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The light returns… does anything else?
Today the light returned. I joined the livestream from Stonehenge as people from all over the world joined in person and online to watch the sun rise between those ancient stones. For all our cumulative scientific knowledge that gives us assurance that the sun will...
Third Culture Kid Racism
I’ve just spent 20 minutes looking for a blog post that engages with this question – can Third Culture Kids be racist? And it might just be my poor Googling skills but I couldn’t find one. So here I am, writing it myself. Something that reared its head again and again during my research with TCKs was what I’d describe as casual, covert racism. The kind of “I love this country but its people are…” or “They shouldn’t club together to speak (any language other than English) when here at school/in the dormitory.” This latter I described in my thesis as language imperialism. That’s a fancy academic term for racism. It’s just racist.
Black Lives Matter- Taking a knee
In my mind’s eye a memory floats into view, a visit I made to the King of the West African town I lived in as a young child. My mother, who was home-schooling us at the time, had taken me and my younger sister to admire the courtly palace architecture. We were looking up at the crenulations, discussing how we’d describe this in a write up later, when a couple of men approached us. My mother greeted the men and, after a brief interchange, she relayed to us (I had lost my grasp of the local tongue – my birth tongue by this point, an ever-present loss) that we had been invited to greet the King, who was in fact in residence that day. Slightly stunned, my mother gestured to us that we were to follow and take her lead.
Out of my Comfort Zone
Today I am being nudged very kindly and patiently, toward the edges of my comfort zone – on the one side I feel competent, energized, safe and enthused, on the other I feel child-like in my inexperience, shame, overwhelm…
We were never supposed to journey alone…
One of the most painful cries of the heart I hear is, “Shouldn’t I be able to handle this on my own?” It is painful for the speaker because it speaks of so much shame, so much self-judgement – the double-whammy of pain, if you will. One whammy, that of the pain of whatever challenge/experience is being faced, is enough. But here piles on a second – that however painful this is, I shouldn’t be finding it so hard. I should be able to handle it, and handle it alone. Maybe you have felt alone for a long time. Maybe you feel alone because you really don’t have people you feel you can call one. Or perhaps you feel alone ‘in a crowd’ – you have people but feel out-of-step with them and their perspectives or experiences. When we’ve had early or prolonged experience of alone-ness, we can get really good at handling things on our own. We change our own lightbulbs, manage our own decisions, sit with our own emotions. And yet. While we may have adapted for self-sufficiency, we are not designed for emotional island-living. In particular, their are some areas of psychological and emotional processing that we cannot be expected to work through alone.
Third Culture Kids & Making a Mark
Mark-making is a phrase associated, here in the UK at least, with the experimental lines and swirls that pre-school children make before they learn to form letters. Making their mark is an important developmental phase that lays the foundations of letter formation, leading towards a formalised communication style that helps them to communicate with others. For adults, making a mark refers to the ability to make oneself visible in a positive way – to be seen and heard, to be considered a beneficial and welcome presence. Making a mark involves risk-taking, self-expression, and being seen and heard by others.
Third Culture Kids and Responses to Pandemic
I’m hearing varied answers from Third Culture Kids during this pandemic so far. Some of us are feeling pretty calm, as though we’ve been prepped for this by previous chapters of our stories. Others of us are feeling horribly triggered… more loss, more uncertainty, more unknowns. Many of us are feeling some combination of the two. On top of this, I’m getting the sense that a lot of us are feeling that our response to coronavirus is yet another piece of data demonstrating that we are, in fact, very different to our non-TCK peers. And how do the significant non-TCKs in our lives understand our responses? What impact is this having on our relationships?
A Response to Coronavirus Anxieties
I’ve been considering what exactly I want to contribute to the conversation about coronavirus. What do I want to say to you about it? There is already continually updating information provided by our governments regarding the symptoms we need to look out for, as well as the steps to take should we spot these symptoms in ourselves or our families. There is even a good deal of advice out there about how to manage our mental health in this current climate too. So what’s left to say?
Third Culture Kids and Intimacy
Rejection is pretty high stakes as a Third Culture Kid. We know how much making friends quickly could make or break our social standing, even our social survival. And we may, even in adulthood, carry with us this sense of high stakes risk when we reach out to others for intimacy. In fact, many of us stop reaching. We have been burnt, and burnt repeatedly so that we now associate intimacy with danger and pain. Perhaps we find our relationships consistently break down once a certain degree of intimacy is expected or invited. Being close hurts.
“Finding myself, finding my people”
So this is post number five in the series, beginning with this one – an overview of Erikson’s ‘eight stages of man’ concept. And this is the big one – the one about Identity. For many of you reading, questions you have about your identity as a Third Culture Kid are what lead you to read this blog in the first place. It’s a big topic. So let’s begin with what Erikson says about it all. Basically, in child development terms, Erikson suggests that the age of 12 to 19 is the point at which the majority of our activity orients around the question, “Who am I?” We busily collate data from all other points up until this age to construct a sense of who we are in the world around us. And this ‘identity in context’ part matters. We don’t create identity in a vacuum. We collaborate with those around us to build a sense of who we are, in relation to those others. And interestingly, finding ourselves able to successfully answer the ‘who am I’ question achieves for us, according to Erikson, the virtue of fidelity.