I’m a TCK. Who knew?
Not Any Old Weirdo
I was in my early 40s when I discovered I was a TCK, or third culture kid. I had never heard of the term before. I looked blankly at the person who was telling me this. She was one too. It all started when she said she was from Kenya and I said I’d lived there too. In fact, the whole conversation was full of “and then we moved to…..”.
She sent me to a website. She said there was a book. And so started my journey of discovery about all things TCK.
I found out that I’m not just a weirdo who had moved around a lot whilst growing up. There are other people like me. Other people who had experienced a nomadic upbringing and who felt the same things that I did. Like the dread when asked what I now know to be the notoriously hard question for TCKs: “Where are you from?”
A Whole World of TCKs
It turns out that there are other people like me who mimic the chameleon. We learned how to fit in. We learned how to change our appearance, our behaviour, even our accents so that we didn’t feel like the perpetual outsider.
I discovered I wasn’t the only one who didn’t have a close relationship with my extended family.
I used to think it was just me who felt like a dummy when people would say a catchphrase that everyone else seemed to know but me. Or when other cultural references drew blanks for me.
Discovering that being a TCK is a thing that has dramatically altered my life. There are so many times that I have felt alienated and misunderstood. Most people were not like me and had lived in one place all of their lives (they are called monocultural).
Monocultural people simply didn’t get me. They thought I was bragging when I talked about going to the game parks in Kenya during my school holidays, they thought I was exaggerating when I said I’d seen countless lions and elephants. They thought I was privileged because we had staff.
What felt normal to me was seen as showing off and it made me feel ridiculed and unhappy and I wanted to hide.
Being a TCK is Normal
It turns out that all these things are normal for a TCK.
It also turns out that there are very specific things associated with having had a TCK upbringing; some are great things, others are issues.
On the side of great things, I can list the following: I can fit into any situation pretty quickly, be it a work situation or a social one. I recognise that this isn’t without significant personal cost (for example, it can be exhausting spending time with monocultural people and feeling like I have to monitor what I say for fear of being thought of as a show off!). I pick things up quickly too, it’s part of the skills I learned when moving from one school system to another — I needed to be able to catch up rapidly or feel like the class idiot.
On the side of issues I can list the following: I used to think about the sadness that came with all the moving was just part of being a child rather than recognising it’s specifically part of being a TCK. The loss of friends, familiar places, smells, tastes and sounds are things that I grew used to, albeit that they have impacted my adult life. The discovery that I am a TCK made me reflect on this. I have acknowledged the grief of my childhood. I have come to understand why I am the way I am and to accept that my version of ‘normal’ is typical for TCKs.
Perhaps You’re Not Mad, Maybe You’re A TCK
Some TCKs seek counselling or therapy for damage that their nomadic childhood had on them. I sought coaching. The difference between counselling/therapy and coaching, to put it in its simplest form is that counselling/therapy looks backwards and delves into past trauma to try to resolve it. Coaching on the other hand accepts the past and looks forward to create a new and brighter future than the one that may have been experienced without a coaching intervention.
The difference it made to me was so dramatic that I retrained to become a coach and I work specifically and exclusively with TCKs.
