Remember when you left home for the first time? It might have been leaving to your freshman year of college or moving out of the house you were raised in. 

Think about that very last moment when you’re looking out of the back car window with your knees smashed against suitcases wondering if you’ll ever see that place you loved so much ever again. You might kick yourself for not soaking in all of those precious memories enough. You should have loved harder. You should have treasured more. You should have done better by that place. You have no idea if you’ll be lucky enough to walk those familiar streets one more time. You’re staring so hard so you can take all of it in and take that last mental photograph. 

Click.

Your eyes are welling up a little bit but you know to try to hide it. Your throat is closing up now so you dry swallow all of those feelings.  Close your eyes now. Push it down. Push it down. Push it down. Until it comes without warning: the crashing realization that nothing will ever be the same ever again, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. 

Think about that feeling. Hold onto that pit in your stomach. It hurts, doesn’t it? And then count on reliving it every 2 to 3 years, depending on contractual agreements between existing embassies, global conglomerates, the military, and other various international institutions. 

There’s a lot of hullabaloo about “living in the moment” and “existing in the present”. Self-care and mindfulness have been thrown around and overused thanks to Goop and other corporate wellness brands. Massive conglomerates have grabbed onto self-love in the hopes of repackaging and selling it to the masses. Honestly — it’s easy to roll your eyes at the lot of it. 

When entering any suburban white mother’s bathroom, you’ll be bombarded with reminders about how important it is to live, laugh and love. Yesterday is the past, tomorrow is the future, but today is a gift and that’s why they call it the present, or whatever. Am I right or what, Moms of America? It’s a lot of pressure.

Upon performing any basic Google search for Third Culture Kids, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that we will be shit out of luck when it comes to sound mental health. Cling onto your decorative throw pillows ladies because we have a shitstorm of niche psychological conditions coming our way. We’re told to beware of Destination Addiction — the idea that happiness is in the next place, the next job and with the next partner. On every mom blog and listicle, it clearly warns of the inevitable depression, grief, and loss that every Third Culture Kid will be forced to endure due to the hop-scotching nature of our lifestyle. 

And to an extent, that’s true. 

But I’m unsure about how applicable all of this Goop-y, well-meaning advice it is to Third Culture Kids. Very little of the existing literature or national discussion around mindfulness or self care says what to do about the unrelenting cycle of mourning and celebration that Third Culture Kids are so often stuck in. So, how does one cope with “being back”? Is it possible to come back home a whole person with a history of weaving gains and losses? 

It’s a tough balance to strike. We recognize the enormous privilege that accompanies our lives as Third Culture Kids. We’ve benefitted from the multitude of structural inequities; omnipresent forces like colonialism, unequal spatial distribution and one-sided economic opportunity. We acknowledge the disparities and unfair advantages we’ve been given without punishing ourselves for circumstances we have little say or agency in. We do the work to uplift others who have been oppressed. And we adapt. We’re good at that, adapting. It’s kind of our thing. 

The happiness isn’t always the trickiest part of moving. Sometimes, it’s the being in being happy to be back. Mindfulness can be a real bitch for us because more often than not, our existence in a space isn’t really up to us. Always looking one step ahead at the change to come, aren’t we? We are at the whims and mercy of the Powers That Be™ when it comes to where we live. Too often, Third Culture Kids can get stuck in a chronic cycle of severe separation and loss. When the contract is up, we’re gone. Zip. Outta there. Instead of just losing a friend here or there, entire countries are ripped away from us without adequate warning. And if we’re lucky enough to visit homes we once loved, more often than not, we’re shocked to find out that they have had the gall to move on without us. Time stops for no Third Culture Kid. 

Kaitlynne O’Reilly, newly minted Australian citizen and long time Indonesian resident relayed an all too common story for returnees, “When I did go back, I personally felt aimless and trapped between times. I felt dragged back into the person I was when I was living there, but so at odds with the person I was trying to become. That was a really heartbreaking experience. I’d carefully wrapped up all these beautiful memories of these places and found going back really shattered some of them. I saw things in a different light, with adult eyes. It was like the buildings had crumbled away and all that was left was this cold, hard scaffolding. My friends, my youth, my sense of belonging had all vanished when myself and all my TCK peers went about our mass exodus.”

These heartbreaking stories aren’t exactly the kinds of things we like to share during cocktail hour when the inevitable, “Wow! That’s so fascinating! What was it like living over there?” arises. Most Third Culture Kids have a few quick stories we can unfurl for these awkward moments. When I’m describing how I was raised, I talk about the school gardners finding cobras in the playground, dancing in the rain storms during monsoon season, and how a water buffalo crushed my Nokia brick phone after I fell off my bike into a rice paddy in China.

I don’t recount the quiet terror of being pulled over and asked for my papers at 2 AM by Jordanian secret police officers or being lost in the middle of snowy Moscow and contemplating calling the Marines for help. Nor do I depict being caught in a riot and watching blood splatter against the car windows. Having to prep your go-bag because the embassy might issue an immediate evacuation as a 4th grader lacks a certain kind of whimsy during small talk. Nobody wants to hear about that kind of thing when sipping a cocktail and, besides, they’re just trying to be nice. 

