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 30th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
1. Parents!
They don’t understand, and expect you to be thankful and everything cause you’re ‘priveleged’. Seriously, I KNOW that, I am not dumb - but did they ever think that sometimes, I do miss my friends, and I have my emo moments then? NOOOOO. LOL.
2. Friends that don’t keep in touch.
Okay, sure some are busy, but you can’t ALWAYS be. I find time to keep in touch, why can’t you, right?? And how dare they say that we’re still gonna be tight even after I leave, or after they leave, and then totally disregard you. Thanks man.
3. Opportunities to learn ‘normal stuff’.
Friends here in small town canada, know how to DRIVE and they’re YOUNGER than me. Of course, they’ve had more time to practice and stuff.. but still, I wanna learn how to quad, or snowboard.. then again, I can’t even have lessons. I move too much, it would be a waste to give me lessons for anything. We’re out most of the time.
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December 31st, 2007 at 3:03 am
1. Parents. I have one tck parent and one “normal” one. My relationship with the “normal” one, my mother, is abysmal. She sees my cousins, good catholics raised in the same town she did and still living there and really close to their parents and assumes that I’ll see everything the way they do. I don’t. I hold a different passport, I’ve never lived there, rarely visited I hardly speak the language, boarded in a different country and I’m atheist. She swings between getting angry I’m not more like her or my cousins, and completely denying that side of my heritage to me. I don’t know which is worse. It doesn’t help that my relationship with my dad is easier as he was himself an MK. There are still issues, as he grew up in a very different class culture, didn’t go to Boarding school and so on, but his personality and his ideals are more like mine and so we understand each other better.
2. Alienation of family. Living in so many countries, boarding in yet another one, I’m not close to my family. I don’t feel a connection to them and that can sometimes be upsetting, especially when we visit and see how close my grandmother is to my cousins and how hard they work to make us feel included and cross the language barrier.
3. Relationships. My boyfriend grew up within a 30 mile radius and met some of his best friends while they were still in nappies. He tries very hard to understand, but there are some peculiarities of mine he just can’t understand. Like how bad I am about throwing old stuff away. I find I cling to certain things, particularly decorations, pictures and stuff like that. Because we moved so much, and have moved so much since I left uni, home became associated with particular objects rather than people or places. I try to make him understand but he (understandably) gets defensive and angry when I burst into tears when he tries to throw out a ratty old blanket, for example. No matter how you phrase it, it sounds very strange and pathetic when you try to explain that blanket means home. The blanket is still there.
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December 31st, 2007 at 4:15 am
1. The underlying feeling of restlessness. I can’t seem to be comfortable in one place for very long, be it a home, job or relationship. Thus I tend to move on fairly quickly or, if for some reason I cannot move on when I need to, I get incredibly frustrated.
2. Relationship with my father is terrible. He did not seem to take into account any of my feelings or needs when we had to move. He was also very busy working. I understand that was his job but his job was not everything! He has a family! My mother and I are ok but we do tend to have the odd enormous argument from time to time. This I think is rooted in unresolved feelings from my childhood and teens which is directly linked to how often i had to integrate into a new culture.
3. Identity. This has always been the hardest part for me. Non-tck friends I have made do not understand my aloofness sometimes and mistake it for a kind of arrogance. I just hang back because it is difficult for me to fully integrate with their cultural viewpoint because it is a lot narrower than mine. My TCK friends are scattered across the globe so no real connection there.
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December 31st, 2007 at 12:35 pm
Personally I love being a Tckid
here are three things that do suck
a) Never knowing when you’ll see your friends again, like almost everyone else my friends are scattered all over the world and I know I’ll probably never see them again, saying bye is the hardest part especially when it comes to that point where you really enjoy living somewhere and before you know it your house is empty and your stuff is in boxes, oh geez thats the worse part. I will always remeber standing in my house when it’s empty. I think its hard keeping in touch, especially when they tell you about the fun they are havin? does anyone know what I mean?
b) missing out on alot of the “traditional” stuff of being a kid, like riding ur bike (haha I was kind of late on this one) going to homecoming, growing up with your friends through middle school onto high school. Like hm when you leave someplace and you come back in three years and its completly changed? and you weren’t there to see it happen. Sometimes I feel as if I wasn’t actually there in the first place. Kind of like no sense of belonging
c)Short term relationships. I don’t think I’m a bad person but I just can’t commit to anything at all. Like I will be really good friends with someone and then push them away. I can’t let anyone get too close because I feel like I’ll just end up leaving. I’m also really defensive. I have my moments I guess where I just really want to be close to someone cause sometimes it does get lonely.
