By Philip Weidler

My grandfather is a traveler. In that regard I suppose I take after him quite a bit, as I also have had ample opportunity to travel the globe. Our large worldviews and adaptability are the hallmarks of our personalities. Yet perhaps the one thing that I haven't inherited from him in spite of all our similarities is his sense of direction.

Often have I envied him of this internal compass-especially while driving. While he navigates by intuition and memory, I still scramble to find out where I am after taking a wrong turn. For all the continents I've been to, and all the countries I've lived in, I still have a tendency to find myself lost on the highways like a rat in a maze, struggling desperately to find my way in an unfamiliar domain. This peculiarity (and others like it) especially stand out now that I'm in the US attending college.

Americans in particular, born and bred in the country with the norms of US pop culture, social habits, and driving (on the 'right' side of the road) particularly seem to spot these differences. Indeed, my inability to navigate in my "home" country would seem to be not only a negligible shortcoming, but a microcosm of the knowledge I lack and a metaphor for the challenge I face by living in this alien culture-the country of my birth.

I grew up in Asia. My earliest memory is of finding a spider crawling on a shallow depression in the side of an orange earthy mound of clay. The kind of thing that you only see in southeast Asia. There was the first time I felt the warmth of a fire or tasted the sweetness of a marshmallow. My first words were in East Asia, my first crush was in Taiwan, my first swim in the waters of the Andaman Sea, and my first heartbreak, in Singapore. These are my badges, the experiences that define me. But now they are hidden.

Now I live in America, I look like an American, and I am defined in the minds of others largely by what they see from me in everyday American life: the music I listen to, the clothes I wear, the movies I watch, the hairstyle I have, and the town I'm from. I often find myself out of step and at a loss to connect. For I don't know who Beyonce is, I've never seen LOST, I don't own any American Eagle shirts, I have a timeless crew cut and I'm not really from Dallas, Tex.

In spite of theses differences, I seem to fit in relatively well. In variety there is uniqueness. But I don't belong because of them. Most of my new peers don't understand why I seem cautious to attend social events, why I have such a difficult time finding my way around town, or why I struggle with finding things to talk about in regular conversation.

Where am I from? I don't know. Let me flip a five-sided coin.

Yet my story is an all too common tale, and its characters are increasing -- call us the Third Culture Kids (TCKs). For we fully possess neither our own nor our host country's culture, but instead invent and dwell in a sort of hybrid of our own, constituted by those others like us who also find themselves out of phase with the normality of belonging. Perhaps the change in my circle of acquaintances from 3 TCKs before preschool to over 500 by the time I graduated high school reflects in part the explosion of this population in the world in which I live.

What of this lifestyle? Is it one I should praise or lambaste? Is the expansion of a TCK's worldview worth the lack of ultimate belonging or the confusion that it accompanies? I think so.

Most of us are proud to be exactly what we are, while embracing the advantages with the challenges and realizing that our lives are just different. For we are the true travelers; uprooted trees planting ourselves in the cultural forests of the world, always taking with our roots elements of the soils in which we are planted before the winds of change deracinate us again.

I don't belong in my American culture and thus far, have not found my place there. My American peers will never fully appreciate or understand the background or experiences I possess. Nor can I return to the country I once considered to be home, but in truth, no longer is.

Yet maybe, this is not that different from what I have faced all my life -- adjusting to new views and thought patterns, bridging gaps, and navigating the highways of life which I am called to explore. And though I may never feel rooted to one place in this journey, I can become a better navigator to explore the places I find myself now, and the destinations to which I see myself headed.