Belonging Beyond Borders: How Adult Third Culture Kids Can Cultivate a Sense of Belonging
Third Culture Kids (TCKs) have typically spent a significant part of their upbringing crossing cultures. Their experiences can make it challenging to find, form, and sustain a sense of belonging to place and to people. Belonging Beyond Borders supports the journey of Adult Third Culture Kids in unpacking what it means to belong in their multiple communities: personal, professional, familial, cultural, spiritual. I include questions and self-reflection exercises that invite readers to get curious about how to belong, where to belong, and why to belong.
Using analogies from the garden, I create imagery for readers to explore patterns in belonging and opportunities for belonging. As an Adult TCK, I personally share in a deeply spiritual and cultural way how I have navigated and grown in belonging to people and to place. In a polarized world, my desire is that this book offers love and encouragement about how to see and bridge differences.
I wrote this book because I have observed that young Adult TCKs can struggle with feelings of restlessness, rootlessness, and not belonging. I want to provide some language and reflection exercises for TCKs to explore these feelings. I hope that this book serves as an invitation for readers to interact with and respond to who they are as a person, as a local and global citizen, and as an individual who has had the TCK experience. I hope this book provides some additional language to describe the many ways we can belong to ourselves and to others and to the places we have called - or continue to call - home.
What People Are Saying
“In the most lovely way, Megan Norton is inviting all to find a new way of discovering and naming our identity. Her model doesn’t wait for the others to name us, but through the beautiful language and metaphors she uses, we are challenged first to consider how we have been naming ourselves or allowing others to name us. Through reflective and meditative pieces, we are then invited to places of self-discovery and helpful reflection.”
“This is a wonderful contribution to the work out there for TCKs! I love that TCKs can self direct through this and I feel like it reads well to older TCKs as well as college age. The issues you touch on I’m working with in clients in their 50s and 60s too. I really appreciate the self-reflection prompts… they are great journaling guides as well as more structured worksheets and I can see them being of so much use to TCKs in applying theory to their own lived realities.”
"The chapters' self reflection exercises are practical, helpful, and beneficial to your reader. It’s clear you are a good teacher :)!"
“Megan writes with endless love and concern for TCKs, and with a huge amount of courage and vision for their personal development challenges and needs. Her compassion combines with care that offers practical insights into living into the selves and the stories that we want, inviting the kind of authorship and ownership that so many of us need.”
“It’s fresh, it’s lovely, it is accessible, it is true, and it is good! It is nice to read something that adds lots of new things to the basics…a million folks are writing about transition, but this is the first book I have seen so clearly outline belonging and I love that you are unabashedly Christian, yet folks from any religious background can read and not feel pressured…that is not easy to do and this may be one of the gifts of you not being an MK [missionary kid]…but you are definitely being salt and light.”
"I needed this book and I'm sure you know first hand the amount of people this book will help. It's important and needed and I'm grateful for it.”