Life of a TCK

I will admit, part of the reason I'm writing about life as a TCK, is
due the fact that I have no idea what else to write about so this just seemed like something someone would be interested in.

So for those of you who don't know, I'm a third culture kid (duh, you should know that. I mean seriously, I have it posted like everywhere and use every moment I have to rub it in your face).
A TCK is a person who has grown up anywhere but their actual country of origins or someone who has lived in multiple countries. For myself, my passport country is the US, but I've lived in Thailand for ten of my eighteen years. TCKs are more commonly found in military families, missionary families, kids of diplomats,
and others. Pretty simple right?
I don't want to say that my family is any different from any other TCK's, but mine is a little strange. I didn't actually realize how weird my family was until my brother, Matt (the Matt I mentioned in my last post about Land and Freedom) joined the military and had to give details about his family (you know stuff like that, to make sure no one is in leagues with terrorists or anything).
Let me give you a little bit of detail about my life; me and my brothers are half Filipino and half American, my sister is adopted and really my cousin so she's full Filipino. I was born in Japan while my brothers were born in Utah. My sister in law is French and my brother in law is American. And my sister and her husband live in Japan. And of course before I forget, me and my parents live in Thailand.

So extremely short story of my life. So before my parents decided to become missionaries and move to Thailand, my dad was an air traffic controller for the United States Air Force. And that's the reason why I was born in Japan, because my dad was stationed there for several years. I don't remember much about Okinawa, Japan since we moved to Florida before my second birthday. I lived in Florida for roughly around five years until we moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand a month before I turned eight.
When I went back to the States four years later, family friends in Florida asked me and my family what it was like to be 'home'. 'Home'... that word is the hardest for a lot of TCKs to define. To me and my brothers, Florida isn't home. It just isn't. I don't have many memories of the States being 'home'. To me Thailand is home. But in other ways it kind of isn't. I've been an outsider my entire time in Thailand. Because of my white features, I'm always considered the foreigner. My brother Josh (yes, the borderline hipster one), gave the perfect definition of being a TCK, "When I'm in Thailand I feel like a foreigner, but when I'm in the States I feel so Asian." That pretty much sums it up. I fortunately haven't gotten the chance to really feel like this yet, but we'll see next year when I return to the States.

Growing up in Thailand, being bi racial, and being born in Japan has made me quite a confused child. My dad once told me he was surprised when he had heard that my brother, Josh had gone through an identity crisis. To that I chuckled and told my dad that all of kids have gone through at least a small identity crisis at least once in our lives. Being a TCK is extremely confusing and we get confused on what we are and where we come from.

Link to a short film about TCKs: http://vimeo.com/41264088