Nobody in Phin's poem gets a name, and that is part of its sting. There is only "they," who keep returning to the same topic, and "I," who is the topic. The speaker opens with a shrug, "I didn't really care," but spends the next dozen lines disproving it. Someone who truly didn't care could not list the charges so precisely: doesn't fit in, "a blatant, social outcast," alone, stuck in the past, "nose always in a book." The central idea is the gap between the indifference the speaker performs and the hurt that keeps leaking through. It is also about the weariness of being discussed as a problem to be solved rather than a person to be understood.
The shape of the poem makes that gap visible. Three plain statements open it, three short ones close it, and in between come nine questions in a row. The lines are brief, a handful of words each, and every one is stopped hard by a question mark or a full stop. There is no flowing meter. The effect is of being prodded again and again. The questions are slippery, too. "Why does it matter anyway?" starts as a real challenge, and "That I don't fit in?" hangs grammatically from it. But the next line, "I'm a blatant, social outcast?", abandons that grammar and simply repeats the accusation. The speaker seems half to argue and half to echo what has been said, until it is hard to tell whose voice is whose. "Blatant" is a cruel word choice. It describes something so obvious that no one could miss it, which is how it looks from outside, to people who have already decided.
Sound does quiet work here. There is no tidy rhyme scheme, but "book" and "mistook" chime two lines apart, and "outcast" lands on the same sound as "past." The first pair ties the speaker's retreat into reading to being misread. The second ties the label to the refuge of memory. Then the pronouns shift. For most of the poem "they" stay at a distance, but in "That you mistook?" the speaker turns and addresses someone directly. The line is usefully ambiguous. The reasons "weren't clear," yet the fault is pinned on the listener who misjudged them. It is a flash of both honesty and defiance, the only moment the speaker looks anyone in the face.
Only one question in the poem is not a quotation of someone else's concern: "Should I try fitting in?" The answer is the title, «i tried to.» The guillemets make it read like a line spoken or thought, and the lowercase "i" makes the speaker smaller than the capital "I" inside the poem. Because the title gives the answer away in advance, the poem becomes a long wind-up to a reply already made. Even that reply is hedged. "At least" is two words, almost an apology, a claim to minimal credit. Then comes the last line, "I was lost again." Its "again" echoes the first line's "They talked about it again," so the poem closes into a loop: they talk, the speaker is lost, and it starts over. "Lost" is wide enough to mean several things. It could mean lost in a crowd the speaker couldn't join, or lost to oneself in the effort of pretending to belong.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses to resolve. There is no comforting turn, no discovery that books are better company, no triumphant refusal to conform. Trying to fit in doesn't fail dramatically. It leaves the speaker where they began, or somewhere worse. For anyone who has been the subject of other people's concern or gossip, the poem names a particular unfairness: being asked to change by those who have misread why you are the way you are. It does this with almost nothing, no setting, no names, hardly any decoration, just a plain voice, a rush of questions, and a final line that doesn't pretend to be fine.