Recently I came across a word that made me stop and think. The French verb déranger means to disturb, interrupt, inconvenience, or bother someone. Je suis désolé de vous déranger simply means, “I’m sorry to bother you.” A perfectly ordinary phrase. Yet somewhere along its journey into English, the word took a dramatic turn. Today, calling someone “deranged” no longer suggests a minor interruption. It implies that a person has become psychologically unbalanced, disconnected from reality, or hopelessly eccentric. The word crossed a body of water and apparently decided to reinvent itself.
As an expat and Third Culture Kid, I find this strangely relatable. One of the most common questions people ask is, “Where are you from?” It sounds straightforward enough, but for those of us whose lives have unfolded across multiple countries, languages, cultures, and continents, the answer is anything but simple. The short version might be one country. The medium version requires a map. The long version begins with a deep sigh and eventually resembles a doctoral dissertation complete with footnotes and a family tree.
Third Culture Kids are often described as people who spend a significant part of their developmental years outside their parents’ culture. We belong everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. We become cultural chameleons, learning to adapt, observe, and blend in. We develop an unusual ability to feel at home in unfamiliar places while occasionally feeling unfamiliar in places that are supposedly home. In other words, we become slightly dérangés. Not deranged. Dérangés. Moved from our original arrangement and relocated into a series of new ones.
Over time, the question stops being where you are from and becomes where you feel at home. That question is considerably harder because home becomes less geographical and more portable. It is found in a language, a smell, a recipe, a football team, a family tradition, or even a favourite phrase. Home becomes something carried rather than somewhere located.
Perhaps because beneath all the labels, passports, accents, and cultural categories, most people are searching for remarkably similar things. We want to move through the world without constantly having to justify our existence or explain ourselves. We want to be seen for who we are rather than who others assume us to be. We want our stories to be heard, our identities acknowledged, and our presence accepted without suspicion or qualification. Whether we have crossed an ocean, a border, a neighbourhood, or simply a social boundary, the desire remains much the same: not to be disturbed in the deeper sense of the word, but to belong.
This can be confusing for people who have spent most of their lives in one place. They often expect identity to behave like a postal address: permanent, stable, and clearly labelled. For TCKs, identity is more like a carry-on suitcase whose contents are reorganised every few years. A few things are carefully preserved, a few things are lost, and a surprising number of new things are added along the way.
The irony is that what appears confusing from the outside often feels perfectly normal from the inside. After enough moves, adaptation becomes the default setting. You stop noticing that your vocabulary changes depending on the country you are in. You stop noticing that your cultural references come from several continents simultaneously. You stop noticing that your answer to “Where are you from?” changes depending on who is asking. Eventually, you simply learn to live in the space between categories.
Perhaps that is why I find the story of déranger so appealing. The French word merely means to disturb. English transformed it into something far more dramatic. Yet both meanings contain the same underlying idea: something has been moved from its original place. The difference is largely a matter of perspective.
From one point of view, the word is deranged. From another, it has simply adapted. Perhaps people do much the same thing. We move. We absorb new influences. We acquire new languages, habits, loyalties, and identities. We become something different from what we once were. The process can be disorienting at times, particularly when others insist on fitting us into categories that no longer quite fit. Yet change is not necessarily a sign that something has gone wrong.
Not broken. Not lost. Not less than before. Merely rearranged. Or, if you prefer the French: Dérangés.
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