Third Culture Kid ..... finding "Home"

I just checked....it's true, I have not written a post dedicated to the one thing that really inspired me to begin a blog 5 years ago.  I have made reference to it, but not a single solitary blog post dedicated at all to TCK...  If only you knew what this really means to me.... it will be hard to describe, a lot like my post "Saudade"

But it deserves so much credit that I will take a shot at it...

Let's begin with the Cliff notes version:

I grew up overseas.  Born in nowhere AZ, somehow my father got his first foreign service gig to the very "exciting" metropolis of Tehran, Iran then quickly moved to Baghdad Iraq, family got evacuated, moved on to another "safe and comfy" location: Bogota Colombia, then off to Jakarta Indonesia, back to Brasilia, Brazil, up to Monterrey Mexico with a couple of required stints in Virginia/D.C. sandwiched in between.

My life was a series of adventures and was absolutely an incredible experience.  An unbelievable life.  So deep, so wide, so rich, so rewarding.  I knew nothing else.  I became familiar with change in a way that actually changed me forever.... 

Change became a normal way of life for me.  It didn't just come my way once a year. It became a daily gig, meeting new people, running into new smells, learning new words, absorbing a never ending supply of cultural nuances with every step....Change found a hungry and thirsty vessel and wrapped its tendrils all over me.....I welcomed it....I never resisted....It gave me new eyes.  

Was there downside? Oh yeah!.... leaving friends was the jagged pill that was the hardest to swallow.  Saying goodbye almost always meant forever to a kid. 

As a result, the notion of "home" was confusing to me.  It was unanswerable and always required a longer preface than people wanted to hear, or were willing to understand that asked where mine was.  To me it was never a location, but an emotion....often it was more about "when", than "where".

Eventually, the inevitable finally happens... I return to my passport country....yes, even the good 'ol USA!  I have wondered all my life what that would be like. Not the quick vacation return knowing that I would be leaving again....but the "final" return.  The Soldier coming home.    

My expectations were through the roof.  I had so many idealist notions of what Americans would be.  How they would accept me.  How they would love the experiences I had.  How they would appreciate my unique perspective.  That they would embrace me as one of their own.  America, land of the free and brave.....Oh yeah, my hand was all over my heart.  And then to top it off, finally.....to have Mormon friends!  To also return to Utah, the mecca of Mormonism..Ah!  To be among those that were like minded, lived the same values, believed the same things....to have friends that would shine for me, to be beacons of examples of really living my faith.  To learn the tenets of my faith first hand by going to church in my own language.  Oh, the expectations were monumental.

Oh, the naiveté of a 17 year old dreamer.  What I found upon my return was  the most challenging time of my life.  Never had I felt so much shock, disillusionment and confusion.  I ran smack dab into a huge cultural brick wall that had sharp edges all over it, and it hurt like crazy.  So this is what people always referred to as --"Culture Shock".  I had never experienced because I never knew the U.S.  Moving from culture to culture was my way of life, it was cool, it was exciting, it was full of adventure.  This was not that!

People did not embrace me.  They didn't have an ounce of understanding of my experience.  They did not accept me for who I was.  I didn't fit in in the least.  My hair and clothes were all wrong.  Noone related to me and I couldn't them.  The Youth at church were not stellar examples.... they did not meet my expectations at all.... They were cliquish, they were two-faced and in many cases not great examples of living the beliefs I thought were in my faith.... In other words they were "normal" human beings..... oh my.... that was disappointing!  My attitudes were not welcome, no one was interested in the weird foreign "new" guy and within weeks I found myself naturally gravitating to all the other social "rejects" which happened to be minorities and non-church members.  Americans did not realize the wonderful bounty and blessings they had to be in a country that had so much freedom and choice.   Noone knew how cool it was to go to a store where you could literally choose from 20 different toilet seat lids..... Wow! People would complain about the most mudane things that other countries could only dream of ever having.  The ignorance of other people, culture and beliefs was astounding. I found myself having feelings of embarrassment for them. How could they be so "globally dumb" and "culturally moronic"?  There wasn't even a desire to learn about others.  For the first time being ironically in a position of being intolerant and judgmental about a group of people...in this case Mormon Americans.

This is what is supposed to happen when I lived in all those other places...not here in the U.S.A!!!  I was numb for a long time, then it turned into pain and a considerable amount of anger.  I struggled mightily with not knowing exactly what was happening to me.  Managing this dynamic was completely foreign to me.  When months passed and anger dissipated into a dull ache in my heart I ended up doing what I did in every new place... I figured out a way to be a chameleon.  A change artist.  One more time, I donned the eyewear that always helped me in the past.....and I adapted to the environment as best I could.....I put away the hurt feelings and anger.  I tried to accept them for who they were and started to try and see things from their perspective. The only exception this time was that I would never leave the US again, so the prospects of enduring for the short-term weren't the same anymore.  This was permanent.  So, I pretended, I acted, thinking that over time things would work out. Meanwhile, there was a constant uneasy feeling lurking in the shadows letting me know that I wasn't really ok.  I was putting on a good show.  I put a lot of frustration, loneliness and hurt on the shelf because I didn't know how to deal with it all.....

