TCKs and Our Never-Ending Quest for The Inner Ring

It is the regular experience for TCKs/ATCKs. It is, in a sense, what makes the TCK. It brings confusion and tears, mixed loyalties and overcommitment. It is the wish, the desire, to belong. 

To belong is a profound and human need. But those things that heigten this need in the TCK practically define largelly shape what a TCK is. Many TCKs spend enough time in their formative years to conform significantly, in thought patterns and values, to a society that is visibly, politically, culturally, and linguistically different from them and their forefathers. What are the odds of their really belonging there - in one generation. And yet, the experience shapes both their mind and affections, and (as many know), the TCK may feel more at home in their host country than in their passport country. But in significant ways they still do not belong, for belonging is more than an internal identification - it involves the acceptance among the people that is unlikely to happen in such a short span of time. They may be on a temporary visa, they may look different, speak with an accent, celebrate diferent holidays; a hundred different things separate them, somehow, from their host culture. And most of all, they are not from there. Many who have adapted a globalized view of the world find this hard to accpet, but it is still visible in some places in the US, where unless your family has lived in the area for generations, one remains an outsider. 

At the same time, returning to the land of their citizenship, TCKs often find it difficult to identify with their peers who are deservedly content in their own lives and naturally have no real category for understanding the way that a different place, a different world has so molded and loving carved the souls of the TCK. The belonging seems purely superficial - based on a birth certificate or the color of a passport cover. They are invisible immigrants to their own fatherland.

Indeed, the question "Where do I belong?" pricks the heart of many souls, but none less the hearts of those who, from their youngest days, have had it witheld, who grew up reaching for it, and for whom it has always seemed to just escap the grasp.

I think this heightens the desire to belong beyond the average experience, leaving a person particularly vulnerable to the temptations of C.S. calls the Inner Ring. 

"To a young person," writes Lewis, "just entering on adult life, the world seems full of "insides" full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and he desires to enter them. But if he follows that desire he will reach no "inside" that is worth reaching. The true road lies in quite another direction."

The Inner Ring is the name Lewis gives to something as common to human nature as friendship itself. It exists as an invisible clique, consisting of two or more people; it is an un-formal (though not always informal), unspoken group to which one either belongs or does not:

 You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then, later, perhaps, that you are inside it… It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the border-line… There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have a been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It has no fixed name. 

"The only certain rule is that the insiders and outsiders call it by different names. From the inside it may be designated, in simple cases by mere enumeration: it may be called, 'You and Tony and me'. When it is very secure and comparatively stable in membership it calls itself 'we'. From outside, if you have despaired of getting into it, you call it 'that gang' or 'they' or 'so-and-so and his set' or 'the Caucus' or 'the Inner Ring.'

Two features of this belonging, this Inner Ring, are true: first, it is found everywhere. Every school, organization, job, univeristy, church - you name it - has one. It is a necessary fact of life, common to human interaction; and one cannot escape this invisible hierarchy simply by wishing it away. The second feature this - the desire to be a part of the Inner Ring can never be satisfied. It is a layer, inside of which is yet another another one, more intimate and more exclusive, to which even members of the previous Inner Ring are excluded. It is, as Lewis says, like peeling an onion; it is like Alice's rabbit hole. When one finally becomes a part of it, one becomes aware of a deeper Inner Ring of which he is not a part.  

And here's the catch - once you are in the Inner Ring, it isn't as bright as it looked like from the outside: "By the very act of admitting you, it has lost it's magic," says Lewis. There is soon the discovery that there is another, more intimate ring to which you have not been admitted. And that pang of not belonging is liable to strike again. 

But though the Inner Ring is morally neutral, the desire to belong to an Inner Ring is a very dangerous thing. And, says Lewis, "Unless you take measures to prevent it,this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care." 

This is the path that everyone is already on. And, importantly, "Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of continuous effort." 

It is a dangerous thing because one can spend their days chasing Inner Rings; one can waste away peeling onions. And every time, when one finally enters, the magic will wear off and one is left unsatisfied. 

Perhaps this is one point where some TCKs (ATCKs by now) decide to move. Perhaps some move on to chase the magic. 

But even more risky are the things a person may do out of a desire to be accepted. Peer pressure hardly begins to describe it, for pressure need not at all applied knowingly from within. The desire itself can drive you… - if only "they" will notice; if only "they" will smile approvingly;  if only the "they" can be come "we".  

"The quest of the Inner Ring," says Lewis, "will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the result your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sounds craftsmen  and the other sound craftsmen will know it… And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, ween from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the differencce is that its secrecy is accidental, and its eclusiveness  a by product, and no one was led thisther by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do the things that they like. This is friendship… And no Inner Ring can ever have it."

The trouble for the ATCK is that those spaces where one finds "the people you like" are often in places they are familiar with - the transient ones. The in-between spaces. The nature of the third culture, the international culture, is that people come in and out of it. It is exhilirating, and it is exhausting. And I am not convinced we were made for such continuous change. In fact, I think that unless we ATCKs can grow out of our devotion to the other, the international, and can begin to nurture a love for the mundane, the everyday - unless we can do this, we will live very shallow lives indeed. But that is a discussion for another day.