BELONGING EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE Vected

The Rise of the Third Culture Adult

- By Giselle Gunewardene

The first time someone asks, "Where are you really from?" it often sounds like curiosity. By adulthood, for many people who have grown up across countries and cultures, it begins to feel like something| else entirely. The question is rarely about geography. It is about legitimacy. It is about whether you fit cleanly into the story others want to tell about you.

For the third culture adult, identity has never been singular. It has been shaped in airports and classrooms, through accents that shift depending on the room, through traditions borrowed and adapted rather than inherited wholesale. These are individuals who grew up between worlds and carried that in betweenness into adulthood. They belong everywhere and nowhere at once.

The term third culture kid was originally used to describe children who spend a significant part of their formative years outside their parents' country of origin. What is emerging now is the long arc of that experience. The third culture adult is not defined by childhood mobility alone but by how that mobility reshapes adulthood. It influences how people form relationships, pursue careers, relate to politics, and understand home.

In a world that prizes global exposure, third culture adults are often admired for their adaptability. They are comfortable with difference. They read rooms quickly. They can move between cultural norms with ease because they learned early that survival depended on it. Many speak more than one language or at least more than one cultural vocabulary. This fluency is often celebrated as sophistication.

Yet adaptability is not the same as belonging.