At what point do you become an ATCK?

Posted by Marie on January 23rd, 2008 | Categorized as Blog, Introduction | Tagged as adulthood, ATCK, childhood, growing up, intro, reality | 365 views and 13 Comments

At what point do you become an ATCK? Someone in another discussion one day talked about their inability to bring on responsibilities, and another about the “delayed adolescence” thing. For me, there are two aspects to the delayed adolescence. First, it is wrong. My whole life people have always said I was more mature than my age, that I’m an “old soul” or whatever they want to identify me as. All my friends have always been older than me and I’ve never really been interested in the same things as people my age (except for those things which really defy age like playing on a “soccer” team when you’re 10). But in another sense, it’s completely right. There are many ways, especially socially, in which I’m WAY behind all my counterparts of my age. It might be cultural differences (with every culture) but in any case I don’t feel like an adult, even if (sometimes/most times/whatever) I might act like one. So when do we become adults? And even more, when do we become ATCKs? What determines an ATCK? Do we all of a sudden stop growing up and stop being changed by the impacts of our nomadic lives? Is it when we finally (if we finally) decide to settle down in a place and live like “normal” people with “normal” jobs and “normal” family and social lives? Are these just stupid questions of someone who’s in between adolescence and adulthood and who has absolutely no clue of what society views them as? (ugh, god forbid I be viewed as a “college kid”). The truth is most of the time I feel like a child, like I’m 5 or 6 years old and I’m pretending to be an adult to avoid the reality that I really don’t fit into the whole society thing, kind of like how I move every few months or find a completely group of people to follow around so that I don’t have the overwhelming feeling of being completely stuck in one place with no where to go and no freedom and no control. A lot of people have been talking about the post on the tckkid website (which resembles unsurprisingly this website to the point that when I first clicked on it I changed it because I thought that facebook had bugged out again); the post from the girl who said that being a TCK sucks. She’s right in a lot of ways, it does sometimes suck. It sucks not feel like there’s any place you really fit in (except, of course, on this or some other discussion board or with friends who grew up like you). The truth is, we’re a force soon to be reckoned with. People like us are the future, we’re the ones who are going to be working in international organizations, we’re the ones who are going to be telling other people’s kids that we get what they’re feeling when their parents are still confused about how the world has changed and whether or not there will be a global homogenization of culture (no). So really, my answer to that post is simple. While yes, it does suck a lot to be a TCK, no, I wouldn’t trade if for the world. I wouldn’t be me. I’d rather be a screwed up weirdo who doesn’t seem to fit into one place (but rather into this thing we call “earth”, although most people 60 years ago who said that were probably sci-fi freaks waiting to see aliens come down with the obvious “weee comme in peeaaccee” as if they would be able to speak English off the bat). The benefits outweigh all of that, all of the crap you get every day when you try to explain where you’re “from”, why you can’t answer or whatever lie you make up to make it easier on you, whatever rejection you feel, it’s all worth that one moment every so often where, without warning, you run into this person who for some reason smiles when you answer “ummmm…well do you mean where I was born, lived, went to school, feel culturally, or my passport?”, who you just know without words that they understand something about you that you might not have even known until they bring up this term that you’ve never before heard but then there’s this book and you open it and the first word makes you sit down because for the first time in your life, someone’s talking about you. Not a little bit, not just something you can associate yourself with, but you only you and completely you. That was probably the scariest day of my life. No one ever got me like that before.

I’ve gotten completely off topic (I don’t think there’s a bigger tangent than that anywhere), so I guess here’s where I come back to my original question. What is adultness? How do you make the transition from TCK to ATCK and better yet does being a TCK impact your transition from adolescence to adulthood complicating comparisons to those around you without those peculiar experiences? How are you supposed to know? Do you all of a sudden wake up one morning and find out you’re an adult now? I think I’ll always be a child, running around in my house with my blanket on my back pretending I’m a princess/superhero/reject who saves all the other rejects from the big evil people who threaten their freedom and livelihood, running around with a home made out of cardboard because that’s the life of a superhero like me.

I guess this will be my introduction.