Even though these things kind of do suck(I’m not sure if I made any sense) I wouldn’t trade anything for being a Tckid, I think that just comes along. There will always be something bad in whatever I do but I’ve just come to live with it. I just hope that these little things will make me a better person? haha I’m so cliche.
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January 1st, 2008 at 1:45 am
1. “Feels so new~”
Really suck of being asked a few hundred times “Where do you come from?” while I move to a new place. And I agree with many of others here saying that we are treated differently… And to be frank, in asia, many people is jealous of me being a TCKid… Sometimes is frustrating in dealing with such comments… (Altho I seemed to get used to that while growing up)
2. Restlessness
I am afraid of building a long term relationship with any people or to its extreme, I rarely sign any contracts with a maturity of more than a year. Feels particularly bad in festive days… which for others, they may have their families, or friends to share with in a small party… or dinner maybe… I have nearly forgotten when is the last time I had dinner with my family~ lol
3. Identity
This seems the hardest point for any TCKid as far as I know… same to me… seems no need to explain it further coz you may refer to like 10 passages of explanations above… hahaha~
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January 2nd, 2008 at 11:27 am
I hear you; you sound exactly like me when I was your age and even now to a certain extent. Especially point 1. I tried not to complain about my “home” country when we moved back, because I also had made a big deal about how great moving back to the States would be, but I hated it once I got there.
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January 7th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
I am generally an outgoing person so when I’m quiet everyone always asks me what’s wrong. I do have a need to have alone time. Maybe take a long drive alone, or go somewhere just to write, go take a hike alone. When I do this people around me think there’s something going on with me, but I just need that time to regroup, collect my thoughts, and think up new idea’s. Most people don’t understand this need to just be with myself.
The career thing….what career? “I’ve got an idea, maybe I can do this, or that, or whatever”….always end up back in sales, no matter where I am, easy for me and there is always a need for a sales person in any industry.
Of course the classic…if they’re not a tckid they just can’t relate and most of the time don’t even try and relate to our experiences. Always feel that yes I know the other person better because I ask questions…maybe they just don’t know what questions to ask??
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January 9th, 2008 at 2:39 am
I so know what you mean about number #1 and #2.
1. Parents making you feel like you are ungrateful because you miss what you lost!\\
2. Friends that don’t keep in touch! Like bestest bestest friends who are less than curious about how you are doing a couple of months later… when months after you are still wondering about them!! Damn it, people!!!
#3. For me is when you don’t make new friends for a while. Having to settle sometimes for people who may not get along with that great just to fit into the new place you live. (I dont recommend doing it… i certainly learned from it tho. I think i rather be a complete LONER than someone who is surrounded by people they dont really like!)
Once i begun to deal with some of my grief.. life has been looking much better each month. Its not an easy road but thats how life is sometimes so just gotta stick to it!
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January 9th, 2008 at 3:07 am
In response to question 2:
I literally *lost* a friend of mine, another TCK, after we both left primary school and both sets of parents began a crazy run of moving house. We wrote, but I got one letter nearly a year after it was written (and I later found out 3 countries later as well, 4 for me). This was in the days before email and the internet.
There is an answer, it’s not perfect, but I actually found my friend, working only a few hundred yards from where I work, after 12 years, and we’ve actually managed to pick up where we left off! The answer? FACEBOOK!!!
As I said, not perfect. But one advantage of being a TCK is that when we do stay in touch with special friends, we’re guaranteed foreign holidays!
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January 9th, 2008 at 9:30 am
1. Friends. My relationships with them are so short, and as I grew older it was getting harder to form them. Especially when in my school people have lived in Belgium (where I’m from and where I am now) their whole life. I’ve moved around so much that I never lived in Belgium and never had gotten to know it. So now I only have online friends and a close real life one living in Australia.
2. Family. Since I was usually in some country far away from Belgium, this caused me to grow distant from them. I never really had even been close to them. There was also a large language barrier since I speak English as a first language and my Dutch barely scraped by to make me bilingual. I even still have problems today, and I’ve been studying it for the past 3 years.
3. “Where are you from?” “Well, technically, I am from Belgium but… -insert 6 countries that I had been to- ”
I am getting sick of that question. Belgium was never my home, it’s only my home because my passport says it is. The end.
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