Third Culture Adult: How a Life Abroad Grew WebbSprout

Part One: Values Built Between Worlds

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it really means that I lived in Korea for twenty years. People hear that number and nod, but I don’t think anyone, including me, truly understood the weight of it until recently. Twenty years is not travel. It is not a phase. It is an entire adult life. It’s long enough that people I knew here had newborns when I left, and those children are adults now. It’s long enough for the place you lived to shape your instincts, your expectations, and the way you understand relationships. I didn’t just live abroad. I grew up there in every way that matters.

What I absorbed in Korea was not “Korean values” in the cultural sense that locals live them. I didn’t assimilate. I observed, worked, translated, adapted, and built my own frameworks within the structure of that society. What stayed with me were the parts that made sense to my own ethics: showing up for people, the idea that a promise is a promise, the instinct to solve problems together rather than leaving someone to struggle alone, and the expectation that relationships create webs of care that flow in both directions. These were not gestures. They were the logic of everyday life as I experienced it. I didn’t internalize the hierarchical pieces, the obligation by status, the shame, or the deference that didn’t align with me. I kept the structural principles of collective care and left the rest.

Consent. Communication. Collaboration. Critical thinking. Creativity. The five core values of WebbSprout.

Those ideas became the backbone of how I function. They were reinforced again and again in the expat ecosystem I lived in for two decades. That community was always shifting, with people arriving, leaving, and reinventing themselves, but over long stretches of time you begin to see patterns that short-term residents simply can’t. The turnover itself taught me how to read relationships as systems. Living that long inside a constantly changing community made it impossible not to notice how people rely on one another when they are far from home. That understanding of reciprocity, practical, unspoken, and necessary, became part of me.

Coming back to Canada after all that time was disorienting in ways I wasn’t prepared for. My first year here was almost entirely isolated. I was back in my mother’s basement with no real social network, no foothold, and no shared cultural logic with the people around me. Canada values independence, politeness, low emotional intensity, and the idea that needing others is a burden. The norms here are to manage your problems privately, to apologize for taking up space, and to avoid anything that might create discomfort. My Korean-informed model, directness, reliability, shared responsibility, did not map easily onto these expectations. The mismatch was sharp and constant.

Eventually I met people who were trying to build community in their own way. They talked about connection and mutual care, and I could tell they genuinely wanted it even if they didn’t always know how to live it. Their efforts weren’t perfect, but they showed me that the desire was there. The tension I kept seeing wasn’t that Canadians don’t want community, it’s that they’ve never been given a functioning model for reciprocity. They’ve been taught to take care of themselves first, to minimize impact, to avoid appearing needy, and to keep their struggles invisible. This creates confusion around when to show up and when to step back, and people often default to withdrawing even when they wish they wouldn’t.

I also began noticing how these cultural habits collide with economic disparities in community spaces. People want fairness and access, but without shared expectations about contribution, things get murky. Who pays? Who volunteers? When is labour freely given, and when is it being exploited? How do people participate meaningfully if they have fewer resources? In that ambiguity, misunderstandings grow easily. Motives get misread. Sometimes people with charisma or resources accumulate unintentional influence. And people like me, who lead with generosity and assume reciprocity will follow, can end up in uneven exchanges that aren’t anyone’s fault.

Right now, the imbalance I’m living in isn’t simply that I’ve given more than I received. It’s that the web itself isn’t fully connected. I’m giving more than I can sustain in some directions, and in others I’m relying more than I can repay. It’s multi-directional. It’s the kind of imbalance that happens when the surrounding culture doesn’t support a shared understanding of reciprocity, and the system can’t distribute care evenly. It isn’t about blame, it’s about structure. 

It took me a long time to understand that what I brought back to Canada wasn’t Korean culture and it wasn’t Canadian culture. It was a hybrid I formed by living between worlds. I kept the reliability, loyalty, and collective responsibility I saw in Korea, but I paired it with Canadian ideas about autonomy, consent, and individual ethics. I took the idea that community is a living web, something I understood intuitively from both expat life and ecological systems, and combined it with my own rejection of hierarchy and obligation. None of this was intentional. It was simply the set of values that made sense to me as I navigated two very different societies over two decades.

