The freedom of being a third-culture kid

If you visited my personal Web site anytime over the last two years, you would have seen my grinning photograph with a large blue subhead: "Returning to the United States has shown me -- once again -- that I am simultaneously at home and out of place in any country."
It's time for the photograph and subhead to go and for an updated site to take their place. But the realization behind that subhead hasn't changed.

I'm what they call a "third-culture kid," born in Karachi, raised in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. I've bounced around so much as a child and now voluntarily as an adult that I feel like I belong in several places at once. This can be both good and bad. It means you get stingier at entering deep friendships because you know you'll be gone soon. It means you lose touch with friends once you do move. It means people ask where you're from, and you never have a clear answer. It means people question your accent, and your customs, and never really believe you're one of them.

But it also means you have more friends, in more places, and the ones you stay in touch with tend to be more meaningful and interesting to you. It means you learn flexibility and adaptability and recognize the similarities between things as much as the differences. It means your accent is an intriguing mix of countries and regions, and that you know slang words nobody else does. It means your customs are your own because you can choose which ones to keep, which ones to discard and which ones to adopt.

Soon, the way of life your parents showed you as a child starts to become your choice as an adult.

A third-culture kid like me feels lucky to be a journalist. I'm supposed to be an observer, standing slightly apart to report on what I see and hear. Comes pretty naturally, really. Reporting exposes me to diverse settings and people and lets me move from place to place, literally and figuratively, and satisfies my wanderlust. I'm more likely to understand and anticipate -- and hold equally true -- the different points of view to a story. It's a skill I draw on everyday within my own multicultural family. With every reporting assignment, as with my personal life, I am confronted with such variety that I feel at ease and out of place all at once.

I wouldn't have it any other way. As a third-culture kid, I have the freedom to rediscover my world, over and over.