The Clock is Ticking: Struggles in Making Friends as an ATCK

I was nine. We had just moved to a huge new homestead, and our neighbors on the left and right had five children combined, ranging in age from eleven to six.

I used to stand at the window and watch them skate, play, walk to each other’s homes, and take the bus to school. And I would pray, God, I want to be their friend.

But I had no idea how to go out and make friends when adults or some common activity didn’t facilitate it. It didn’t even cross my mind that I could have gone to my parents and said, I want to make friends with other kids my age! I thought my parents would just ask me to play with my sisters more. 

I remember that our neighbors did reach out to us when we first moved in. They brought us cookies. They offered to take us riding on their ATV. Once, I remember specifically, the mom extended an invite to us to go over to their place for popcorn. My parents talked it over briefly and decided that it was not a good time. They didn’t invite us again, and my parents never reached out. I was so frustrated but never said anything.

Yet it was the beginning of a resolve that slowly and surely cemented in my subconscious: When I grow up, I will have friends.

Why TCKs Struggle with Friendships

Everyone struggles with making friends in some capacity, TCK or not. Some people face rejection one too many times and lose trust in people. Some deal with insecurities about how worthy or likable they are. Some long for even just one real friend who will stick by them, either from family or school, but find none. TCKs don’t struggle with making friends just because they’re TCKs, but the TCK life can certainly contribute factors to the equation.

We TCKs will find that we have certain struggles in common because of our shared experience. In particular, the constant mobility of TCK life can greatly contribute to the lack of opportunities to form deep, lasting face-to-face relationships. This leads us to deal with several problems.

First, we’re exhausted. Emotionally drained from having to repeatedly make and lose friends, we become sorely tempted to give up, and some of us do, for a time.

Second, we eventually find out that friend-making is a skill like any other, one that you improve the more you practice. And so, if we have given up, we also discover that friend-making is way out of our comfort zone. We have to learn it anew, and feel lost trying to learn the ballgame of making friends as an adult. 

Third, at some point, we have to confront and heal the emotional damage that we have gone through as we stopped trusting that people (and we ourselves) will continue to stay and care.

It’s not easy, but we are relational beings, created in the image of the eternally relational God, and the commandment God gave us is to love one another. It’s not good for us to be alone. And a basic understanding of relationships is necessary to fully participate in the kind of deep love God calls us to.

And so, over the past couple of years, I’ve started to pursue my childhood goal: When I grow up, I will have friends. 

As I’ve started getting more involved in the communities around me and putting more energy into real life relationships, I have found myself up against a particular set of fears over and over again. I used to think I escaped a TCK childhood relatively unscathed, but as it turns out, I too have taken emotional damage that I’m finally beginning to sit with and process. There are lies that I’ve internalized that I must unlearn and truths that I have to recognize and move from my head to my heart.

1. Imposter Syndrome — Do I Deserve to Belong?

Here’s the lie: Who do you think you are that you can find belonging here?

I was walking down the street to someone’s birthday party. I didn’t know him that well — we were just members of the same young adult group that I’d joined several months before. But he’d sent an open invite and happily welcomed me when I said I’d show up.

I was excited to go, but as I was walking down the street, a sudden terror gripped me — I felt like a complete fake. A pretender. Desperate, even. That I was inserting myself where I most definitely did not belong. Like I was stupid to believe people actually wanted me. The whole way there, this thought kept hissing in my mind: You don’t belong, you don’t deserve to belong, no one wants you to belong, what do you think you are, trying to belong here?!

On the outside, I tend to appear friendly enough, happy to accept invitations and to reach out to people in an attempt to befriend them. Even when I feel like I have zero social know-how or skills to navigate a situation, I show up because I value relationships and believe in doing my part to cultivate them.

But on the inside? Every time I attempt something new to expand or deepen my social circle, that insecurity is there, waiting for me. Why are you going? For what purpose? You think you have time to build something here? You think they care? No. Not you. You’re just a number to them.

But here’s the truth: You are not the only one learning how to belong.

