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.
May 27th, 2008 at 10:28 am
I completely understand. My mom’s a TCK, too, but she’s a bit in denial and hates keeping things from the places we’ve lived. She’s also a neat freak, and doesn’t understand why I need to keep notes written to me when I was 14.
She’s always trying to get me to throw out the things I’ve saved…
The box of drawings, letters, and tiny momentos I have will always be something I need to grab if the house catches fire.
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May 27th, 2008 at 10:32 am
All I can say is yes.
yes yes yes. That is me, too. I could have written it word for word.
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June 5th, 2008 at 11:13 am
Hey there!
I am an Chimerinadian Spanglish (Chinese ethnicity/ Live in America with Green Card/Canadian passport/Spanish passport/ British passport…don’t ask me how, PLEASE)that is currently living and studying in switzerland after having been to boarding school in England for 4 years after having been to an international school in Hong Kong for my childhood!
1. Identidy Crisis: I can’t fit in with the native people in which ever country I am in, niether can I fit in with my fellow Chinese people. And that gets really frustrating because you can never relate to anyone. I hate being treated like a foreigner wherever I go and it gets really tedious and tiring trying to understand the local culture ALL over again.
2. Parents: I love my parents very much, but since they are Non-TCK I find it very frustrating to explain them my problems sometimes. I sometimes tell my parents that I am not enjoying myself in boarding school because I find it lonely or that I miss my old friends in Hong Kong very much- but the usual answers are, “Michael! We are doing this for your own good!”, or the ever common, “Michael! You should be more grateful!”…SIGH- I AM!
I am angry at the fact that I left Hong Kong at the age of 14….I missed out on ALOT of my teenage years, during the time when all my friends were starting to party and explore the opposite sex, I was twiddling my thumb in crowded airports glaring with rage at the ‘FLIGHT DELAYED’ message on the info screen! Or getting shouted at by a teacher for not doing my tie properly or tucking in my shirt! (And to add to injury, I went to an ALL-MALES CATHOLIC BOARDING SCHOOL IN ENGLAND!!!) Or trying to settle into a new mono-cultural group of people that have nothing in common with me that I can’t relate to!!
OMG, this is such an EMO moment! LOL, sorry, I must sound like a little brat =(
3. Trying to be something that I am not: Whenver I try to understand the slang, or popculture of whatever group I am in contact with- I am just completely lost and whenever I try to join in and try my best to enjoy myself…..I just don’t end up enjoying myself because:
a. I end up looking/sounding awkward when I try to be accepted.
b. I know that i have absoutely no interest in these activities, hence- I feel fake when I do it.
I hate trying to be something that I am not!
4. (Im gonna add another one ¬kekeke!), That feeling of, “Im never gonna see em’ again anyways, whats the point?”: I have a natural defence mechanism and I dont enjoy getting too close to people, because I know i’ll just have my good friends torn away from me once I leave- alot of people think I am a reclusive and anti-social hermit because I’m not friendly with them. It’s not because I am anti-social or that I am a hermit, it’s just because once I get to the point of being good friends with them….it’s time to pack up and go.
I HATE IT!!!
Thanks for being patient! You guys are awesome!! xD!!
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June 12th, 2008 at 3:12 am
michaeltam, I really know where you are coming from. I grew up mostly in Hongkong with British parents (dad from a TCK famil)and went ‘back’ to Britain age 14 - talk about culture shock! Both at a girls boarding school then again on a mostly male uni course, it was like being on another planet. I knew the words they were saying but had no idea what they really meant, and there were so many cultural references that just had me lost every time. I reacted with anger, saying ‘I hate this country, I’ll leave’ - but no-one ever understood why - and I did leave as soon as I finished college.
The question that I hated most was ‘where are you from?’ - I never knew how to answer it honestly or briefly. For years it made me angry, then it used to make me tearful because the only true answer was ‘nowhere’.
I ended up teaching English around the world, always packing up and leaving again after 1 or 2 contracts…I made friends more easily when I was younger but always kept a bit of myself back for safety. There are so many people in a dozen countries I think of as ‘good friends’ but we haven’t been in touch for years and probably never will again.
