Like We Belong Nowhere

Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Dressler, Margaret
- Area of Honors:
- English
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Thesis Supervisor
Claire Mary Colebrook, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Identity
Home
Self
Coming of Age
Rootlessness
Third Culture Kid
Nonfiction
Memoir - Abstract:
- The foundation for this project is and always has been understanding, in the sense of understanding myself and bringing others in. When I moved to Penn State in the summer of 2019, I left behind me a life spent mostly in Palestine and Germany. I was scared, overwhelmed, and deeply alone. I wanted to be able to read someone else’s stories and see that I was not alone in the alienation I felt, but I couldn’t find what I was looking for. Three years later, this core desire led me to compose three essays, each encapsulating a different aspect of life as a Third Culture Kid. After reading the beginnings of one of my essays, a close friend said, “Your writing sounds like you’re just trying to get people to understand. You’ve had this life that’s different from so many people’s, and it can be hard to understand, but it’s like even a little bit of understanding is enough for you, and that’s why you write.” The idea had never occurred to me, but as soon as she said it, I saw the truth in it. To be understood and to understand myself, others, and the world I live in are some of my greatest desires. My adviser for this project, Dr. Julia Kasdorf, observed that the lenses through which I look around me are sadness, an inability to look away, and curiosity, which lead me to inquiry through writing. I don’t write because I have answers but because I have questions. My hope is that through these essays, my curiosity will inspire others to ask questions too. To begin, I want to lay out a timeline that plots the locations of my life. Born in New York. Three years in a church parsonage in Pennsylvania. An apartment in Palestine. Another apartment in Palestine. A third Palestinian apartment. Seven months in Pennsylvania. Back to the third apartment. A new apartment in the West Bank. Off to New York for one year that turns into two. Back to the West Bank. A new apartment in Jerusalem. Two years of hell on earth. A boarding school in Germany for a year. The rest of my family moves to a house in Germany. A few months after that, on to a different house in Germany. High school graduation. Eleven days. Penn State. Pandemic. My aunt's house. Germany. Penn State. Germany. My aunt’s house. My grandparents’ house. Helping my family move to Pennsylvania for one year. Penn State. Moving my family back to Germany. Penn State. I grew up as a Third Culture Kid, or TCK, someone who has parents or a parent from one cultural background but who is raised in another, such as the children of military personnel, diplomats, migrant workers or missionaries. As a result, the child cannot fully identify with the first or second culture completely and forms a third cultural identity, frequently an amalgamation of the cultures that have influenced them. For TCKs who grow up outside of their passport countries, transience is usually a key feature of life. An often-confusing sense of cultural identity results in issues that surface as the TCK becomes an adult, such as depression (Habeeb), a sense of belonging nowhere (Phoenix), difficulty in finding a clear identity amidst complex cross-cultural upbringing (Abe), and a need to share and feel seen and understood by peers, which is a difficult process (Cranston). The first essay, “TCK by Maggie Dressler,” is inspired by “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid. Since the first time I read that piece, I have loved the way that Kincaid conveys the essence of growing up as a girl through such a short and seemingly simple mode of writing by listing the expectations placed on the narrator almost like punches. I emulate that effect by writing about the finer details of my own life in a way that is not only descriptive of my experiences but, I hope, also resonates with other TCKs. Though we may not have lived each other’s exact lives, in each other’s company, we tend to form a kinship of depth, rooted in asking the same questions that reflect a childhood spent in global motion. This piece is for me. It is also for them. The second, “My Identity Is Disputed Territory” explores my Palestinian upbringing in greater detail. When I started writing it, my intention was to explain my cultural identity to my classmates and friends. What I did not expect was to embark on the personal journey that began once I found a metaphor for my cultural identity by way of a memory from Palestine. Without revealing too much here, I realized that perhaps it is not a coincidence that I often feel so at war with my identity given that I grew up surrounded by one of the most complex global conflicts of all time. I want to mention that I read James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” while working on this essay, and while his experience as a Black man visiting a Swiss village whose residents had never seen someone who looked like him is something I could never understand, the concepts his story touches on relate to my own experiences, and his processing helped me to do my own. The third and final piece to this project, “(Some of) My Shamokin Stories,” is the result of a personal investigation of the town where my parents grew up. The small, central Pennsylvania town is old and it feels like it is dying, and yet, many people take pride in it. I wrote this essay as a way of trying to understand how people feel about their hometowns, my parents’ relationship to the place they grew up in but no longer consider home, and my own position in the midst of all of that as someone who has never had a town to call home. It gives an outsider’s perspective on something that I feel requires an insider’s point of view to understand, but I brought my muddled emotions and observations together to try to parse out how I feel about Shamokin. I said it earlier and I want to reemphasize it: I hope you gain something new from reading this collection. These essays are packed with so much personal processing for me that it took me the many months it took to create them to get comfortable with the idea that these words would soon be in the hands of others, but I think I’ve finally made peace with the idea. That’s not to say that I’m not still afraid; I am, but I’m also ready to continue the journey ahead of me. Thank you for coming along.