The more I talk to people, the more I realize we’re all in the same boat, more or less. We’re all navigating the same struggles. 

Over the following weeks and months, I discovered that some people who I thought had been around forever had joined the community at the same time I had. I learned that others were also seeking to make closer, deeper connections. I heard from people that they had had to do the exact same work that I was doing when they had first arrived.

I struggle to break into what I perceive to be an “established circle.” The problem is, sometimes that’s just my perception, and the establishment doesn’t have it as together as I assume. They also struggle with friendships, loneliness, losing people, finding belonging in church circles, and so forth and so on.

Breaking into established circles can be intimidating. But some fears are largely in our heads, with little basis in reality. No one ever made me feel unwelcome. In fact, they were nothing but warm and gracious, excited to have me there. There was no evidence that I was in any way a bother to their establishment, although I felt like it at times.

So here’s what you do: You show up, you show up, and you show up again. Even when imposter syndrome dogs on your heels, you speak the truth to yourself, in spite of your fears, and you show up anyway.

2. The Change Mentality — Will Good Things Be Ripped Away from Me?

Here’s the lie: You will soon have to leave behind every good thing you think you have before you’ve even begun to enjoy it.

A couple of years ago, I randomly befriended a TCK on the internet when I saw that she lived in the same city as I did. After a year of trying to sync our schedules, we finally had the chance to meet in person and sit down in a café. 

We had a long, deep conversation about how we are working through our TCK experiences, what God is teaching us in life, and how these things are affecting our identities and relationships. We were practically strangers, but it felt like we’d always known each other and always would. She made a fascinating observation about that conversation: “Talking with TCKs is unique. We go deep, fast, because we don’t have time not to.” 

That really stuck with me and made me reflect on how TCK friendships cannot afford the luxury of time.

It’s true. With every new friend I make, it’s like a countdown begins. I feel a quiet dread — a cold, weary sense in my bones — that I have only a year, maybe two, to make this relationship matter. Like an invisible clock ticking down to my departure, I have so little time to cement this friendship. If I don’t, I’ll lose it forever. I can’t just stroll, smell the flowers, and exist happily beside others. That takes years, and I don’t have years. 

Just like with the aforementioned imposter syndrome, this feeling often has no basis in reality. But even when I’m not about to move, I feel I soon will be. All my past experiences are triggered to remind me: when you meet someone, you will lose them. In three days. In two months. In a year. It’s inevitable. You can pray for friends, but you better be willing to give them up if God asks.

Growing up as a Christian TCK is complicated. We may develop trust issues with God Himself. The TCK life is made up of a lot of loss and suffering, and we frequently hear about how God is involved in all this. Our parents make decisions that they believe to be according to God’s will. We pray about every move and big decision we make. We hear about experiencing God in all circumstances. We try to persuade ourselves that all things work together for good.

But we are children. And we can so easily adopt a mindset of asceticism: believing that the way of hardship, loss, and sacrifice is the higher, better, and superior way of God because it is the way of hardship, loss, and sacrifice. 

At least, that’s what I discovered in myself. I was afraid to be happy before God, fearing that if I dared to feel fulfilled here and now, He would take the good things away from me. 

With my head, I can say that God is with me in my circumstances, even when they’re hard. But with my heart, I frequently find myself feeling like God perpetuates my circumstances, especially the difficult ones.

This is an irony. For years, I’ve prayed for friends, but when they are given, I’m afraid to accept. I’m so used to waiting for a good thing, I don’t know how to rejoice when it is given. I’m afraid that rejoicing will show God that it’s time to rip it out of my hands.

But here’s the truth: God delights in my well-being.

How do I change my mentality? The first step is to recognize that my view of God is skewed and that I need to consciously correct that by intaking the truth. So I read the Word, and it says He delights in my welfare — my safety, health, wholeness, peace, contentment, and friendships. 

I remind myself of the truth: God is not vengeful, He’s not out to get me. Sometimes circumstances might appear to be, but He is always on my side. He doesn’t want me to be alone. He made me for community. He loves it when I’m in good relationships with other people.