Fast forward 30 years....  Mission, College, marriage, family and now career. All of these "repatriation" issues were far behind me.....water under the bridge you could say..... so I thought.  Then one day about 5 years ago, I accidentally came across this acronym TCK.  It was a reference to "Third Culture Kid". I was intrigued.  I went searching and found this website that explained what a  TCK (Click to see) was:

"A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents' culture.  The TCK frequently builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any.  Although elements from each culture may be assimilated into the TCK's life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background."

This totally got my immediate attention!  Who wrote this and how do they know me so well?? I read on......"You know you are a TCK when:"

1. You don’t know what “home" is.... You call it “passport country.”

2. You often find yourself singing along to songs in languages you don’t speak or understand.

3. You can curse convincingly in at least five different languages.

4. The end of the school year was always bittersweet because so many people moved away.

5. To everyone’s confusion, your accent changes depending on who you’re talking to.

6. And you often slip foreign slang into your English by mistake, which makes you unintelligible to most people.

7. Your passport looks like it’s been through hell and back.

8. You have a love-hate relationship with the question “Where are you from?”

9. You’ve spent an absurd and probably unhealthy amount of time on airplanes.

10. Your list of significant others’ nationalities reads like a soccer World Cup bracket.

13. And your circle of best friends is as politically, racially, and religiously diverse as the United Nations

15. So when you do see your best friends, you lose it a little.

16. You’ve had the most rigorous sensitivity training of all: real life.

18. You know that McDonald’s tastes drastically different from country to country.

24. You’re the token exotic friend in your non-TCK crew.

27. And, no matter how many you say, good-byes never get easier.

28. But the constant flow of new friends more than made up for it.

29. Now you feel incredibly lucky to have loved ones and memories scattered all over the globe.

30. You know better than anyone else that “home” isn’t a place, it’s the people in it

31. And you can’t wait to see where your life adventure takes you next.




My mind exploded.... My heart was pumping a thousand beats per second, I was sweating and tears just sprang from my eyes!!!  This list literally blew my mind.  I felt so immediately understood I could barely speak. For the first time in 30 years the doors of that shelf of pain I had locked away was blown apart and all these bottled up emotions poured out of me for several hours.  




Then I found the "community" of other TCK's sharing their experiences and  So many people had the same experiences I had.  The empathy was deep..... I was so overcome.  I remembered who I was..... it was very much like finding "home".   I wasn't crazy after all.  Someone out there knew exactly what I had gone through.   That was amazing.




More factoids:


• 90% feel "out of sync" with their peers.


• 90% report feeling as if they understand other cultures/peoples better than the average American.


• 80% believe they can get along with anybody, and they often do due to their capability to adapt to situations, and people of different culture, ethnic and religious backgrounds.


• Divorce rates among TCKs are lower than the general population, but they marry older (25+). (Me almost 26)


• Usually they find themselves being referred to as 'foreigners' by their own relatives residing back in the country of their origin.


• They also sometimes know more history, geography, literary and cultural values than the locals of the both countries.

.....after a childhood spent in other cultures, adjusting to their passport country often takes years.

It was the single most therapeutic, carthatic, emotional experience in the past several years of my life.  I couldn't believe that there was a vocabulary associated with this phenomenon.  A book was written.  People had come together  and created a built in coping and sharing mechanism. I was immediately embraced by a community that accepted me for who I was.  What a beautiful tender mercy in my life.  I realized then, that I needed to share more of my experiences, my perspective, my musings somehow. Thus, the blog.

So, I have a deep sense of gratitude that is difficult to put into words for the TCK community.  They have been instrumental in helping me find "home" cause everyone deserves that...


Postlude:  I love being American.  I love being Mormon.  I know now that I was the one in error.  People are people.  The expectations I had built up in my own mind no one on earth could have ever sufficiently met.  My mental model was doomed from the beginning.  Do I wish Americans were a bit more culturally sensitive and had greater understanding of their freedoms?  Sure.  Do I wish Mormons lived their faith perfectly?  Sure. Both aren't perfect.  In my mind at that time in my youth, I needed both to be perfect so they could "save" me--at least validate that I was ok, good enough.  I realize I have to find that out on my own, not through them.  Only God can help me with that one.  So I love both and have reset my expectations to the dial of "freely accept" all for who they are.

..........The Home piece is still elusive....I am getting closer.  I feel it here and there and is usually associated with particular people.  They know who they are.  My sense is that at the end of the day, the only true home is the one I came from.  That is the one that matters.  I carry great hope that it will be the final place where I am totally welcome, loved, feel totally comfortable and know exactly who I am.