a fish out of water

One who does not feel comfortable in a new environment. When Carla transferred to a new school, she felt like a fish out of water because she didn't know anyone there. Marie was like a fish out of water when she assumed a manger position at the company where she had worked as a clerk for so long.

If you are like a fish out of water, you feel awkward because you are in an unfamiliar situation or because the people you are with are very different from you. I think he thought of himself as a country gentleman and was like a fish out of water in Birmingham. It's not as if I had any obvious trauma in my life; I just felt like a fish out of water. Note: You can use fish-out-of-water before a noun, to describe a situation where someone feels awkward. The fish-out-of-water feeling continued when she went to study in Cambridge.

A person who is out of his or her element. It presumably was observed in ancient times that fish cannot survive long out of water, because their gills cannot take oxygen from the air if they are dry. St. Athanasius is credited as the first to transfer this idea to human beings out of their usual environment, sometime before a.d. 373. The simile reappears in numerous fourteenth-century writings, by John Wycliffe, Geoffrey Chaucer, and others, and survives as a cliché to the present day.