The people I related to best were mostly locals who had lived overseas and found reentry hard, or other TCKs (as I recently found out we are called), it’s surprisng how many ESL teachers grew up as TCKs and do that job to have an excuse to keep moving. Quite a few attempt to solve the problem by marrying a local and trying to become Chinese/Indian or whatever but that doesn’t quite work either, especially if the partner is well grounded in their own culture; the partner will never be able to truly get where the TCK is coming from. Now that I’m in my 40s I realise I would have done a lot better if I’d married an outsider like myself. My husband and I are both migrants, but I’m trying to belong here while he - not a TCK - doesn’t need to. Often I feel only my TCK brother really understands me, but he’s back in Britain doing his best to be British.
I found this site in passing and only meant to have a quick look but an hour later I’m realising I have more issues to deal with than I thought, just reading these posts makes me tearful. A lot of stuff sudddenly makes sense.
Good luck everyone. We have a lot of potential but I think we need to link up with each other to know what it feels like to be amongst your own kind.
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June 12th, 2008 at 3:44 am
Alessandra, it’s the complete opposite w/ me and my mom… she’s a bit of a tCK too but she keeps EVERYTHING…I hate having “stuff”…so I get rid of everything (mostly)…sometimes my mom will find stuff ppl gave me and it’ll turn up 5 or 10 years later which is cool… but I still don’t really keep things (if it’s electronic I do…but actual stuff annoys me).
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June 13th, 2008 at 12:08 am
Alessandra: I think some mothers have this way of asking their kids to throw away stuff out. My mom was like that too. But then again maybe this has something to do with having a messy kid because I sure was messy. That said some moms have a gentler approach to this. I’ve heard that some moms will sit down with their kids and teach/help them how to be tidy versus just ordering the kid to throw out stuff.
I’ve read that Stephen King had an aunt (I think it was an aunt - but don’t remember exactly as it was decades ago I read this) who took the copies of his Fantasy & Science Fiction among other things and threw them all out too.
The throwing away things seems like a common occurrence whether one is a TCK or not.
I guess some people are just more tolerant of other people’s needs to keep things they themselves feel are useless or ‘evil’ or in some way negative. Others just can’t see things from other people’s shoes so they do ‘terrible’ things like throw out a box full of letters you wanted to keep. I’m not sure you can even explain to them how much of a loss this was to you in some cases.
Sometimes we assume people are more similar to us than they are but even your own parents can be very different. Their brain just works in a different way and sometimes understanding this helps you to brush off ‘terrible’ things that they did to you - when you realize they didn’t know what they were doing and can never even understand the impact of what they did to you. But it can still be annoying if you are around them too much and they do these things too often. Ditto for acquaintances who fall into this category.
Knowledge can help you rationalize the situation but sometimes it makes you irritable anyway. :p
To get back to the TCK thing - I think the number of differences can increase when you are a TCK with non-TCK expat parents versus a mono-culture kid with mono-culture parents.
If you couple this with individual differences, then in some cases the TCK and his mom will be so well-matched personality wise that the TCK differences don’t make much of a difference. In some cases, the mono-culture kid and mother have such huge differences their mono-culture isn’t helping them get along at all.
However I think that when the personality types aren’t that different, it can seem that way with a TCK and his mom for example, because the cultural differences exacerbate this problem.
I hope this makes sense.
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July 5th, 2008 at 8:28 am
I’m sure I am repeating much of what people have said, I have not gone back and read all nine pages of comments.
I don’t think I would ever willing want to change my TCK status–it has made me into who I am today: the good and the bad. I truly can’t even begin to imagine myself not having grown up in Brasil. However, like I mentioned there is good and bad.
The bad, in no particular order:
I’m a social misfit. I am an introvert by nature and then that coupled with my TCK’ness, I hate social situations. Along with that, I don’t make friends very easy. Close friends. I can work with almost anyone, but truly getting to know them and open up to them is VERY hard for me to do. I blame it on the fact that I made really good friend then left them 3 years later. I remember them, but will probably never see them again. As an adult I think I have become more guarded against that.
