Letters to Our Younger DRFTID Selves: What We Wish Someone Had Told Us

For the kid who was always explaining where they were from. This is for you.

If you could write a letter to your younger self — the one who was always the new kid, always explaining the accent, always trying to locate home in a world that kept moving — what would you say? The DRFTID community has been collecting these letters. What follows is a composite of what we have heard — the things that adult TCKs, expats, and multicultural individuals wish someone had told them when they were young. Consider it a letter to every child who has ever felt between worlds.

You Are Not Too Much

The complexity will feel like a problem for a while. Other people’s lives will seem simpler, more certain, more rooted. You will sometimes wish you could swap the richness for the ease of belonging somewhere without having to think about it. You cannot. But you will learn, slowly and then suddenly, that the complexity was never the problem. It was always the point. You are not too much. You are exactly enough.

The Friends Who Leave Are Not Lost

You will make friends and then lose them to the geography of your life. This will happen more times than feels fair. What you will learn is that the friendships that form across distance and survive it are some of the most durable human connections available. The friends who grew up alongside you in different cities and different countries will understand you — at thirty, at forty, at fifty — in ways that the people who only knew one version of you never will. They are not lost. They are distributed.

The Accent Is Not a Flaw

There will be moments when the accent — whichever one it is, the one that shifts depending on who is in the room — will make you self-conscious. When the mix of references and languages and cultural registers that comes naturally to you will seem confusing to others. Let it be confusing. The ability to move between worlds in your voice is a gift. The people who do not understand it are the ones who have only ever been in one room.

The Question Doesn’t Get Easier But You Get Better at It

Where are you from? You will be asked this question for the rest of your life and it will never have a short answer. But you will get better at deciding how much of the truth to give in which contexts. You will develop a version for strangers, a version for friends, and a version for the people who have earned the whole story. The question does not get easier. You get more at home in the complexity of the answer.

You will Find Your People

They are out there. The ones who understand without needing it explained. Who have cried at departure gates and felt most at home in transit. Who speak multiple languages and dream in all of them. Who have built their lives across multiple cities and call all of them something close to home. You will find them. And when you do, it will feel like arriving somewhere after a very long journey — not because you were lost, but because you were always DRFTID.

For the ones who are finding their people — follow @drftid for a community that gets you and visit drftid.com for pieces that celebrate your identity. 🖤

Everywhere. Nowhere. Yours.