The Queen has been on everyone’s mind recently. After her passing in September, I joined the millions of other Netflix users in re-watching The Crown. It’s a stunning series, whether you’re a fan of the monarchy or vehemently against them, you can’t argue that The Crown has excellent writers and it is a decadent visual escape.
In one episode, the newly coronated Queen Elizabeth discovers the gap between her education and the education of everyone else around her. She notices the lack of her basic knowledge and is aware of how this gap inhibits her conversations with Prime Ministers, visiting diplomats, and the public in general.
The Queen confronts her mother about her lack of general education. Her mother, taken aback, asks the Queen what she wanted to learn that she hadn’t and the Queen replies ‘I don’t know! I don’t know what I haven’t been taught.’
She is referencing her lack of knowledge about basic maths and science, political relations and anything else that didn’t pertain to the constitution but, I found her words oddly familiar.
Now, maybe it’s a bit rich to try to compare myself to the former Queen of England, and I promise that the comparison won’t go too far, but I also have questioned my lack of knowledge and said, in frustration and desperation ‘I don’t know what I haven’t been taught!’
As a TCK, there are a host of skills I have learned that are unique to the countries I know. For instance, no one else in my friend group (that I am aware of) was required to navigate the airport in Angola, or switch clothes on an airplane from Doha or remember multiple immunisation cards. This all became commonplace knowledge for me. It took up space in my brain where, I suppose, other Western children held space for sports’ teams or neighbourhood games or driving lessons.
Since I traveled far and wide and became familiar with a host of cultures through my parents’ ministry, I believed myself to be well rounded and, in a not so humble sense, exceptionally intelligent. I could speak in several languages, I could code switch for others, I could rearrange my mannerisms depending on the surrounding context to keep myself welcome and safe.
So, it’s not unreasonable to believe, I didn’t think entering the United States would be a challenge.
I rocked up to my West Tennessee university with all the confidence in the world - and it was quickly shattered as I realised the absolute breadth of my stupidity.
Perhaps stupidity isn’t the correct word, although it highlights all the correct sentiments. I was confronted with all the gaps in my knowledge, and let me tell you, they were abundant. While I could navigate international airports without breaking a sweat I couldn’t grasp grocery shopping in a Krogers.
As a side note, I think this is what has made me particularly attached to certain brands in the US. I remember my first solo trip to a store where I carefully picked out snacks that I thought I would enjoy (or that I had seen my peers eat in the library) and I loved most of them. So now, even though I am well aware of better things to eat or enjoy, when I’m back in the US I still crave those first snacks. There’s something very satisfying about savouring a box of Cheezits or a Private Selection ice cream and remembering when I chose that experience for myself because I thought it would be good and I was right.
But, apart from the quick gratification of American snack food, I was way out of my depth. I just didn’t know how much I didn’t know about life in the United States. Since my parents are both American I always assumed there would be some innate knowledge in my bones that would just awaken when I set foot in the US of A. I thought pulling out my best accent, throwing about some general obscure knowledge about history would, somehow, morph me into someone who naturally fit.
It didn’t.
I didn’t fit.
It was painful to me when I realised how much I didn’t fit. Not because I looked or sounded different - often I wish I did because then I would have not have been expected to fit in, but because I look and sound like I could have been raised in the Southern United States, it was a shock and spectacle to others when I betrayed myself and showed my incompetence.
I didn’t know basic university etiquette. I didn’t know that 18 year olds were free to explore the town and go out to eat on Friday nights because my boarding school had always planned events on the weekend to keep us busy.
Tip - don’t ask your professor what events are planned on campus for the following weekends. The professor won’t know, they don’t live on campus, and they will look at you with pity and confusion.
I didn’t understand Western bureaucracy after growing up in countries where bureaucracy is really a loose term, it’s more about who can out-wait the system, who knows who, and who has the patience to learn the mannerisms that will get you a pass. American universities - very much into bureaucracy. You couldn’t exchange money unless you had a specifically stamped piece of paper, notarised it, and took it to a certain branch of your personal bank. Where are the money changers waving their wads of cash to give you the daily deal? Where are the exchange centres in post offices that offer you most foreign currencies with minimal hassle?
The skills I did have - international travel, cultural understanding, knowing what time it was in a different country, how to convert measurements in my head - were all foreign to my classmates and perceived as a bit unnecessary for our age. It was as if I had one foot ten years ahead of my peers in global experience and one foot ten years behind them in life skills since I didn’t have the basic survival instincts that they did.
And all I really wanted was to be standing beside them - with both feet.
I didn’t understand simple things - boxed dinners, Southern passive-aggression, toll roads, store samples. And I embarrassed myself a fair amount of times.
Tip - don’t ask a room full of Tennessee football fans why their team plays for free when they could get paid millions… That’s not what the ‘Tennessee Volunteers’ means.
