”You're American”

Where do you belong when every answer feels only partly true? In this solo episode of The Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli explores the world of adult third culture kids, or ATCKs: people who grew up between their parents' culture and the culture of the country where they lived and formed a third culture of their own. Diana shares what happened when she moved to Gstaad in 2002 and her neighbors called her American, even though her father was Swiss and she grew up steeped in Swiss tradition. Belonging in the valley, she learned, was based on lived experience rather than blood or passport. Even other Swiss people were foreigners there. She also responds to a video warning Black Americans that moving to an African country may not deliver the sense of home they expect and explains why that pull toward somewhere else is so familiar to her from recovery, where it's called "pulling a geographical." You'll learn how to recognize when you're hoping a new place will solve an internal problem and how to build what Stephen Covey called a changeless core: the one thing that crosses every border intact. If you've ever felt like you belong everywhere and nowhere at once, this episode was made for you. Chapters (00:00:05) - You're American but You Don't 'Fit' in Your Country