Neither Here Nor There: Losing Language, Finding Voice
Fragments of language, layered and lost — on silence, identity, and voice.
This is part 2 of my 7-part essay series, Neither Here Nor There: Loneliness, Belonging & Othering, that I’m sharing here on Substack. You can find the introduction and series hub here.
In the last post, I wrote about the particular kind of loneliness that comes from living between worlds. One of the earliest ways I felt that dislocation was through language: accents that marked me out, silences I chose for safety, and the watchful stance that grew from them.
A few months ago, I was introduced to the concept of Third Culture Kids or TCKs. It’s estimated that millions of children globally now grow up as TCKs, a number that has grown in recent decades due to globalisation, migration, and international work structures.
Sociologists David Pollock and Ruth Van Reken define a TCK as "a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents' culture."² Those developmental years—childhood and adolescence—are the time when identity, belonging, and emotional foundations are laid. But for those of us who experienced this, they're also when we learned to observe rather than simply participate, to document rather than fully inhabit.
Of course, not every TCK experiences this disconnection in the same way—some find ease in mobility or form early communities that anchor them—but for me, the loneliness was formative.
In that in-between space, a "third culture" begins to form; rooted not in a specific country or tradition, but in movement itself, in the act of constant translation between worlds. Van Reken put it another way: “[TCKs] build relationships to cultures all over the world, while never taking full ownership of any. They dive in, but they're always ready to dive out." This perpetual readiness to dive out, I've come to realise, is both the curse and the gift of the creative life. It keeps us forever on the periphery, but peripheries offer the clearest view.
Unlike monocultural peers, our identities aren't shaped by the continuity of one place. Instead, we grow by contrast: learning early to adapt, to shift idioms, to listen before speaking. These are, fundamentally, the skills of the artist: observation, adaptation, the ability to find universal meaning in particular experiences.
We moved to Aberdeenshire when I was eight; I celebrated my ninth birthday a few weeks later. By then, I had spent no more than three years in one place. At my new Scottish primary school, the slight Suffolk burr I'd picked up was swiftly bullied out of me—verbally and physically. But rather than replacing it with the local Aberdeenshire accent, I chose silence. This early loss of linguistic home became foundational to my creative identity: I learned that language itself could be unstable, that words could betray as much as they revealed.
I was already a shy child; watchful, hesitant in unfamiliar settings. I still am, which possibly explains why I struggle with street photography. Raising a camera there requires a kind of boldness that I don’t naturally possess coupled with the fear of rejection that has been reinforced by childhood experiences. But this experience layered in something deep within me, something that would prove essential to my creative work: the understanding that I would always be observing from the outside, that my voice—literal and metaphorical—would never quite fit the expected patterns.
Perhaps, even then, I understood—though I couldn't yet say it—that I didn't belong there. That I probably wouldn't. I felt it in my body, in my voice, in the silence I adopted when words might betray difference and invite reaction. That silence stayed with me long after the bullying stopped. It shaped how I learned to move through the world: quietly, observantly, waiting to see which version of myself might be safest to show. But it also became the foundation of my artistic practice—the ability to watch, to wait, to find meaning in the spaces between words.
Has there been a time when silence—or losing your voice—changed the way you saw yourself or others?
That silence became the foundation of my creative life. From it grew an instinct to observe rather than to join in, to listen before speaking. In the next part, I’ll turn to how that watchfulness unfolded into a creative landscape, where loneliness itself became raw material for art.
Next instalment: The Loneliness of Being Unknown.
² David C. Pollock was a sociologist who coined the term "Third Culture Kid" and spent his career researching cross-cultural identity. Ruth E. Van Reken, a writer and speaker who grew up as a TCK herself, expanded his work by exploring the emotional and psychological layers of globally mobile childhoods.
I found your post really interesting Lynn. Although I don’t technically classify as a TCK, I saw myself in the description of their psychology and behaviors. In particular, this statement of yours resonated strongly with me: “quietly, observantly, waiting to see which version of myself might be safest to show.”
I once had the privilege of spending an afternoon with James Baldwin. He told the story of leaving NY as a young man when he could no longer bear the racism of the Jim Crow years, escaping to France where he didn't know the language and knew no one. He spent is early days in France alone with his own thoughts. "It was in that silence," he said, "that I finally heard my own voice."
Cheers, Lynn. Keep writing.