How it feels to be an outsider

Yesterday, I made a passing comment about being an outsider to my coffeemateA person, not the brand. who proceeded to ask me how it felt to be an outsider. While my comment stemmed from our ongoing conversations about matters of international research careers and cultures—our identities are rooted in constant geographical relocation but also research blogs and weird things like Inkhaven—I was somewhat taken aback by the question. It’s possible I saw it as a chance to share more about me than I actually wanted to but I also try to abstain from identity politics. Being an outsider has a lot to do with that.

I did not have a straight answer to his question; an outsider was just who I was. So, in reaching for an answer, I said I hadn’t ever had any other identity. I was born in India but grew up in Nigeria. When I returned to Bangalore, I was nearly a teenager—an age that needs no geographical influence to feel outsiderness—and despite looking the part, reintegration felt uneasy. A decade later, I moved countries again, this time finding myself in Northern California for graduate school; the elephant of cultural reintegration was saddled with needing to navigate academic culture, with virtually no prior exposure to it¹.

Weirdly, I only began unpacking the skills needed to wade through academia after moving to London. My learnings from America—academic and cultural—were not fully transferrable so I was an outsider, again; the context of one geography does not apply to another. In much of academia, there are pre-established networks; I suspect the system hinges upon them for survival².

Occasionally, an outsider slips through the cracks³. And maybe I was one of them? That’s how I felt when I landed the equivalent of an American tenure-track position in the UKThere is no tenure in the UK; thanks Maggie T.. If they are like me, such outsiders vacillate between attributing it to luck or a demonstration of academia being a meritocracy. Maybe they move from one to the other; a migration from the disbelief of imposter syndrome to acceptance.

My answer to my friend’s question was that I felt indifferent to my outsiderness as it is mostly what I have been throughout my journeys. Uncertainty is inherent to the associated difficulties of outsiderness but that is not necessarily bad. On the one hand, when I am unsuccessful at navigating bureaucracies, I let myself feel regret briefly—then it’s back to the drawing board. If anyone had told me ten years ago that I would be where I am currently, I would barely have believed themThough most of my close friends would be surprised that this is really how I feel about things.. So, in the difficult moments of outsiderness, I remind myself of this and move on. And when there is success, there’s a sense of achievementBut that might just be my proclivity for the narrative.—then it’s back to the drawing board, again.

My answer is one you can expect to hear from others, especially in casual social settings. But, in more professional settings—especially interviews—this answer comes across a bit wishy-washy and uninteresting. In such settings, people only want to hear two answers; it’s either good to be an outsider or it’s bad. The latter answer is overdone—it’s possibly why we have some of the social polarisation of our times; that is all that is worth saying on this matter.

But there are others who over-index on the upside because of an increasingly widespread belief that outsiders disrupt systems; this particularly American viewpoint is especially common in technology research and startup cultures. Commonly accepted in Silicon Valley, I am increasingly noticing this belief among Europeans. In the more stagnant economies of Britain and its neighbours, believing that outsiders change systems is important but also dangerous as it ignores survivor bias. I say this as someone who survived: people forget that systems have disrupted outsiders more than the other way round.