Often, I was frustrated, embarrassed, and hurt by my own lack of knowledge and by the lack of understanding of others around me. I was frustrated that my boarding school had spent a whole weekend telling me how much I would miss living overseas but they didn’t tell me how stupid I would feel living in my passport country. And no one gave me a 101 course with ‘Here’s all the cultural references and relevant experience you need to know if you were born in 1994, missed everything, and want to survive in university’.
It took a few years before I was able to verbalise to my friends and fiancé that ‘I don’t know what I don’t know, please be patient with me.’ And it took even longer for me to laugh at my inadequate knowledge rather than seethe with embarrassment and resentment.
It continues, even now. I no longer live in the US and I am no longer a student (thank goodness) but my lack of knowledge shows itself constantly. There are huge gaps in my cultural experience that are just not easily explained. While my friends can talk about huge phenomena from their teenage years in the UK, I have no understanding of their discussion, and I don’t have an American event to counter it - I just have a lost piece of time where my existence was entirely based on a boarding school on a mountain with a very niche culture.
At the risk of another Harry Potter reference - actually, no, no risk, Harry Potter is a fantastic piece of literature and if you are a TCK or know a TCK you should read the whole series. Among the themes of loyalty, friendship, kindness, and bravery there is also Harry figuring out how much he doesn't know about the wizarding world - a world he fully belongs to and yet knows very little about. Harry is an inadvertent TCK.
This is particularly noticeable whenever he visits the Weasleys, or when Ron has to explain seemingly everyday things to Harry, like Flu Powder or how the Ministry works. In the final book, Harry and Hermione (more of an expat than a TCK) are confused by references to a few children's stories. Ron is aghast that they've never heard these stories before until Hermione reminds him that she and Harry were raised outside the wizarding world. Their childhoods had very little overlap with those of their peers.
When my mum read that bit of the books out loud my immediate thought was 'I know how they feel.' I too know what it's like to be sitting among my peers, British or American, and to have no understanding of the cultural references flying around me, to have nothing to contribute to the conversation, and to carefully remind them that I was raised in a different country.
And, at times, it is lonely. I think this is why my friendships from boarding school remain as strong as they do - we share so much that no one else understands and we know that we’re anomalies to our peers. We don’t want to burden others with our strange tales of studie and safo and scarfing so we keep the stories amongst ourselves.
I also think this is why I truly love watching the World Cup.* It is a global event that gathers genuine interest and participation. I remember World Cups from my childhood and I can share those memories with my brother in law or my Cambridge friends and they have the same memories of head butting Frenchmen. It’s a rare and valuable find - a shared memory.
TCKs - we don’t know what we don’t know. And that’s okay. Some of us have skills that no one else in our life with ever have. Some of us have caught fish on the top of Mt Kenya, gutted and cleaned it while singing in Swahili. Some of us can navigate immigration queues or high school exams in three different countries without breaking a sweat. Some us have intricate working knowledge of foreign politics and no knowledge of our own constituencies. Some of us have the ability to live and thrive in any country but our own. It’s displacing, frustrating, confusing, and at times, very lonely.
My best advice - learn how to laugh at yourself and your mistakes. I would have saved myself a lot of grief if I hadn’t taken myself so seriously. If I had simply accepted that at seventeen I was leaving everything familiar behind and entering a world where I would be a novice, I would have been able to cope with more levity and less disappointment with myself.
My husband is the one who told me I need to accept I will always be part American, part British, and wholly neither. The more I accept that I will live in a perpetual limbo, half belonging to all my homes and half belonging nowhere, the easier it will be for me to accept the gaps in my knowledge and the more humbly I can tell myself and my friends ‘I just don’t know.’
Learn how to be honest with your friends. First, find friends who will allow you to be honest and who will have a compassionate understanding of what it feels like to be lost and overwhelmed. They might not understand the particulars of being lost in your ‘own’ country or culture, but hopefully they will be understanding when you share how difficult it is to discover how much you really don’t know. Find your Ron Weasley.
Ask your friends and family to remember your background, so that they don't expect your reactions, memories, and opinions to align with their own. Yours won't, because your existence was cultivated in a completely different context. It helps when other people remember that - and it helps if you realise it can be a difficult truth for others to understand.
Being honest with yourself, being generous toward others, and being humble (never easy, always necessary) will mitigate the anger and frustration that comes with being overwhelmed and with feeling stupid.
You are not stupid - you’ve lived a unique life that has required tailored skills - and often those skills don’t fit into a ‘normal’ existence. You need to allow yourself an adjustment period, a time to learn and to grow and to adapt.
You are not alone in needing that. Even the Queen of England needed a tutor and extra lessons in history and literature to help her succeed. Even the wizard who defeated Lord V didn't know the most famous children's tales of his kind.
Please know this, you are not stupid. You just don’t know what you don’t know - and you also have no idea how capable you really are.
* I understand the controversy surrounding the 2022 World Cup and support those who have chosen to boycott it in response to the unethical and inhumane conditions during the stadium's construction.