Blog
The Third Culture Kid drive to “be good”
I’m currently sat at my desk in a mild slumpy grumpy space. It’s because I’ve eaten too much sugar, and drunk too much coffee and now I feel I need a good long lie down. I want to hide from myself, because I’m cross that I over-indulged. However, given that I’m me, I’m feeling curious as well as grumpy – why did I do it? Why did I eat and drink more than was good for me? Now I’m getting all philosophical and asking the BIG question – why do we do what we don’t want to do, and why don’t we do what we want?
Chronic Pain & Medication
How do you manage your pain? Meditation, counselling, pacing, massage, physiotherapy, exercise… medication? We often seem to flinch at the latter option, reacting to it as a necessary evil. And it’s certainly true that popping a few pills to ‘take away the pain’ is a bit of a myth. There are sometimes costs to consider, side effects, and how pain medications interact with any other medication that you could need also. It’s daunting.
Self-critique or self-esteem; how do you grow?
I’ve long avoided ‘self-esteem’ as a concept. I’ve never identified with issues of low self-worth and, considering myself a seeker of truth, found it more natural to think in terms of self-critique instead. Self-critique, I argued, allows for all elements of ourselves to be seen and processed – both those elements we admire about ourselves, and those elements that we struggle to accept. Self-critique deals in reality, while self-esteem seemed to deal more in how I wanted to feel about myself (and could therefore be dismissed as self-indulgent delusion).
Searching for Identity, and How to Find It
An experience shared by a lot of Third Culture Kids is that of having multiple cultural identities. They are often described as chameleons, able to adopt behaviours (and sometimes even beliefs) at will to function in changing social environments. So why would a TCK be searching for identity? Surely they have plenty to choose from!?
New Year Goals – free printable!
Assuming that new year goals either a) set me up to fail or b) must necessarily cause me intense suffering, I have (unsurprisingly!) avoided them. Of course, there is a further complication to my setting of goals. As a Third Culture Kid I can have a tendency to assume my life will uproot just frequently enough to make goal-setting redundant. Accustomed to regular ‘new start’s, I (like many other TCKs) can lack faith that we can see projects through to completion. Not so this year. This year, I’m allowing myself to dream, to hope, and to acknowledge my own investments… and successes!
Fear of Missing Out & the Third Culture Kid
Since I opened this page to start writing this post, I’ve checked my Facebook notifications twice. I check my phone for emails and messages as soon as I wake up, even before I have my first cup of tea. The fact that I’m checking them minus my essential morning caffeine boost is an indicator that I have no actual intention or urge to reply especially quickly; rather the aim is simply to read them and check I’m absolutely in the loop. I justify this with the fact that I have clients spread across multiple time zones, so it’s perfectly reasonable to be concerned about missing anything during my night-time/their day-time. The reality though I suspect is less altruistic. I just don’t want to miss anything. And this anxiety has been given its own acronym; FoMO or Fear of Missing Out.
Chronic Pain & Sensory Overload
I have chronic pain. It’s due to Ehler’s Danlos Syndrome (Hypermobility) and is mostly low level thanks to the painkillers I have been prescribed to take daily. But I do have flare ups and these can be due to stress, weather, overdoing it, illness, or extra physical activity. It can take a bit of digging to figure it out. Today’s is the result of an adrenaline rush, extra walking and a few busy days. I knew I was more fragile than usual as soon as I opened my eyes this morning… and felt hit between the eyes by the day.
Darkness & Light this Autumn (or Fall!) – Honouring Loss
I’m sitting listening to fireworks going off all around my home – they bang with great gusto, remembering poor old Guy Fawkes (whatever your politics, he had a grisly end) and his failure to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. It’s typical of the Brits that one of the closest things we get to a National Holiday is the celebration of a failure to achieve revolution. But whatever its origins, the fact that this holiday comes so closely on the heels of All Hallow’s Eve, or Halloween, really emphasises that juxtaposition of darkness and light we often associate with this time of year.
Chronic Pain and other Life Limiters: Accepting what is Real
I have Chronic Pain. Like many others I know, I wrestle daily to balance what I want to be real, and what actually is real. I don’t want to accept my limiters, generally fearful of what this might mean about who I am and what I am worth. And yet, these limiters remain real. And resisting them seems to equate to denying their reality. And so, I want to share three things I have come to accept about myself; three realities I have previously rejected.
Third Culture Kid Relationships: Attachment & Trauma
I’ve been looking more deeply into attachment theory this week and it’s interaction with Third Culture Kid relationships. In this theory, Bowlby’s proposes that the way we experience relationship in our first few years draws up a blueprint for our later relationships. Some say that the way to establish what our early experiences (pre-memory) of attachment were is to look at the way we engage in relationships now. How do we do relationship in our present day lives? Do we feel secure in our relationships? Or perhaps we feel anxious about them never quite convinced the affections we receive will continue. Perhaps we feel avoidant in our relationships; aware of our need for connectedness but hesitant to ever be truly vulnerable in relationship, instead prioritising independence.