say something about the freedom in all this, because it’s real, and I don’t want to make it sound only like a burden.
There’s a lightness to not needing a group’s approval. When I change my mind, there’s no tribe to disappoint. When I learn something that challenges an old belief, I’m free to let it. I’m not defending a territory, only following a question. I can listen to someone very different from me and let their words actually land, because I’m not busy deciding whether they’re on my team.
I’ve found this makes me, I think, a better listener. Not because I’m a better person, but because I’m less defended. When you’re not protecting a group’s position, you can afford to be curious.
And there’s a kind of peace in my own company that I don’t think I’d have if I were always seeking my reflection in a crowd. I can sit alone with a cup of tea, a notebook, or a half-formed thought, and not feel that anything is missing. The solitude doesn’t frighten me, nor does it feel like a retreat. It’s more like coming home.
That’s the otrovert’s freedom. It’s quiet. It doesn’t announce itself. But it’s there, steady, like a pulse.
And the Loneliness, Because I Promised Honesty
I’d be lying if I said it was always easy.
There are evenings when I watch a group of people share a belonging I can’t quite enter, and something aches. Not envy exactly. More like a gentle, passing sadness, the kind you feel watching a lit window from the street. I think, how warm it must be in there.
There are times when I’ve wished I could simply be a joiner. When a friend says, “You should come, we’re all going, it’s our thing,” and I smile and go, and I’m glad I went, and yet somewhere in the middle of the laughter I notice I’m still standing at the edge. Still observing. Still a guest in a house everyone else calls home.
And there’s a particular loneliness in being misunderstood as distant. People sometimes assume that if you don’t join, you must not care. That if you hold back from the group, you’re holding back from them. It’s hard to explain that the opposite is often true, that my care is individual, specific, and unwrapped by any banner.
I don’t have a solution for this. I’m not sure there is one. I’ve simply learned to let both things be true: the freedom and the ache, living side by side, like two people sharing a bench who don’t need to talk.
Are We All Otroverts, Somewhere in Between?
Lately I’ve been wondering about something, and I offer it only as a wondering.
When people say, “I’m an introvert,” or “I’m an extrovert,” I listen differently now. I listen for the little qualifiers that follow. “I’m an introvert, but I love a good party with the right people.” “I’m an extrovert, but I need days to myself.” “I’m quiet, but I can talk for hours with the right person.”
So many of us seem to add a “but.” And I’ve begun to wonder whether the “but” is where the truth lives.
Maybe the two big labels are a little like the two sides of that room, useful for sorting, but not quite how human beings actually are. Maybe many of us are standing somewhere in the middle, or off to the side, or moving between them depending on the hour, the company, the weather of our inner lives.
Maybe the word otrovert isn’t meant to be yet another box. I hope it isn’t. I’d hate for it to become one more tribe, with its own membership and its own jersey. (Wouldn’t that be a funny irony? A club for people who don’t join clubs.)
I think it’s more like a window that opens in the wall. A small acknowledgement that there are people who love others without needing to merge with them, who can be warm without being absorbed, who belong most of all to themselves, and, in a quiet way, to everyone.
I don’t know how many of us there are. Maybe more than we think. Maybe a lot of people stand at the edge of the circle on the evenings no one is looking, wondering if they’re the only ones.
A Small Evening Thought
It’s late as I write this. The tea beside me has gone lukewarm, which is how it usually goes when I’m thinking.
I notice that I don’t feel the need to end this with an answer. I’m not sure I have one. I started out hoping to understand myself a little better, and I think I have, but only in the way you understand a friend: partly, gently, with room left over for surprise.
What I do know is this. I’ve stopped apologising, at least internally, for standing where I stand. The edge of the circle isn’t a failure to enter. It’s just a place, and from here the view is wide, and the air is clear, and I can still hear everyone laughing.
And sometimes, if I’m lucky, someone else wanders over. They stand beside me, not quite in the circle either, and we don’t say anything for a while. Then one of us says, “Nice evening, isn’t it?” and the other says, “Yes. It is.”
No flags. No sides. Just two people, noticing the same sky.
Perhaps you’ve been that person too. Perhaps you’re standing there right now, wherever you are, with your own cup gone cold, wondering whether anyone else feels this way.
If so, I hope you know you’re not as alone as it sometimes seems.
And if not, if you’ve always known exactly where you belong, I’m glad for you, truly. Come and find me at the edge sometime. I’ll make the tea.
Related blog posts: Non-Judgment and Finding Inner Peace: The New Definition of Success
About the author: Anu Chandrashekar is a bilingual writer, poet, and content creator. ORCID: 0009-0002-8916-9170
Read this in Hindi: ओट्रोवर्ट की डायरी से
Disclaimer: This post is a personal reflection based on my own observations and experiences. The term “otrovert” was introduced by psychiatrist Dr Rami Kaminski, but this piece is not psychological, medical, or professional advice. Readers are encouraged to reflect and decide what resonates with them.
Copyright: © Anu Chandrashekar. This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