Our lives have storybook moments to be sure. Thanks to our parents, we’ve been placed smack dab center in a grand adventure. It can be even the smallest vignettes — like the first moment you step out of a plane onto the jetway and get a blast of fresh city air. It’s like a punch to the cerebral cortex. Or that moment of quiet victory when you’re finally able to communicate properly in the local language without an accent and you feel like maybe, just maybe, you’ve got a handle on this. Until you don’t again. 

Negotiating this discrepancy between feeling happy and being back is a lifelong challenge for returning Third Culture Kids. 

“I certainly don’t think enough people talk about it. It’s hard to figure stuff out for yourself when it feels like there isn’t a larger cultural or social discussion about what you’re going through. Do other people feel the same way I do? Where can I find them and talk about our similar struggles? Feeling homesick or heartsick isn’t really the biggest thing for me, it’s rather when other people don’t understand why I feel those feelings or can’t relate emotionally,” relayed Aaron Chu, a Third Culture Kid out of Singapore and Scotland. 

We’re admittedly an unusual sociological subset and it’s not like Third Culture Kids have a distinctive marker, besides an impressively beat up passport. We don’t look the same. We don’t sound the same. But we exist under an umbrella of this beautifully, destructively, uniquely, shared life experience. Our unifying issue is that transition always involves loss, no matter how good the next phase will be. Loss always engenders grief and the greater you have loved a situation or place or people, the greater the grief. 

And in this place of mourning, I’ve built and rebuilt myself home after home. 

After countless international moves, I’ve developed a repertoire of small habits of authentic self love and self care. More than once, I’ve found myself in the position where I need to construct a community for myself from scratch. I’m by no means an exemplar of wellness and mental health, nor will all of these work for other Third Culture Kids inundated by grief and piercing homesickness. I get it man, it hurts. This is what I’ve done to lift that small, but heavy burden of “being back”. 

Hold Onto Home(s). 

Mementos are important when you have to leave so much behind. I keep two One Hundred Thousand Rupiah bills in my wallet. I also wear Jordanian jewelry and have several travel-themed tattoos. I’ve held onto certain things over the years, because traveling for fifteen years has changed me to my skin. For years, I had exactly 50 pounds worth of clothes because that’s the weight limits for suitcases on all major airlines. I was never allowed to buy hardcover books because they were too heavy. So I held onto the smaller things. By holding onto small bits of homes, I can still honor their importance to me in how I present myself to the world. 

Honesty

The most recent time I moved back to America, I made the choice to stop dodging questions and outright lying. I’ve embraced radical honesty whenever I tell my story. Yeah, my childhood was really fucking cool and weird. Yeah, I think you’re an asshole for asking me that insensitive, xenophobic question about living in a majority Muslim country. And yeah, none of my pop culture references are remotely timely and I have several clarifying questions about which driving laws are applicable here. For years, I was told to not brag about how I was raised. This permuted into never speaking honestly about my childhood and these once-in-a-lifetime adventures I was in. I couldn’t ask questions. I couldn’t share. I felt stuck. I had stories to tell and didn’t know if anyone would listen or understand. Not anymore. 

Habitat

I always felt like my bedroom was one of the few places I could control. Everytime I had to camp out in someone guest room or couch during family vacations, I was miserable. It wasn’t until I read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own that I was able to put a source to that quiet, transient unhappiness. Set up your room. Don’t sit around surrounded by boxes. Smelly, dusty cardboard boxes that just came out of your shipment will only serve as a reminder that you moved. Again. Your bedroom is one of the few places that you can control. Make it an oasis. 

Habit

It’s really easy to get discombobulated when nothing looks the same anymore. Reading and writing are thrown into question depending on the location of the new move. Jetlag has you up and wanting lunch at 2 AM. Everything is different, so it’s vital that you stay the same. Keeping to a regular schedule, whether it’s Sunday night Game of Thrones or Thursday evening yoga brings a semblance of normalcy back. Fall back into routines and habits that remind you of the life’s little pleasures.

Homecooking

Every time I would fly home, I would call my grandma with a grocery list the size of my arm. I wanted corn dogs, Dr. Pepper, Reese, bacon and all of the delicious, American things I couldn’t get at home. Being the enabling angel that she was, she’d buy every single item just for me. Food is a big deal in our house. And even when I was home in California, I would still crave bits and bites of Asia. I used to have friends and family flying from Indonesia smuggle big bags of Indomie for me. My mother regularly smuggled ten to twelve pounds of bacon into Jordan with a Trader Joe’s bag and a bunch of bras. Every Third Culture Kid I know, returned or not, absolutely treasures food from past homes. It’s the easiest way to return because it’s a bite full of memory every time. So, eat. Especially if a grandma made it for you. 

When people ask me, “So, are you happy to be back?” I cringe. It’s second only to the dreaded, “Where are you from?” It’s so innocuous but loaded with presumptions about where I’ve been, how I’m coping with the transition, and if my surroundings have changed too. So, no. I am not happy to be back. Too much has happened; too much has changed. I am, however, happy to be here, however challenging it may be. Staying in one place is hard enough as it is, but being present can occasionally feel impossible. I am a Third Culture Kid, and we are a flighty bunch. I still suffer from itchy feet every 2-3 years. I’m always happy to be here at home, but who says home has to be only one place?