You know you are a Third Culture Kid if…

How do you know you ‘count’ as a Third Culture Kid? You know, a REAL one? This was raised as an issue for my doctoral research on TCKs – how would I define them? There are the classical definitions of course – children of parents working for...

Adventure without Travel – a TCK necessity

Feeling antsy? Blocked from travel? How can we get adventure without travel? So something that comes up a fair bit with my work with adult Third Culture Kids is the ongoing desire for adventure. We grow up with change being our normal, and we can develop a certain...

Third Culture Kids and Burnout

I’d been dragging for a few days. Everything was fine – great even, and I’m REALLY good at noticing when things aren’t okay. I’m SO great at noticing when things aren’t okay that I sometimes take a big stick and poke ‘just...

Are books sacred to you?

Books are sacred to me because stories are sacred to me, as are the people who tell them. Whether these stories are born of imagination or experiences, they are all somehow true. And truth is sacred. Books are sacred in the way they present a universal story in a...

Gabor Maté’s “Scattered Minds”: ADHD & TCKs

I devoured this book. Maté writes about the human mind in relational, rather than mechanistic, terms. He writes about ADD and ADHD and the term ‘scattered’ that he uses to describe this cohort seems to me very apt. It also happens to be the term used most...

Third Culture Kids and AD(H)D

Before I sat down to write about Third Culture Kids and ADHD, I made a herbal tea (some concoction I had made for me ages ago to help regulate my energy levels – it’s probably out of date now) and jumped up and down in the kitchen for a few minutes, eating...

Performing Identity & the props we use

How do you feel about the idea of ‘performing identity’? For many people, performance is associated with ‘faking it’, ‘inauthenticity’ or even, ‘drama’. It can feel jarring to consider identity as performance. And yet...