It is a lovely sunny fall day. As I was sitting on my porch having my morning coffee I thought, “I will miss this”. I will miss my porch and my view. But will I?

I write about places I have lived and I love reconnecting with old friends but have I ever actually missed anyplace?

It has been hard to leave places but the hard part was saying goodbye to friends. It wasn’t the city or the house. When I arrived at my new home in my new city I never wished I was back where I came from.

I am a person who lives in the present. Being a TCK forces you to do that. I become so involved in my new place, trying to fit in, meet new people, find my way around, understand language and culture, I don’t have time to pine for the past.

When I left Colombia I cried all the way from Bogota to Miami. By the time I got to London I was living my new life. Eating gammon steak, gawking at the Beefeaters, loving the theater. When I finally arrived in Lagos, Nigeria, my final destination, I was in such culture shock all my energy went into survival. How to cope in such a strange place. There were no familiar things to relate to, nothing to compare. I had to immerse myself in the present.

The reality is you can’t go back. The unique set of circumstances that made up your life in that point of time will not be the same. Everything will have changed. The city, the people, the house. The experience will be different. After leaving Mexico I went back a couple of times to visit. My neighbors had moved, my friends had moved on, the city had grown. I saw some familiar sites but I was now a visitor, a tourist. The whole dynamic had changed.

I left Minnesota 25 years ago. Since then I have lived in Florida, Washington DC, Moscow, and Virginia. I have lived in 12 different apartments. I don’t miss any of them. I see this move as going back to the future. I don’t expect it to be anything like my previous life in Minnesota. I will be learning about a new place and meeting new people. Some of it will be familiar but much of it will not be. I don’t expect it to be. I don’t want it to be.

When I first moved to Minnesota I didn’t know anything about Third Culture Kids. I was fresh out of college where I had a difficult time adapting to my home country. I didn’t understand why people reacted to me the way they did. When I went for job interviews in Minneapolis, I thought I would bring something special to the table. I clearly could get along with all kinds of people, I was well educated, I was smart. But when the interview was over they would say, “Are you going to finally settle down and stay in one place for a while?”. I didn’t understand the question. What difference did it make?

As I adjusted to Minnesota culture I realized that it was another foreign country. Most people had lived there their whole lives, few people had done much traveling. Although it was a progressive state, many people were conservative. I learned to bury my past even deeper and watched a lot of TV so I would have something to talk to people about.

When we left Moscow, we went to Minnesota and tried to find work. It was right after 9/11 and people were scared. When they saw on my resume that I had lived overseas for the past 9 years, they didn’t want anything to do with me. That is how I ended up in Washington DC.

Minnesota is a much more diverse place these days with large Liberian and Hmong populations. I am also armed with the fact that I know much more about myself. I know how to use my TCK-ness to an advantage without scaring people off. I know I will still be different and there will be people who think I’m odd but it doesn’t bother me anymore. Plus I have lived in the same place for the past 12 years so that should show them I can stick it out.

Starting over at my age in never easy, but who said life is easy?

I might miss my sunny porch on dark winter days…. but probably not.