Psychological Diaspora

Mary Edwards Wertsch, a TCK/military brat who authored the landmark study," Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress", writes about belonging and loss in this excerpt from her essay, entitled, "Outside Looking In":

"The first legacy of military childhood transience is what might be called the psychological diaspora. As adults most of us manage to slow or stop the moving- and yet still we find ourselves caught up in a strange migration. It is a migration of the soul, all the more mysterious to us because it has no clear origin and no certain goal.
There is only one antidote to the angst of the diaspora. Belonging. It is not easy for a military brat to learn what that even means, much less to find it. Yet belonging is the single greatest quest of our lives, a quest that lives in many of us as a powerful unnamed yearning.
My feeling is that it is crucial for military brats to put the right name to this yearning, face our unrequited need to belong, and address it as best we can.... Another corollary seems to be that for military brats, a prerequisite to belonging is grieving over not belonging and repeated loss. That stands to reason: it is necessary to break down the old immunity before one can become attached to something new. And belonging, more than anything else, is about attachment."