It’s the end of a contract, an entire summer season. Literally.
When I got here in April, it was snowing – just flurries, but still. Then it got warm, then it got swelteringly hot. Now, a chill is returning to the air, usually burning off by midday. Leaves are slowly starting to turn.
Seasons, theatrical and natural alike, are fertile ground for reflections on the passage of time, the transient nature of the work and also of life, growth, and cycles.
I’m bucking against a familiar feeling, in part because I kind of always am, in part because I’m staring down another ending. It’s the wretched pre-grieving that somehow robs me of both joy for the present and excitement for the future that always comes around this time near the end of something; an anxiety cocktail hangover that is, I think, scientifically proven to feel the same as Capital-G Grief. Transition feels like death. Your body can’t tell them apart.
So I sit here, on a lazy morning before I do a show for the sixth-to-last time, knowing I should be thinking about packing, but instead am writing variations on a theme that’s haunted this little blog since its inception a decade ago. I don’t know how to do this well.
I Googled the term TCK, third culture kid, to try and spin something from its origins and development and make a point about academic research. It’s a slim Wikipedia article. I did, however, learn the term ATCK, Adult Third Culture Kid, which clarifies and expands the research pool and distinguishes my current issues from the ones I had at age twelve.
I scrolled down to the “see also” section, and that’s where I got stuck. Some highlights include:
- Cultural jet lag
- Culture shock
- Existential migration
- Global mobility
- Identity crisis (psychology)
- Social alienation
God bless everyone who has known and will know me between the ages of seven and, I don’t know, maybe eighty-five? What a list.
But I fell down the rabbit hole of those see alsos and read heady philosophical and psychological analyses, research, and statistics.
Go with me here. We’re gonna get academic. I found something really good.
The Wikipedia page titled “Existential Migration,” linked at the bottom of the TCK article, basically summarizes a 2006 journal article by Dr. Greg Madison (which I read in full. It later became a 300-page book that’s on sale right now for $85. I did not read that). It’s a psychological research article, published in the journal Existential Analysis. Functionally, it’s a series of interviews with adults living outside their countries of origin discussing the nature of home, and the complicated emotions that they associate with that choice and all it encompasses. It’s moving to read.
Dr. Madison notes in his abstract that his interviewees are “ultimately grappling with issues of home and belonging in the world generally.” He supplies that this ontologically indicates “alternative understandings of ‘home’, ‘not-being-at-home’, ‘belonging’, which take into account the narratives of these migratory experiences. An example of the conceptual ramifications of this new understanding of voluntary migration is found in the definition of ‘home as interaction’ rather than the usual ‘home as place.’”1
I am, notably, not a member of the group Madison is studying. To borrow some of his terms, migration has always been career-motivated. My parents’, growing up, and now my own. And, technically, his study refers to those who move internationally – I have not done so as an adult. Madison suggests in his work that an application of this area of research is in interdisciplinary studies with people like me, and secondary research into our existential experience.
So none of this is really about me. But I can’t shake the framework itself. I want to unpack the way Madison offers language for elements of my experience. I want to unpack the deep and sprawling teleological and eschatological implications that it has, both as a phenomenon and for me personally and how much I care about that, and how I steward that and practice that and process it.
Perhaps this is the work of my life, exploring the existential homelessness but also deep belonging that permeates nearly every facet of my lived experience. The already but not yet, if you will.
I am not ready to write about all of that here and now.
Mostly, I am relating that to my work – my art, really – that is by nature immediate, embodied, and ephemeral. It is people, onstage and backstage and all around you, who create the moment you experience. All of us have spent hours crafting this for you; in some ways, the individual you. Every audience is different. We feel it. We know. We’re playing pretend professionally, sure, but also, for that ninety minutes or two and a half hours or whatever it is, we are inviting you into the moment. It’s incarnational, if you’ll allow me such a sacred word. We are participating in storytelling together. It’s a gesture of hospitality. It is deeply human. Beautifully, wonderfully so. By definition communal.
And we start from scratch every few months. Every rehearsal, every show, every team, every company is lightning in a bottle. It only ever happens once. You can’t replicate it, hard as you try. It is so fleeting.
It’s a little bit of Madison’s home as interaction. A joke in an early rehearsal, the familiar ribbing and banter in a green room, the quiet buzzing of a house slowly filling before a sleepy matinee, in the anxious/excited energy that peaks at an opening but never totally dissipates.
