somewhere to start from

In all honesty, I’ve been trying to post something for weeks now. I’ve drafted entire posts, and read them over and over until the words themselves didn’t make any sense anymore.

At first I thought I was overthinking my writing, but then last night I realized that I was struggling because I was trying to skip straight into where I am now, without explaining how I got there. So let’s start over:

I’m a Third Culture Kid.

If you want a standard definition of the word, it means that I was raised outside of my parents’ home culture for a significant part of my developmental years. But if you want my explanation of the word, it means that I grew up moving.

I was born in the US, but I grew up in different countries on the African continent- in the Western, Eastern, and Southern regions of the continent. I moved back to the US to finish high school, graduated and moved to the East Coast for university, and have been living here since then (except for occasional travel, and that one time earlier this year when I was studying abroad in Madrid).

But being a Third Culture Kid doesn’t just mean that I moved a lot. It’s bit more than that.

Being a Third Culture Kid is, in many ways, a significant part of who I am. It’s the reason I love traveling. It’s reason airports are my favorite place on earth. It’s the reason I don’t feel that I fully “belong” to any one country or any one culture. It’s the reason I hate being asked where I’m from. Being a Third Culture Kid is why I find it hard to claim the space I’m living in- be it a house/apartment/room/bed- as my real “home”, because that word feels incredibly permanent.

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I’m a Third Culture Kid. And that means something to me. It means a whole lot to me. And I needed to say that-to try to explain that- before I feel that can say anything else.

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originally posted nov 26, 2018.

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