Nostalgia and Third Culture Kids
The trouble with nostalgia and the concept of home for third culture kids
The first memory I have is of falling.
Scraping my knees bloody and gathering my first scars. I remember the first scent — cheap perfume my classical singing teacher wore. The first kiss on a stairway. First feeling of rage as someone picked on my sister. First promise made to my mother. First loss at the passing of my dog. First (incredulous moment of) love at first sight across a crowd.
None of them have form, taste or colors. They’re soft. Afterthoughts. Intangible, faint, comforting.
Nostalgia isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Raking up memories leave a bittersweet taste given the traveling childhood I had (the years since — 11 cities and four countries — only giving it further affirmation). I came to convince myself that unresolved grief was not uncommon of losing people when you were moving homes every couple of years. Over time, I grew increasingly averse to trips down memory lane as the dish often offered up was way past its sell-by date. Languishing in a past laced with a romantic legacy of what was or what could be, exhausted me and left me barely functional. The experience was that of a passenger, neither my present self or my goals, propelling the adventure.
People come, people go, I thought at sixteen when I found myself, backpack on shoulder, head buried under a hoodie too big, surrounded by snow that left me far less cold than the one gripping my insides, waiting on a bus that took me to a school in Midwest Ohio… that was just faces. Faces I craved to find familiarity with.
The ability to get over people and situations quickly was one of the necessities of childhood, teenage years and 20-some years. I was at home everywhere and nowhere. All at the same time.
Home was always elsewhere, and a sense of rootedness at any point of geography was unknown. I’d come to adjust, survive and succeed, but the sense of “place” was elusive.
Call it a sad coping mechanism of a six year-old, or a Third Culture Kid causality — it kept things simple and allowed for sanity.
Year after year, friend after friend, places replacing more places, I found all I ever granted myself was limbo — but not as far from inferno as I had hoped. I remember returning to India at 23. It was unlike anything I was prepared for. It was not the same country I had left, neither did it have the people I had attested to memory. Maybe the accelerated rate of change in physical spaces, social norms, and family expectations were at odds with the whimsical memories I carried from my younger years.
People come, people go.
So cliché, and this feeling only got stronger, making me feel older and far more cynical than my age demanded. Time, I mused, was silent and indifferent to people like me. People like me. Third culture kids. Belonging to experiences and people, not homes, or a passport. And we were desirous of collecting experiences 24/7, 365 days to match the frequency of movement — a remnant in our formative years.
But more importantly: somehow we belonged to each other. The few rare instances we ran into each other, our conversations find the closest definition of a home. Our pasts filled with events, people, and places, find common ground and for a moment, we didn’t feel as foreign in your own skin. We weren’t alone in our obsessive need to collect experiences 24/7, 365 days to find semblance.
Outside of these interactions, “home” continues to be elsewhere. In between such encounters that we can only define as serendipitous, we often long to get to the other place in order to feel at home. The need to change up places every few months, or keep challenging our day-to-day for something more, haunts our nights.
There’s always a homesickness for something we don’t even know exists.
