Child of the World

Hi Tiny Toes and Tuk Tuk readers! I’m Casey from True Colours, a travel blog that encompasses my passion for seeing the world and documenting my trips and travel tips for everyone with a little wanderlust in their hearts!  I do a lot of traveling, both for work and for pleasure but it was my childhood overseas that installed my passion for travel in my heart.  I'm so excited to be guest posting here today as this is a topic that Erika knows about well.

I grew up as an expat kid in the Middle East and as a Third Culture Kid, I spent many years trying to figure out my place in the world.  I have written a few different posts about my experiences as a TCK on my blog if you're interested, but my goal when writing about my experiences is always to take down the veil on expat kids, to help others understand what we go through, to help parents raise Third Culture Kids and for the TCK's themselves to know that while the road isn't easy, it's beyond extraordinary.  

As Erika knows, raising a Third Culture Kid can be difficult.  I myself, lived through it.  I spent a good 10 years of my life through my teenage years searching the world for a place to call home, and even while I had a steady suburban American home as a teenager, something was constantly missing.  No one around me understood what I felt, that I had lost a piece of me when we returned to the States, that the typical American life wasn't what I wanted or needed.  It was those years searching for what "home" truly meant to me that propelled me forward to take charge of how I wanted to live my life after college.  It was those years that I realized that I didn't want my adult life to be narrowed down by the typical standards of American society.  I wanted to travel again, I wanted to spend time around the world, I wanted to place myself as a child of the world, with no particular country or allegiance, but a person working to see new places and experience life in so many different cultures.

Now, when I look back, I see how much my expat years and my background as a Third Culture Kid have shaped me.  I am American, but I'm also a little bit Arab, along with a little bit French, a little bit English and all those other cultures that have shaped over the years.  Each place I visit, each country that calls my name, becomes a part of me now.  And in the end, I've realized that being a Third Culture Kid isn't a burden, it's a blessing.  I hold on to places more than those that aren't TCK's because I've learned over the years that places can really shape you, they can hold you when nothing else can and places can make a real mark upon your soul.  For me, I've had life changing experiences around the globe, moments when I take in a place and realize that it's because of my background, it's because of the years and years of searching for my place in the world, that now I can take it all in, now I can appreciate each place and hold it within me.  I've found after years of searching that one place to call home for me is not enough and at the end of the day, I'd most certainly rather be a child of the world, seeing new places and finding a little bit of home in each of them.