Identity. A daily challange

These are some of the thoughts a client has shared with me in the past months:

“I’m not ready to give up my own life story in order to become fully * or *?, because I am so much more than that. Living in Europe feels so difficult nowadays because the price you’re asked to pay is incredibly high. In the countries where we lived before I was an expat, but local people were willing to interact with me and get to know who I was. Here, people don’t seem interested. You have to live like them, act like them, or you end up with no one to talk to—because you’re ‘too different’ and ‘too complicated’ to deal with. Why? How did it happen that, here, people lose interest in others simply because they’re different? Being different doesn’t mean being less valuable, less intelligent, or less fun. To me, being different means that I can learn from you and you can learn from me. It means finding a middle ground where we can communicate, and maybe discovering common points none of us could have imagined before we started talking and truly listening to each other.”

In the past months, while I was reading No Place Like Home by J. J. Bola, I came across a passage that deeply moved me. I decided to share it with some of my patients because it resonated with moments from our therapeutic sessions:

“Why learn the language? Is it to enjoy the poetry of Chaucer or Keats? Most who speak the language do not even read it. You learn it only for moments of servitude—when you are at work and must follow instructions on how to stack a shelf or clean a toilet, when you are fully capable of calculating quadratic equations or reciting epics in your own tongue. Or is it to be included? So you can clearly understand the hate and prejudice directed at you? Before, when it was only in language, you simply saw it with your eyes; but now you hear it too—worse still, you feel it. And when you do learn it, you’re told to speak it properly; you are constantly reminded of how you do not sound the same…”

Some of the young people were moved to tears because they saw themselves in these words. Others told me that the passage perfectly expressed the emotions they had been carrying for months—and, for some, for years—after returning to the country of origin of one of their parents. Similar thoughts have been shared with me over the years not only by many TCKs, but also by several parents I met during my time abroad. I have read numerous articles and books explaining that one of the main challenges TCKs face in adulthood is understanding their true identity or sense of belonging. I believe this can certainly be true for some of them, though not necessarily for all.

Throughout my experiences abroad, I have met families and young people who feel constrained by the traditional meanings attached to “identity” or “nationality,” especially when parents come from different cultures and countries. When they return to one of their countries of origin, they often struggle with the expectations and pressures placed on them in various ways.

Some of my clients who were raised in different countries refuse to be defined by their parents’ nationalities because these labels do not reflect their personal history. For young people in this situation, having to choose one identity can feel impossible, as if doing so would require them to give up parts of the experiences they have gained in the places where they have lived.

Recently, I read a book by Italian anthropologist Francesco Remotti, L’ossessione identitaria (“The Identity Obsession”), which explores how the notion of identity has been examined across several fields—philosophy, anthropology, and history—in an attempt to understand how European and Western cultures have perceived and interpreted this concept.

In his work, Remotti draws on different studies to show that our identity is in fact constantly evolving. For people who have grown up in a stable and homogeneous social environment—within a single country—it may be harder to recognize this. We are not the same as we were yesterday, and tomorrow we will not be exactly who we are today. Yet we often prefer to ignore this, confusing personal identity with national or cultural identity. When we cling too tightly to these fixed notions, we risk reinforcing divisive and nationalistic ideas that can easily take a harmful turn.

For many young people growing up between cultures, identity—and the difficulties connected to it—does not become a real concern until adolescence. It is only at this stage, when they begin to step outside the “protective sphere” of their parents and start engaging more with the wider world, that this question begins to emerge with intensity and take on real significance in their lives.