Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] You're american June 8, 2026 Diana early the Pressures of Privilege When I first moved to Gstad in 2002, my neighbors would make comments like, you're American even though they knew I was Swiss. My father was Swiss by birth. His ancestors were Swiss.
[00:00:26] What they didn't know was that I had grown up visiting my grandparents, eating Swiss food, listening to Gross Papa play folk songs on the accordion, and having discussions at mealtime about what it meant to be Swiss.
[00:00:38] My grandparents made me feel very loved and I wrote about this back in 2023.
[00:00:43] Friends recently sent me a video by Brandon Lehman. In it, he warns black Americans that moving to an African country may not deliver the racial solidarity or sense of home they expect.
[00:00:56] He talks about exploitation, differential pricing, difficulty of belonging before making a closing pitch for Appreciating America. The video reminded me of what adult third culture kids atcks go through.
[00:01:11] Atcks grow up between their parents culture and the culture of the country where they live. And out of that in between existence, they form a third culture of their own. It is why we can feel that we belong everywhere and nowhere.
[00:01:29] The pain of not knowing where we belong and where home is is real. We often imagine that things will be better somewhere else. Addicts do this too. In recovery. We call it pulling a geographical relocating in the hope that a new place will solve an internal problem.
[00:01:45] As Jon Kabat Zinn put it, wherever you go, there you are.
[00:01:50] Every country, town and local club has its own version of who belongs and who does not.
[00:01:57] Sometimes it's racism, sometimes it is xenophobia.
[00:02:01] Sometimes it is class, culture, language, religion, ancestry, or simply having been born somewhere else.
[00:02:08] A person from Zurich can feel like an outsider in Gstaad. A black American arriving in an African country may discover that shared skin color does not erase profound cultural differences.
[00:02:22] Moving back to my father's country, the place where I spent the first two years of my life, taught me that people who didn't grow up in the valley were essentially foreigners that included other Swiss people.
[00:02:35] Belonging there was based on lived experience, not blood or a passport.
[00:02:40] Being an adult third culture kid or an atck is hard. Where do I belong?
[00:02:47] I still wonder.
[00:02:49] I feel most at home with other ATCKs or with people in 12 step rooms. They are like me. I feel less judged and less required to explain myself.
[00:03:01] The dog walking group I joined in Lausanne was made up entirely of expats. It was the closest thing to home.
[00:03:08] I'm also a member of an expat addiction support group. It is the best of both worlds that's why I love cities like Lausanne, Boston and New York. They are full of foreigners, immigrants and people whose identities cannot be explained with one hometown. These places have a particular energy. You don't have to explain yourself.
[00:03:30] America at its best offers something similar.
[00:03:34] It is a country continually shaped by people who come from somewhere else.
[00:03:38] One of the great things about being American is the possibility of reinvention. People care less about where you were born than about what you'll make.
[00:03:49] There is a limit to reinvention, though. You still need a core. As Cuffey put it, people can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them.
[00:04:00] The core is what allowed me to survive all the moving.
[00:04:04] It was the one thing that crossed every border intact.
[00:04:08] I may never completely answer the question of where I belong.
[00:04:12] All I can tell you is that whenever I hear yodeling, tears start welling.
[00:04:20] If this episode landed for you, share it with someone who might need to hear it. And if you haven't already, subscribe so you don't miss what's coming.
[00:04:29] But here's the real thing. I want you to know if you're carrying something you can't talk about, if you have every resource except someone who actually understands what wealth costs. I work one on one with people like you navigating exactly that. You can reach me@diana oehrli.com thanks for listening.
