A Snippet from my Summer Journal

Sunday, July 29, 2013
Switzerland

This past week has been so confusing. Just the feeling of wishing I was in Cambodia with my dad while wanting to stay here forever is totally overwhelming. I mean, how can it be possible to want to be in two places at the exact same time?

I feel so torn.

It feels like summertime is always the time that I'm counting days. The number of days until I go to Switzerland, the number of days until I go to kids camp, the number of days until I can go shopping in Bern again... But now, they're the different kind of days I'm counting. The kind of days you count with sadness and the inevitable feeling of regret in your heart instead of the usual excitement and anticipation.

I don't like this kind of counting. 

It makes me feel as though I have to say goodbye again, even if it is just for a little while. I hate goodbyes. I don't want to be doing this yet. I don't want to be counting the days until we have to leave this place. It's my favorite country in the world, but I know that it's only my temporary home for now - and that's the thought that stinks.

As a TCK, you're always told that you're super lucky because you get to see more of the world than other people. That may be true. I get to see a lot of different countries, see a lot of things, make a lot of friends.

But the thing is, as a TCK, the country in the world that you most want to visit is usually the furthest away from you, and that's where normal people have the advantage. 

We TCKs may know about many different cultures, but normal people know a lot about one culture. And in the end, that can seem pretty comfortable to someone who doesn't know what it's like to be so familiar with a single place or group of people. We TCKs may participate in a lot of different things, but we rarely ever get to participate in something that we can guarantee will actually last. 

Everything eventually stops with us. 

It's as simple as that. Every move and every change transforms our lives, and after a while we start to wonder what it's like to have a real place to call home, a real life that doesn't change so much. For us, it's either overly easy to grow roots but then also easy to lose them again, or just completely impossible to grow roots in the first place.

I don't regret being a TCK. I know that my life is a beautiful, amazing thing, and I'm incredibly thankful for all the things I've seen and heard and done.

The only regret I do have, though, comes with realizing that, out of all the countries that I got to know in my lifetime, I never had the chance to get to know my home.