They call it Third Culture Kid. The label is small and insufficient. We exist in the space of the uncategorised.
What is the word I’m looking for? The impossibility of these categories and names. Still, the need to have a name, something to call mine, to identify with. The need only the ones growing up ‘in - between’ understand. The pain of not belonging is visceral but invisible.
Holding multiple cultural identities can sometimes feel like carrying a weight. Sometimes it feels like having wings. An ache inside abundance. Both fullness and absence. I have accepted them all, each one beautiful and impossible in their own way.
What’s the word for: I was born in one country, my parents immigrated to another, I don’t feel at home in neither of the two. I don’t fully belong to my motherland, I don’t fully belong to the country that raised me. So I added a third place to my ‘homes’. Moved to a third, neutral ground. What’s the word for: I discovered there is no neutral ground? That after all the years of trying, what I loved calling home, doesn’t feel like home anymore? What’s the word for the sadness in realising there might be no physical home for us? What’s the word for: I only feel belonging with people who also don’t belong anywhere?
People call me different things, try to guess where I’m from, as if it’s a fun game, stereotype me, fit me in a box - and I am frustrated when I can’t give them what they want. I am tired of having a complicated answer to a simple question:
Where are you from?
I’m anchored in who I am and it still gets me: The things that I am not. The places I am not. Some days I wish I had one home, one language, my mother’s tradition to keep me safe. Some days I want to belong so hard that it hurts in my lungs. What’s the word for not knowing your ancestral heritage, not having a community sharing the same roots, what is the word for being many things and never quite sure what to call yourself, what is the word for having many cultures merging in of you, for the confusion that comes from saying the word ‘home’?What is the word for envying people who call a group ‘their people’, what is the word for not having a people, a category to put yourself in? What is the word for longing to belong?
Being uncategorised means being free. I am proudly creating my own culture, my own community out of people who are birds with no place to land, people with more than one passport and no national identity. My mind is more colourful, more adaptable, my view of the world wider and deeper. I am used to paradigm shifts. I am more inquisitive and daring, I have words to dream in and write and speak in many languages. Uncertainty has always been my companion, so I don’t cling to traditions, growing up in between cultures meant questioning all of them.
While I carry some convictions loosely, I also live in the tension of rejecting norms and having to hold on to my principles because they create safety and orientation inside a multicultural life that lacked the scaffolding of belonging. People have called me too idealistic for it and I always took it as an insult. But I’m finally embracing it as my power. I have a deep-seated need to understand people, their motivations and our differences, but they do not scare me.
Most days I feel rootless but free. Because I grew up without solid roots, I have always questioned and rejected many things served to me. I am more free than most people I meet. Free to choose. Free to speak the truth. Free to dare. Free to be vulnerable. Free to question. Free to accept differences. Free to build my own path, tradition and culture, free to not use the template that was given to me. Free to sit in the grey, hold the layers, misunderstood, with no need for approval.
I’ve existed in-between all my life. Not one thing or the other, but both and neither. Someone in the middle. A unique blend with many flavours, not easy to define, not smooth, not simple, but delicious. Instead of one culture, one language, one tradition, one home, one heritage, I have many. Everything is multiplied and this is a superpower. My life is richer for it: it is more, not less.
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