Step two is harder. I need to learn to know and trust the goodness of God, but not just with my intellect, which is far more within my realm of control. I also need to let God teach me through experience that He loves me, because that’s the only way our minds can unlearn fear.

So here’s what you do: You look at God, you tell Him, “I am so afraid,” and you look for the good things He has given you. You say, “Thank you — these people make me so hopeful and happy,” and then you let Him love you through them.

3. Afraid to Trust — Do Others Even Care?

Here’s the lie: Those deep friendships you dream of are a figment of your imagination, and you’ll soon discover you trusted for nothing.

My parents were really into this “making brothers and sisters your best friends” thing. The ideas I picked up over my childhood (although it was largely unconscious and unintended on their part) went something like this: you don’t make lasting friends at school, church will let you down, marriage and kids will take over your life and distance you from peers, and everyone eventually moves on for careers and other priorities. In the end, you can’t count on anyone to be there for you except your family … assuming you built that foundation right in your childhood.

With those thoughts floating around in my head and backed by the experience of an incredibly mobile childhood where I was always the one packing up and leaving, constantly making almost-friends and losing them right after, I started to wonder, What if my parents are right?!

And so, on the one hand, I am trying to fill a friendship void from my past, driven by a need to prove my parents wrong so I can justify all the pain of my experience. On the other hand, I’m terrified that I will discover they were right, that everyone leaves in the end. 

So I attempt to be a good friend on the outside, but inside, I refuse to trust. Every time I feel some sort of happiness — They like me! They want to hang out! They are so kind! They are everything I prayed for! — I get ready to squash it out with a good, cold dose of “reality”: That’s what you think now — just you wait.

I’ve barely ever experienced people being there for me for the long haul. So, in the same way I don’t trust God to care enough to let me stay in a good place, I don’t trust others to care enough to be committed to me relationally. I’m afraid to delight in them, I’m afraid to let myself believe in them, and I’m afraid to invest emotionally and think of them as more than just another acquaintance in my pretty collection of people, because — What if they let me down?

But here’s the truth: God can and will complete the work He began in us.

I want to say something nice and sunny about how there are people out there who will care about you and will be committed to your friendship. It is true, in fact. There are such people. But it’s not the reassurance I crave at heart, because I can’t really know who’s trustworthy and who’s not before the relationship has been tested by time and hardships. In other words, you are going to have to walk through fear and pain to find them.

People can let you down. In fact, people will let you down. That is evident from experience. So why should we face the fear and pain to find the elusive unicorns called real friends?

Because experiencing God as a friend eventually overflows into learning how to be a good friend as well. Because receiving the friendship of God also means receiving His love in the form of friendship from others. God wants to form all of us into trustworthy people who love as He does. And He will, but we must follow Him. 

The way isn’t easy, comfortable, or convenient. But friendship is one way that we do the hard work of learning trust and obedience. Do you remember the old hymn? But we never can prove / the delights of His love / until all on the altar we lay* — sometimes we hold onto fear and call it reality, but we must lay the fear on the altar, and let God place hope in our hands.

So here’s what you do: You stare back into the face of fear and say, “My God is capable of keeping my friendships together, but even if He does not, I will not bow down to you.”

***

In hindsight, I’m able to intellectualize my fears and thoughts to this extent. I’m able to label them as impostor syndrome and fear of loss, but in the moment, grappling with those things, they were a blurry mess of darkness. The only beacon shining for me was knowing where Jesus was asking me to go, and, like a mantra, I repeated to myself over and over, I must obey Jesus, I must obey Jesus. It was Jesus who brought me friendship in the first place — surely, He is more than capable of helping me work it out. 

When I was young, I thought friendship was the sort of thing that merely I wanted, and because I wanted it so badly, it would definitely be the thing God would take away from me. However, as God has been patiently teaching me, it turns out that friendship, in fact, originated with Him — He is the first and the greatest friend, and we are meant to be like Him.

Nine-year-old me would be delighted to know this: Just as she wished, I have grown up, and I have made friends.