Freshman year can be a hard transition for any TCK, but when your parents also repatriate, it makes the transition harder. This week Josh Nacy shares his experience of moving and transitioning to university.

I was walking around Washington DC with some acquaintances from university when we happened to pass by a Day of the Dead altar. I had forgotten that it was the night of October 31st. Abruptly, I stopped to observe the marigolds, food, incense, and mourning. The solemn scene made my eyes water, though I would have blamed it on the wind. As I stood there, watching the family both grieve and uphold their cultural identity in a foreign land, I thought of my struggle with cultural identity in exile and grief.
Exile
Exile can be defined as a period of absence from one’s country or home, whether voluntary or forced. It was a term I had found much solace in, as there’s ambiguity in what my home or country is and whether my absence from it was voluntary. My parents had been missionaries in Mexico for twenty-something years before moving to Texas a month before my freshman year at Cairn University. In typical TCK fashion, I was unsure whether Mexico or the United States was truly my home; moving to Texas was not a decision I could control.
Standing in front of the altar, I found myself somewhere in that definition, exiled from a home I could not place on a map, unsure if I wanted to return. Mexico felt like my home country. I thought of everything I had loved there, everything lost when my family moved to Texas and I went to college.
Isolation
The Pennsylvania winter at Cairn University was dreadfully cold. It was the first time I had seen snow in the seven years since my family furloughed in Michigan. The sun would set at 4:30 pm, and the light would disappear by 5. My dorm was dull and far quieter than any place I had lived before. The Mexican flag I hung on the wall felt sorely out of place. I felt sorely out of place. The Mid-Atlantic culture of the state felt to me colder and impersonal than that of Mexican culture. I found it challenging to make friends with my American peers; their backgrounds and experiences felt fundamentally different than mine. Other TCKs were on campus, but hardly any were from Latin American countries. The more I tried to open myself up to American culture and customs, or other international ones, the more I missed the comfortable familiarity of Mexican culture. The more I tried to fit in, the more I realized how much I didn’t. There seemed to be an insurmountable wall between myself and everyone around me. Everything from the expression of faith to the volume of conversation to how friendships are made and conducted was different in America. Whenever I acted incorrectly in these foreign situations, I was reminded I was an outsider. I was reminded that neither Pennsylvania nor America was home. I didn’t quite belong here. The prolonged process of leaving and losing the country, culture, and people I knew brought numbness.
I escaped in my mind to the place that felt most like home.
You could see Popocatépetl and Iztaccihuatl, two volcanoes, from the roof of our house. The sun would set behind them, painting the sky a shade of dark yellows and oranges. Perhaps there was a pillar of smoke rising from Popocatépetl’s vent. I held a cup of chocolate champurrado, a corn-flour-based Mexican drink, in my hands, taking in the view. I would close my eyes and take in the sounds of the city, the traffic, construction, and neighbors yelling, sounds that would lull me to sleep. Yes, it was home, at least more than any other place I had ever lived.

Grief
With no one around me with whom I felt culturally comfortable, I found comfort in isolation and eventually, oddly, grief and contemplating loss. With that move from Mexico, I lost a significant portion of my life with no opportunity to reestablish it. I was forced to grieve in airport lounges and bare bedrooms, to now find myself in this cold place expecting to fall apart irreparably. Instead, I found myself foggy-eyed, accepting the hurt without a struggle, rationalizing my experience. I thought the move was a fact to be reckoned with, not needing an emotional reaction.
And yet, after weeks of that numbness, the loss that I needed to grieve found me. Everything that I expected loss and grief to be had been wrong. Was I to only grieve on the days leading up to the move and while I watched Mexico City disappear below me? I realized that six months later, sitting in my college dorm room, I was still grieving. Moving was not just a fact, but it carried deep loss. Grief is peculiar. It perseveres alongside someone, unfading. Transition required me to hurt and to grieve and to actually acknowledge this pain in order to fully close that chapter of my life in preparation to succeed in the next. Grief was a necessary component of the transition. It allowed me to adjust to America.
Though its flavor has changed, I can still fully taste the grief of transition. Yes, it was bitter, as I had expected, but it also brought a sense of fondness and warmth. I know its bitterness intimately. I learned that accepting grief by acknowledging the loss helped me not be crushed under the weight of carrying it. I trust God through the pain caused by loss, knowing those losses fundamentally shaped me into who I am today.

Josh Nacy is a TCK who lived overseas in Mexico for 18 years and now resides in Pennsylvania. He also holds citizenship from America and Canada; all cultures have fundamentally shaped who Josh is a person and a writer. He has always enjoyed writing and seeks to share his experiences, faith, and what he has learned as a TCK and now, as an American.
You can find Josh on Instagram at @josh.nacy