I was not prepared for college.

I certainly thought I was. I arrived in America two weeks before the first day of school, ready to buy dorm supplies and start my new life. In my head, I was more than adequately prepared in every area that mattered. Academically, I had a banger SAT score. Financially, I wasn’t going to be hungry. Socially, I had the confident friendliness of an outgoing homeschooler who doesn’t realize he’s coming off as awkward instead of eccentric. Spiritually, I naively felt confident in my faith, and even though I didn’t engage with God much through reading the Word or praying, I felt that I was doing good enough.

I lasted for two weeks before I completely broke down, weeping, alone, and hopeless. Thus began a rough period of my life that featured shattered friendships, unhealthy relationships, depression, broken hearts, emo poetry, four once-in-a-lifetime weather events, and a pandemic.
Throughout the years since, I’ve come up with a lot of theories on why college broke me down so effectively. Some of them were technically accurate, some were outlandish, and some were painfully close to the full truth, but I now believe two specific factors contributed most strongly to my mental state. Both developed directly because of my life as a missionary kid: my non-existent relationship with peers and my removed relationship with God.

Let’s start with peers. The issue primarily arose from the fact that for most of my life, I didn’t have any. I was born on the “field” and lived overseas most of my life before coming to university. For much of that time, I was homeschooled in a co-op with about 30 kids. I never had a single fellow student who shared a grade with me. I had friends and a best friend, but none my age, and no other boys at all besides my brothers. Before starting university, I had no experience with same-age male friendships and no history of friendships on an equal footing.

I was an extremely social, friendly person coming into college, which at the time I viewed as one of my greatest strengths, not realizing it was a defense mechanism. I tried to make friends with everyone I met, and when I made friends, I had no idea what to do with them. At some point along the way, because of constantly feeling like an outsider among my childhood community, my brain had developed the firm belief that the reason I didn’t have friends was because of a problem with me—that I didn’t deserve love, or appreciation, or friendship. I fully believed in my heart that I had to earn this love that I craved with every fiber of my being, and no one would love me otherwise.

I worked so hard for that validation. I was helpful and volunteered for any task that other people didn’t want to do. I would choose thoughtful gifts and write kind notes. If I had any interests or hobbies that my new friends weren’t interested in, I would cast those pastimes aside. I’m still struggling to recover some important parts of me that I lost in that time. Those aren’t all bad things to do, but I would do all those things with a fervent desperation that this would make them love me, this would earn their friendship, this would mean I didn’t have to be alone. I turned friendship into a transaction where I would supply them with favors, and they would pay me back with love.

When I had friends tell me I was too much, that they wanted to spend less time with me, or when they just stopped talking to me, it confirmed that the problem lay with me. It would remind me of the very brief time when I was a kid that I had a close male friend who lived in the same area as us. My family moved, and he never talked to me again. When we visited, he acted like he didn’t know me. Looking back, I believe that was when my belief that I was worthless started, and I still carry those scars on my heart. That may have been the first time I felt conscious resentment for my life as a TCK. I reasoned, if we didn’t have to move away, then I could have kept that friend and been happy. Instead, I felt like a casualty.

While I developed several good friendships in my first year of college, I was constantly terrified of losing them, and dark storm clouds started forming on the horizon. Perhaps I would have been able to weather the approaching storms if I had a firm foundation in my relationship with Christ.

At the time, I believed two very incompatible things. The first was that my relationship with Christ would never be good enough. As a kid, all the adults I was surrounded with and looked up to—the ones I called mom and dad and uncle and aunt—I viewed as titans of faith. These were people who’d given up so much, made such great sacrifices to be missionaries that surely, they were phenomenal Christians. Not only that, they also regularly got up early in the morning to spend time with the Lord, gave sermons when visiting churches in America, and evangelized the people around them. Meanwhile, I struggled to read the Bible for more than five minutes without getting distracted and bored. I couldn’t even pay attention during sermons on Sunday morning.

Looking back on it now, I know they were flawed people, and lots of conflict went on behind the scenes that the kids weren’t privy to. At the time, I was unaware.

As someone who struggles to pursue something if I’m not immediately skilled at it, I felt like I had to be on their level of devotion immediately. I ignored that they weren’t born like that, and when I didn’t match them instantly, I decided I would never reach it, and that a deeper relationship with Christ just wasn’t worth pursuing.

