On being arrogant

I was in a facebook discussion this week with old friends from boarding school days - all 'Third Culture Kids' or TCKs (which basically means children of expatriates who grow up overseas but in a 'third culture' - neither their parents culture, nor the culture of their adopted country.)

My friend is writing a book about spiritual direction for TCKs and asked us what issues we all thought needed to be covered.

The first one was of course the issue of 'belonging' which is a staple for people who grow up overseas, and then I thought I'd be clever and add the issue of 'arrogance' which I have recognised in myself, but now, of course, am completely over...

At that point Marilyn, my blogger friend stepped in and asked me to write a guest post for her blog about arrogance and TCKs and I blithely said yes, thinking that it should be easy.

Ha.

My first step was to ask my husband, who has said before that his observation is that there is a certain arrogance in TCKs, exactly what he thought that was and how he saw it expressed.

"I can listen to this," I thought. "I'm just listening dispassionately and hearing his opinion. It doesn't affect me any more."

Ha. Ha.

After about six minutes of conversation I was writhing angrily on the couch, looking away, folding my arms and wanting to argue, "But it's because we're upset about losing our homes and our friends. It's all we've got...and blah blah blah" and then I heard the first person plural pronoun and the present tense quite loudly in my words and all of a sudden I realised that writing about arrogance is going to hurt.

And maybe it will be messy - internally.

And quite frankly, I don't have a clue what I'm going to write.

So that's my challenge for the week. To define arrogance. To think about it in terms of third culture kids, and to face myself and those old feelings again. And then to get down something on the screen that's both semi-coherent and marginally readable.

If you have thoughts on arrogance in general, and arrogance in TCKs, real or perceived, I'd love to hear them.