3 Reasons Why Being a TCK is Challenging. (Share your burdens here)
This is a writing exercise. Name 3 reasons Why being a TCK is challenging.
Do you think being a TCK sucks? Well, some TCKs seem to think so. It’s challenging if you have restlessness, a lack of identity, short-term relationships and unresolved grief. If you’ve been on the site long enough, then you won’t be surprised to find out that some TCKs have had to deal with issues like depression, drugs, alcoholism, and self-injury.
-Do you feel like you don’t belong anywhere?
-Do you have short-term relationships and friendships (18 months to 2 years)?
-Do you have a lot of unresolved grief and sadness for breaking off relationships and friendships?
-Do you feel restless and unable to deal with it?
-Have you always felt you never got a say when your parents decided to move?
We have many hidden losses and unresolved grief. It’s time to write about them.
This post is about naming 3 reasons why being a TCK is challenging. Name your losses and allow yourself to write about your deepest feelings.
“Why write about negative emotions? Isn’t that a bad idea?”
Pennebaker, a professor in the Department of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin is a pioneer in the study of using expressive writing as a route to healing. His research has shown that short-term focused writing can have a beneficial effect on everyone from those dealing with a terminal illness to victims of violent crime to college students facing first-year transitions.
“When people are given the opportunity to write about emotional upheavals, they often experience improved health,” Pennebaker says. “They go to the doctor less. They have changes in immune function. If they are first-year college students, their grades tend to go up. People will tell us months afterward that it’s been a very beneficial experience for them.”
So.. what did you lose? What are you really angry or sad about? What are your fears? Who hurt you and who did you hurt?
You can rant and express yourself and post anonymously if you want by logging in as “anonymoustck”.
Username:anonymoustck
Password:anonymoustck
ON THE POSITIVE SIDE: Should my children be TCKs? and What’s the best thing about being a TCK? Read reasons why being a TCK has been a positive experience.
December 29th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
1. I hated my parents for the longest time when I was a teenager. But I never expressed it, I kept it bottled up inside because I’ve been told “we’ve made sacrifices so you can enjoy all those opportunities”. I didn’t see it that way. All I saw was the pain of saying goodbye to my friends, being confused about my identity, and feeling like I don’t belong anywhere. My parents didn’t understand, they were too “stuck” in their ways. I never had a role model, or someone I could look up to .. or some cultural identity I could understand and live by. Mine was too confusing, and it didn’t make sense. I was really depressed whenever I had to move to a new place, and especially during “re-entry” where I felt like a foreigner.
2. Difficult relationships… I feel like I struggle committing to relationships. I get in a group of people, get short-term friends, but not *real* close friends that I can rely on because if we get too close I tend to leave. I’m afraid of opening up, and revealing too much of myself.
3. Fear of the future. I always wondered what the hell I was supposed to do in life. What was in store for me? I felt confused and kept going after different careers and choices, and I was never taught these things.
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December 29th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
I turned many of those negatives into positives lately, but I do remember how hard it was when I was younger, and had no clue about this “TCK” thing.
1. Cultural shock. Re-entry made me absolutely miserable. I think I was 13 years old when it first happened, and that’s a horrible time to cut off friendships. I had to learn a new language, learn new cultural rules, and so on. I hated it, and I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere.
I’ll add more soon.
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December 29th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
1- All of my high school friends are scattered throughout the world and I have no idea where 90% of them are. (I have 2 people on facebook from my high school who are non-mks, which makes me happy). but the other 50 i have no idea. My brother just went back to djibouti, and found out that one of his friends died a few years ago. that sucks.
it’s easier that way. I can be friends with them, for a bit, but if there’s a hint of anything more, i freak out and lose a friend. And even when I was dating, every time i spent the few months we were dating freaking out until I pushed them away enough that they break up with me, or i break up with them. Which makes me wonder if I’ll ever be able to get married… the concept of “forever” is so foreign….
2- not fitting in anywhere.. I have no idea where I belong, who my ‘real’ friends are (who will be there for even when i’m across the world) which also leads to depression, which i have struggled with over the last 4-5 years.
3-Relationships. I open myself up to people to an extent, but then move on.. leaving them behind it seems. In 5 semesters of college, I’ve had 5 “best friends”. I also don’t trust guys, i don’t know why, but I’m blaming it on TCKness
But.. i also love being a TCK!!
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December 29th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
1. repatriation:
ugh! it was AWFUL! got a lot of shit for not speaking the language, not knowing cultures and customs, laughed at for not knowing popular culture and my background had zero cool points since i had lived in a country folks either hadn’t heard of or associated with famine and poverty. and that, apparently, was not cool. even my parents got frustrated with me, and all this at 8 years old. i began to feel very isolated and HATED my passport country. i still don’t exactly like it there, even though i feel i have dealt with my “demons”.
