Born into one culture, brought onto a boat at a young age, raised on-the-go… it can feel like your brain is a blender. Taking in all this information, culture, and experience at once, mixing it together, forming a ‘you’ that nobody else really gets.
Even when you return to the country where you were born, you might look like everyone else, but something’s different. You don’t relate to these people, you don’t sound like them or act like them. You’re expected to, for sure; but you don’t. Feeling out of place is only the beginning, because soon it dawns on you that your ‘home’- a place where you’re conceptually meant to feel most accepted- is just another case of culture shock. Another place to struggle your way into a community that never really fits.
When you say a Third Culture Kid (TCK) is depressed, be careful about it. Odds are, we’re not- not in the clinical sense, anyway. A TCK is a kid who’s grown up travelling- this means you’re constantly between countries, between cultures, and between friendships. Does this make us privileged? Absolutely. The background photo of this blog is me in Machu Picchu, one of the seven wonders of the world. TCKs live amazing lives, but that doesn’t mean everything is easy for us. Often, the hardest thing a TCK can do is ‘come home’.
When you’re travelling, you’re constantly starting over; learning the social customs of your new area. When other kids are learning how to relate to their peers, you’re having to learn the basics- what hand gestures can I make in this country? What phrases should I learn to have a conversation in this new place? I once had a friendship with a French girl named Sam. I know her name was Sam because she pointed at herself and said, ‘Sam’. I didn’t speak any French, so we just got along with a made-up series of grunts and hand gestures. After a month or so she sailed away, and I was left knowing I could have a friendship without actually verbally communicating. When I ask my non-TCK friends what social skills they learned when they were eight, they say ‘texting with emojis’ or ‘how to use my phone’.
Later, I became friends with three Spanish kids. I knew enough Spanish to introduce myself, but again, ‘normal’ communication was in short supply. And they left soon enough, too. It was a pattern that repeated itself throughout my time living on the boat, and continues to repeat itself for other TCKs. When you find people your age you get along with, either they don’t stick around or you don’t stick around. By the age of thirteen my reaction to making new friends wasn’t ‘I can’t wait to hang out’, it was ‘I wonder who’ll leave first’.
Do we get sad about this stuff? Absolutely. Does the tenth time sting as much as the first? Definitely. But does that make us depressed?
Not quite, technically speaking. We’re just in mourning, constantly. Sure, nobody’s died (most of the time), but we’ve moved on. Our friends have moved on. And whenever there’s movement, there’s loss that we have to figure out how to deal with at a very young age, before we can properly analyse the situation.
Therapists don’t often understand for two big reasons:
1. The term ‘third culture kid’ isn’t particularly well-known yet (I only found out a month or so ago, and I’ve been one all my life!).
2. They haven’t lived through the same experiences!
Children need to feel belonging, recognition, and connection in order to develop a ‘normal identity’. For TCKs, we often aren’t consulted in the decision to move. If we’re lucky, we might get a heads-up of when/where we’re going. Our parents, who most often aren’t third-culture, don’t understand the problem. Losses for the children are seen as gains by the parents; they watch their children move from place to place without truly recognising there’s a piece of childhood left behind everywhere we live as children.
Without even realising it, TCKs blame ourselves for losing friends. We don’t get the chance to mourn the countries we leave, because we aren’t ‘from’ there. As if the words on our passport are the only things allowed to effect our upbringing. All of this can cause a build-up of grief for a lot of TCKs.
A commonly-noted upside of travelling as a kid is the ability to easily adapt. But, when you aren’t given an outlet for the negative emotions that come with the constant changes, this ability turns on you. You become a performer, watching the people around you, mimicking their words and actions so you’ll be accepted. It’s a pack animal’s survival instinct, but it’s what you know. As a result, you lose your identity.
In high school, I wrote a ton of stories about aliens. Not War of the Worlds-type stuff, but from the perspective of aliens who’d been placed in high school to observe and learn about humans. Like me, aliens wouldn’t know Northern English Slang (‘what’s a bap? what’s a butty? On Mars we eat space eels!’). At the time, I thought I was just a weird kid. But now I’ve realised I’m a TCK, it’s starting to make a lot of sense.
The Good News:
Luckily, travel gives you a greater perspective of the world. By fourteen, I knew I’d lived enough for ten lifetimes- so it stood to reason that the hard times in high school would pass, and make me a stronger person for it.
It takes time, but eventually you figure out loss only occurs when you’ve loved something enough to be bothered by its passing. It’s good to love things that much, as long as you learn to mourn them properly and allow them to pass on, otherwise you find yourself reliving all these memories over and over. Living in the past doesn’t do anyone any good.
I didn’t even realise there was a problem until long after I’d graduated high school and been living in my passport-country for years. It happened when I was listening to the popular Tejano artist Selena Quintanilla, who sings in Spanish. I knew the words she was singing, knew I’d known them once, but couldn’t put a meaning to them.
It sounds like a small thing, but it was a massive blow. After living in South and Central America for the better part of a decade, I’d assumed the language, at least, would be part of my DNA until my dying day.
As an adult, I didn’t even know what the problem was. This is common; when losses aren’t resolved during childhood, you forget they ever happened. Then begin to ask yourself the supposedly easy (but important) questions in adulthood. Who am I? Where am I from? What can I trust, if everything around me is going to change all the time? Everyone leaves eventually, so who can I trust?
Of course, the seeds of these problems were planted long ago, in-between borders. They’ve taken root in the subconscious, and how could you possibly get a weed-killer in that?
It all starts with conversation. What do we do to mourn? Hold a funeral. What is a funeral, if not a celebration of the past? Talk to people about your travels, people you met, cultural things you’ve adopted. Hang up photos and let yourself remember the past as a part of you that’s over now, that you’ll always be grateful for. Don’t erase the loss you went through, because that pain is there for a reason.
When I lived on the boat, it felt like losing a whole world every few months, or even weeks. The pain tripled when my family returned to the UK and moved into a house. But the boat-years were also some of the happiest I’ve ever been through! Now that I’ve held a little funeral for those times, I can allow myself to fully appreciate the life I’ve been gifted with on land.
What about you? Can you relate to feeling depressed over past experiences that you can’t quite name? Let me know in the comments- I’d love to talk.
Culturally Confused 