#2…I have had a really time since I was in high school/college in really developing a sense of identity. It has gotten better as I have found my niche in my field of work, but that didn’t really happen until I was working on my Masters.
#3…There is a word in Portuguese that describes a deep longing for something: Saudades. I have this constant longing for things Brasilian. Luckily, I live close to Tampa and Orlando where there are large Brasilian communities, but the feeling of longing and yearning never goes away. I don’t think it would unless I went back to Brasil.
So, my 3.
CR
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July 12th, 2008 at 1:18 am
I feel like I have a connection to everyone here. I mean I think being a TCK definitely has it’s positive points but some parts really do suck.
1) I get antsy when I live somewhere over a year (which is rare enough). Things will be going seemingly well. I would have established a group of friends, gotten used to my house school, etc. And then, I’ll feel uncomfortably comfortable if that makes any sense at all. The need to pack my bags and move on is constant. I lived in Chicago for five years which is the longest I have lived anywhere, the last 3-4 years of living there were extremely uneasy for me I can never really form roots to any one place.
2) My life-style and value system is such a combination of what I’ve picked up from the places i’ve lived that it often clashes internally. I’m not really sure where I stand on a lot of things, or at least it keeps changing depending on where I am at the moment. And it’s pretty much impossible for people to understand where I’m coming from which is a blend of extreme liberalism and tolerance with a touch of conservatism that I picked up from having lived in India.
3)Despite being quite social, I’m not sure of what to do or what’s acceptable at times. Just because people are different everywhere, even when you compare different parts of a country. And it gets really confusing having to adapt myself everytime i move.
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July 12th, 2008 at 3:15 am
“And it gets really confusing having to adapt myself everytime i move.” (dhriti)
In fact I think because we have been forced into situations where we had to change the fundamental way we thought or behaved - I find that I am resistant to people trying to ‘change me’ or telling me to ‘how to behave’ when ‘culture’ isn’t involved.
I have some good habits and some bad habits and some habits that are a matter of opinion but I drag my feet about changing some of these things because it’s a part of my identity.
I dislike going to self-help classes or reading self-help books because, I feel in essence, these classes/books are telling me to change the one part of me that still remains intact from moving cultures and changing myself in many ways.
I feel that if I changed that part of me there would be nothing left of me anymore.
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August 9th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Top three things that suck about being a TCK:
1) Repatriation. Doesn’t matter if you speak the same language, or not. Doesn’t matter if you look the same, or not. Doesn’t matter if you talk a lot or a little, doesn’t matter if your family’s with you or not, Repatriation is, in every way, a MotherDog.
2) When worlds mix. My mind deals well when my Haiti-world stays in Haiti, along with its friends and power-outages and difficult driving and corrupt authority and poverty. My U.S.-world sits nicely as well all by itself, with everyone complacent and naive and good-natured and not very globally savvy. But when those worlds MIX - I completely shut down. If family or friends visit from the States… I don’t know what to do. If I encounter poverty or suffering or if there’s a power outage in the U.S., I either shut down or get extremely angry. It’s because my worlds don’t justify themselves to each other. They only exist in their own paradigm.
Wow, “paradigm.” My $100-word-for-the-day.
3) Psych 101. Hearing terms like “panic attack” and “post-traumatic stress” defined and thinking - “Gee, that’s what I’m experiencing. How nice that they have clinical terms for that stuff. Doesn’t really make it any easier, but hey I’m glad that my symptoms are neatly classified here in my psych textbook next to Vietnam vets and victims of se.xual abuse.” By the way, they did not include the term “TCK” in my textbook, though, so I’ll be dealing with all these without anyone knowing it. Then I’ll walk into a counselor’s office and go through the ordeal of working up to these huge revelations over and over again. I want to just come in and give him a list - “here’s the mess we have to deal with. I’ve outlined all my trigger points and coping mechanisms and graphed my cycles of depression. It’s in bullet-point form and I included a legend and a timeline.”
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