Paradoxically, at the same time, I was filled with a belief fueled by resentment and self-righteous anger that I had done enough. Every time my parents talked about how hard it was for them to leave behind their families,
culture, and way of life to serve in the field, a poisonous voice whispered to me that at least they got to make that choice; I never did. I built up a fortress of resentment at everything that was taken from me. I never got to do extracurriculars like debate. I never got to have any real relationship with my extended family. I didn’t get access to a library so I could read as much as I wanted to. I didn’t get to have friends my age. I didn’t get, I didn’t have, I didn’t experience…

Surely, for all my sacrifices, I had completed whatever I needed to do. Of course, I believed that only faith can save, not works, but I had earned an even greater reward, right? Why should I have to sacrifice my early mornings to have quiet time with him, or my free time to engage in prayer, or my vices to live a virtuous life? I felt like I’d paid my dues, sacrificed more for the kingdom than anyone else my age. I was justified.

These two beliefs insidiously coexisted within me: that I’d done enough and that I’d never do enough, so why bother? Thus, I approached college with an apathy towards my faith that I did not care about fixing.

I somehow survived freshman year, and, after a summer with my family, approached the next year very optimistically. I had a girlfriend I thought I was in love with, my brother had let me borrow his car for the semester, and I was accepted into a prestigious class.

In one day, I totaled the car, finalized my very messy breakup with my girlfriend, and got inundated with so much work for the special class that I was completely overwhelmed.

Everything got worse. My social chameleonic nature which I used to fit into any friend group, completely took over to the point that I was an entirely different person depending on who I was with. At some point, I lost the person I was behind all the masks, and when I was alone, or too exhausted to maintain the masquerade, I would lose all emotion and expression and sit dully, staring forward without speaking.

My apathy towards my faith turned into a disregard. Instead of turning to God in prayer. I turned everywhere else.

My loneliness and social anxiety got so bad that if I had to spend more than 30 minutes by myself, if a friend cancelled plans, if I could find no one who wanted to hang out with me, I would fall into an extremely dark spiral, full of dark thoughts. I would sit on my bed, with my lights out, as the twilight gloom filled my room, and ideas for other options—painful options, permanent options—would start knocking on the door of my mind.

I remember one specific time; I was rescued only because I texted a friend that I needed to be around people. Thankfully, he didn’t ask questions, and I spent the evening hanging out with him.

So, what was the magic moment that made it all better? As is easy to guess, there wasn’t one. Crawling out of that hole was a long, arduous process that I’m still struggling with today, years after the fact. I went to therapy. I
developed stronger friendships. I started a new prayer life where I connected with God over celebrating the good instead of bemoaning the bad. The resolution to this story may be undramatic, but it’s important.

Now, years later, I’m in a much healthier place. I have some of the strongest friendships of my life. When one of my friends told me I was his best friend, I almost cried. I hadn’t believed that was possible. My relationship with God is stronger than it ever was in my youth, with practices of prayer and engaging with his Word through the creation of art—a method I found that allows me to connect with him on a level I never had before.

I still struggle. I’ll find myself baking a friend a cake or helping them get a job—not out of altruistic love, but out of selfish desire to guarantee their friendship—despite their giving me no indication that abandonment is a thought they’d considered. I still miss doing my devotional some days, and I still have spiritual valleys among my peaks, but I rarely fall down that dark hole again. When I feel the storm clouds approaching, I turn to prayer, my wife, and my godly friends for help. I know I’m not alone.

For most of my life, unbeknownst to me, I harbored a deep unconscious resentment against my parents, my childhood, and God for the hand I’d been dealt. In the seven years since I came to college, I’ve worked on dismantling that belief system and celebrating the wonderful opportunities and characteristics being a TCK gave me, but I could very easily have never reached this point. I know other missionary kids who have rejected Christ and the Church, and I understand and empathize with their pain and the journeys they are on.

I struggle to end this article because my story is not done. I’m still growing, and I believe in seven years, I’ll look back on the version of me that wrote this article with the same superior maturity as the me that currently looks at my 17-year-old self entering college. And seven years after that, the same will be true, on and on my whole life.

I was not prepared for college, but through the grace of God, I survived.