Since I was born and raised in Seoul, Korea for the first eighteen years of my life, my identity originally fit quite neatly in the category of ex-pat.
At some point during my adult life, sociologists created a new and more specific label of “third culture kid”, which acknowledged the fact that children growing up internationally have a cumulative experience of influence that is not as simple as just their culture of origin or the original culture of the place in which they live.
More recently, I coined another term related to this kind of life experience:
“invisibly international”.
This category is broader, because there are a lot of ways to become a person who’s been influenced by experiences and relationships outside of your “home” culture.
Maybe you were born in another country.
Maybe you speak more than one language.
Maybe you married somebody from a different culture.
Maybe you worked for awhile in a different part of the world from where you were born.
If you are an “invisibly international” person, then you’re invited to participate in some zoom gatherings that I host for people like us.
They might qualify as kindred spirits.
They might be pondering some of the same questions as you.
Who YOU are as an individual is the result of so many interesting variables:
places
people
past experiences
perceptions (of others, as well as your own)
purposes
and plenty of others, of course.
Who WE are as “invisibly international” individuals, also creates some very interesting human patterns.
As the saying goes, it’s a small world. And fantastic surprises tend to happen when people like us get together.