I was tasked in high school (in a public speaking class, maybe?) to talk about home. A heavy lift from mostly sheltered TCKs. I remember writing about a theater. I don’t remember what I said then; I’m hardly qualified to talk about it now. But there is a moment, every single performance, without fail that captures this spirit. The house lights are dimmed to the halfway point (or not, but that’s splitting hairs). There’s maybe a preshow speech of some kind (“hello, and welcome to this theatre”). There’s a beat. And then, something happens. Maybe the lights change. Maybe music starts playing. Maybe an actor walks onstage. That beat – that second right in between – that feels like home. It’s terrifying, it’s mesmerizing, it is full of so much hope and promise and history all at once. Already but not yet. Home as interaction. Welcome to the story.
Some version of that moment exists in every iteration of a show. Maybe that’s why I keep doing this, show after show season after season, new people every time.
Does that make sense? Am I over rationalizing, trying to justify the whiplash of belonging and loneliness, creativity and despair, comfort and insecurity? Am I making excuses to legitimize my refusal to define home?
I don’t know. I believe it. I love that moment. I’m always thrilled by it. It really does feel like home in one of the truest ways I know how to articulate.
That’s not it, of course. Home is also dinners only my mom makes, the leather of my dad’s old briefcase, my brother fighting me for control of the TV or player one on the Wii or getting to DJ in the car. My grandparents’ Keurig and pretzel jar and recliners and hymnals and the tiny TV that used to be in the kitchen with the puffy tile in the old house. Red clay and calls to prayer and Rittersport in the grocery store, shared on the street headed back to school. The gates of Disney’s Hollywood Studios. My best friend’s sweatshirt on our college dorm room couch.
It’s all home. Or a version of it. And it’s because of the people. Home as interaction. So this is fine. I’m fine. Right?
I also think there’s a part of me that wants to prove that I can white-knuckle my way out of the perpetual grief. Like I can build up a tolerance. If I just keep doing it, it’ll stop hurting, right?
Closing a show I love feels the same as leaving a place I love. Goodbye to co-creators, fellow participants in whatever story we’re telling, feels an awful lot like goodbyes to my first- and second- and fourth- and sixth- and ninth- and twelfth-grade best friends, most of whom I haven’t seen since. The constant renegotiation of myself in relation to a given culture is also, still, exactly the same.
I’m fighting something, but I’m not sure if it’s change, or the fear that things will stay the same or that there’s no such thing as better than this, but the grass is always greener. It’s an anxiety that has reared its head throughout my life, and I just keep taking swings again and again and again.
And sometimes I look up and I’m black eyed and bloody-knuckled and tired. So so tired.
Then what?
The answer is not numbness. It’s not resignation. I have twenty years of evidence. I have – I mean it – the coolest life I could possibly imagine for myself. I have community and am so deeply loved, am a well-adjusted functioning person, have the best job in the world, and also lived 20 minutes away from giraffes and places where Jesus walked and the little French town/quiet village the one in Beauty and the Beast was based on for my growing-up years.
All this – the freaking out about how much there is left to do in so little time and the nagging fear that I won’t do the leaving part right and the freaking out about the future and the next thing – has earned me that. It’s meant wearing holes in the knees of my favorite sweatpants from kneeling over a puzzle late into the night and frenzied texts over our mutual favorite things and voice notes because “I just have to tell you this funny story real quick.” It means couches and basements and coffee makers of friends all over the country (world?). It means really, really good shows and sometimes really, really bad shows. It’s slipping inside jokes into work emails and a post-show drink turning into two or three and heart-to-hearts far later than you meant to stay up. It’s texts from my dad about Star Trek, and FaceTiming my mom just to complain and my brother’s one-word texts. It’s a constant craving for Ethiopian food, the story of Jesus walking on water being mentally inextricably linked to a particular slimy rock I found in Galilee one time, an association with the smell of all-purpose spray and the creak of a heater and a particular shade of blue. It’s quoting swaths of plays and instant recall for the laugh of a friend I haven’t seen in years.
Home is interaction, I think. When I really think about it, the answer to “when have you felt most at home?” It is always in the presence of people I love. The places that feel like home do because they’re there, or because the walls and the smells and the sounds remind me of them. Or because the space fundamentally invites people in. And I wouldn’t trade that for the world.
If that makes me an anthropological phenomenon worth investigating, so be it. If this is a self-delusional trauma response of some kind then I think I welcome it.
It means I get the gift of finding home over and over and over again, everywhere.
So, Um...Yeah 
1 thought on “home as interaction, or, on transitions (again)”