2. being a novelty:
i am an extrovert and thus usually like attention, i am loud and i like being “different”, but not ALWAYS. sometimes i just want to be with people that get me from the get go. as a teen i liked hearing the phrase “i’ve never met anyone like you before” it made me feel original, special, but after a while i just got sick of it, i wanted to meet someone who just listened to what i said and talked to me, got to know me, didn’t think i was so weird. luckily i found my fiance, who is weirder than me (believe it or not)
3. not knowing:
i just found out i am tck a few months ago, so basically i went through my childhood and teens not knowing. not knowing why i was so different, why i was so shunned, why i was so restless. sure i knew it had to do with the fact that i had grown up outside my passport country, but i had no vocabulary to articulate why simply growing up in another country could change who i am so drastically. it sometimes made me feel a fraud, as though i was pretending to be this way, and maybe everyone was right and i should just suck it up and be like my peers. not knowing can drive you crazy, because you think you are crazy and you don’t have anyone telling you different.
luckily i have dealt with and still dealing with some of these issues, but i know they will be with me forever. for example, i am still SO defensive about the fact that i don’t speak my mother tongue, and i think i always will be. recently my fiance mentioned that i will be expected to learn his mother tongue once we are married, i got REALLY defensive about it. he was surprised since he plans to learn mine. i realized i associate language so strongly with my self-worth. as a child i was made to feel that i was worth nothing because i did not speak a certain language, and thus now, when i am questioned about language, any language i get HELLA defensive.
see? still a work in progress. guess we all are.
phew! that felt good! (tckid: the “t” is for “therapy”!)
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December 29th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
1) Not really being able to finish what I started or realize my talents to the furthest extent or being able to purse my interests. I was always good at sports, but now I keep wondering what could have been. I went to a school which was so small as not to be even able to field a soccer team. This part could turn into a rant… sometimes I feel like I wasted some of my talents or never got an opportunity to realize them…
2) Friendships and relationships. It’s hard moving every 2 years and making new friends, usually in very small schools and then leaving them. It’s even harder then coming to a big school and a non-TCK envirnoment. You miss out on all the clicques being formed. You make friends, but they’re never as close as you want them to be. Sometimes it’s hard to connect with people. And to add to that actually trying to get a girlfriend is impossible. So a lot of times you end up lonely and depressed. Furthermore this is even worse when you graduate and have to find a job, you end up in a city where you might have lived before, but now know no one.
3) Identity… I won’t even go into this one, cauz I don’t know where to start.
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December 30th, 2007 at 12:17 am
1. Friends. The first few years of my life were spent in one country, but I don’t remember any friends I made or, for that matter, where they are. The ones I do remember after that don’t keep in touch very much. Mostly because of the time difference, sometimes because we have other friends. Kinda sucks since I really do try and keep in touch. Friends you make once you enter another country is hard. You’d like to be close to them, but never as close as you’d like to be.
2. Hanging on. I’ve always had a problem with it, especially with my own home country since it’s the only place I feel I truly belong to, even though I doubt my identity a lot and wonder if I actually do belong.
3. Getting close to others. I’m no extrovert, I prefer to remain close to myself and never let anyone see weaknesses. I don’t want to get close to someone and figure out I have to leave again. I figure if I can eliminate the pain of leaving friends, moving will be halfway bearable. Of course, in a ay, it’s worked, but in a way, it’s not possible to try and stop yourself making friends.
4. My parents. I still have problems, I blame them for making my entire existance miserable. My dad refers to my friends as ‘business contacts’ I honestly dunno what he means by that, but I used to think he obviously had no friends and no life and therefore merely wanted to make my life miserable. In fact, I still do! He keeps saying it’s hard for him to move, but it was hard for him, then I felt he wouldn’t move at all. He keeps going on and on about all the opportunities the travelling gives me, but I have never once believed him.
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December 30th, 2007 at 5:40 am
1) Being treated differently. I may have had a different lifestyle growing up, but that’s no reason to treat me like I’m clueless or developmentally challenged when it comes to living my life “back home” again. Since I’ve moved back to the Philippines and started working here, co-workers have resorted to either speaking slowly with me or mixing Tagalog with English, as if I have trouble understanding them. My Tagalog is definitely not perfect, but I can understand it quite well and do not appreciate being treated like I’m a special needs case.
2) Having my friends be scattered all over the world. Of course, I’m very excited and blessed to even be able to say that. It just means I will always miss people, no matter where I go in the world.
3) Being a TCK is expensive. What with all the traveling, plane tickets, phone calls, Internet time, etc., etc., etc.
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December 30th, 2007 at 8:30 am
1) The loneliness - I grew up as an mk in a small village and for most of the time that I was growing up there were no non-family foreigners within 2 hours. I had a lot of friends among the nationals, but there were so many automatic disconnects that I spent high school very lonely.
2) Not fitting into my culture(s) and not knowing if I wanted to…
3) Losing home. It really isn’t as big a deal to me as it would be for most people, but I still would like a place that could be home.
All that being said, I loved the experience of growing up TCK and especially for 2 & 3 see tremendous disadvantages in the opposite problems too.
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December 30th, 2007 at 11:27 am
1. I don’t know how to stay in one place for more than a few years, even if everything is going good I have to move. I can’t finish any thing I start
2. Not being accepted because I am different and I have moved so much, being lonely
3. losing everything when I move, friends, my home, my stability, my life, my things
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December 30th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
1. Feeling like a complete foreigner in my “home country.” When I spent a year there a few years ago, I felt so stupid for feeling culture shock for actually living in the country I had begged my parents to move back to for YEARS, and I was miserable.
2. Having depression, and almost hurting myself because of it. I know, this probably has nothing to do with my TCK-ness, but being a TCK certainly didn’t help.
3. The loneliness you feel when none of your friends understand what it’s like not to belong anywhere. Now that I’m in university, I feel like that’s my “home” but I still want to live abroad, which means saying good bye to friends, even if it’s only temporary. But people change while you’re gone, and I’ve lost many friends that way.
This past year has been pretty rough, so please excuse me if I’m a bit bitter.
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