By Rachel E Hicks
You could say my life started out risky. A couple of days after I was born, I rode home from the hospital cradled in my mom’s arms—on the back of my dad’s motorcycle. (And I’ve loved being on two wheels ever since.)
A litany of memories runs through my head as I think about the risks of my TCK upbringing:
- the threat of leopards in the Himalayan foothills of my early childhood;
- daring friends over the rail at an alligator pit in the Sindh desert outside Karachi;
- bribing hotel guards in Kinshasa to let a group of us have a picnic in a penthouse undergoing renovation (we may or may not have brought spray paint with us);
- sheltering inside from violence & looting in Kinshasa, followed by an evacuation;
- riding public transportation alone as a preteen/teen in unfamiliar cities;
- and I could keep going…
…And when I keep going, I find myself thinking about risks I’ve allowed in the lives of my own TCK kids:
- driving my electric scooter with my three- and five-year-old wedged in behind me;
- camping and hiking on an island in the Borneo rainforest with young children (and green vipers, and beer-stealing monkeys, and saltwater crocodiles, and who knows what else);
- hiking straight up a slippery mountain in the rain for my kids’ first backpacking trip;
- living in earthquake-prone Sichuan province, China;
- and my mother-in-law probably remembers us telling her more such escapades…
Yet against all this evidence, I don’t consider myself to be someone who is comfortable with risk. Do some situations just seem “normal” to me because of how I grew up, and so I downplay the risk? It’s hard to say. What is “normal,” anyway, especially for TCKs? One thing I do know, though, is that sometimes risk turns into fun, especially when we look back on those memories!
So, in the spirit of risk and fun, I’m excited to share with you all that Among Worlds, the original and longest-running publication for third culture kids and global nomads, is transitioning from a quarterly magazine to our new website home!
Why, you ask? We want to continue to be responsive to the needs of our TCK community. When AW relaunched in 2019 from print to a digital format, we did so to meet the needs of highly mobile and international TCKs, who are scattered all around the globe. While the magazine and AW’s Instagram account (amongworlds) have enjoyed a growing audience, we realize that having much of our content behind a paywall discourages engagement, especially from young adult TCKs (ATCKs).
Among Worlds goes directly to the heart issues many adult third culture kids face: relationships, grief, transitions, home, values, and many more. AW fills a real need by addressing issues that are relevant to ATCKs today, and it “reunites” them with others of similar experience. AW also helps parents, educators, and others to better understand the needs and experiences of the TCKs whose lives they touch daily. Moving our content to a paywall-free website will enable us to interact more with our TCK community and will hopefully foster connections among TCKs. In addition, we are excited to be able to upload all the content from our digital issues to our new blog, making articles easily searchable according to topic.
What about your upcoming issues? Our December 2022 and March 2023 issues will still be available in our beautiful digital magazine format—for FREE—but the content from these two issues will also be simultaneously added to our new online home, amongworlds.com. Our March 2023 issue will be our last digital magazine issue, published on Issuu—all future content will only be in our searchable blog format.
So, will you take this risk with us and join us at our new home? Check us out at amongworlds.com!
You can also always reach out to us via email at amongworlds@interactionintl.org. We’d love to hear from you!
Journeying with you,