At some point I realized that what I had formed wasn’t either culture’s framework. It was its own system. People who grow up between cultures often build new structures instead of choosing one or the other. There’s a name for this: third culture adulthood. I didn’t fully see that in myself until recently, even though I recognized it instantly in the newcomer students I worked with when I first returned. That was the entire premise of my first business name, Third Culture Kids Connections, which in hindsight feels like I understood the truth before I could even articulate it. As a third culture adult, I was looking for connection.

Everything I’ve been experiencing makes sense through that lens. I am not “too much,” not confused, not culturally inconsistent. I am simply someone who lived enough years elsewhere to develop a worldview that doesn’t match the norms here. My way of doing relationships, direct, reciprocal, interconnected, comes from a synthesis of lived experience, not from misunderstanding or miscalculation. I wasn’t importing foreign habits or failing to “read the room.” I was operating inside the only system that has ever made sense to me.

Understanding this brings clarity to the years since I returned. It explains the confusion, the isolation, the moments of connection, the mismatched expectations, and the misunderstandings that grew from cultural gaps rather than personal flaws. It also lets me see that the values I’ve been holding onto are not unrealistic. They are simply the result of a life lived across boundaries, shaped by long-term experience in a culture built on collective care, filtered through my own ethics, and brought home to a place that doesn’t always know what to do with that.

Naming it isn’t the whole solution, but it helps. It lets me speak more clearly about who I am and why I move through the world the way I do. And it helps me find the people here who can meet me in that space, not because they share my history, but because they share the values that grew in me between those worlds.

Part Two: Values to Shape an Ecosystem 

When people understand the story of how I lived between cultures, my wish is that  it becomes easier to see why the way I ask for help, offer help, and build relationships looks unfamiliar in a Canadian context. The reciprocal model I use now is not a recent invention or a strategy. It grew naturally out of the systems I lived in for twenty years and the ways I learned to survive without hierarchy, without shame, and without the belief that life must be handled alone. It is simply the structure that makes the most sense for the kind of life I have lived.

At its core, my approach is based on two principles. I only ask someone for help if the task aligns with their strengths and brings them some ease or satisfaction, and I only ask when I know I have something meaningful I can offer in return, whether now or later. These principles were shaped by environments where people showed up because they were part of a web, not because of transactions or obligation. Reciprocity was not a ledger. It was how people honoured one another and kept the community healthy.

Consent is central to this model. I only want an enthusiastic yes from anyone who participates, whether in friendship, collaboration, or community life. A yes should come from genuine willingness, not from guilt, pressure, or social expectation. This is why I am transparent about my needs and capacities, and why I am always prepared for a no. I learned that long before Korea, working in fundraising where asking without attachment was essential. A no is never a failure in my system. It is simply part of healthy consent.

If you do not understand the values behind this model, it can look unusual. If you have only lived inside systems where independence is the norm and reciprocity means debt, then someone like me, who names both her needs and her capacities, may look like she is arranging something. I understand that. It is an easy misunderstanding to make. In societies shaped by capitalism and self-sufficiency, clarity can be mistaken for strategy, and interdependence can be mistaken for manipulation. The misunderstanding lies in the framework, not the intention.

One thing that matters for people to know is that I do not want to accumulate wealth or power. When I have resources, skills, or access, I see those things as responsibilities to share. This is something that has always been intuitive to me, but it was reinforced by the cultures I lived in abroad and by the Indigenous teachings I have learned since returning. In many First Nations traditions, abundance is not something to store away. It is something to distribute because survival depends on circulation. You share when you can and lean on others when you must. That idea made immediate sense to me because it matched what I had lived for decades.

I also did not adopt every cultural value I encountered. I rejected hierarchy, rigid status structures, and obligation based on rank or social position. In the systems I lived within, there were expectations tied to age, gender, status, or seniority. I never accepted those. I kept the parts that aligned with my ethics and left the rest. My model is not a copy of any one culture. It is a synthesis shaped by experience, ethics, and personal integrity.

There are parts of Canadian culture that carry traces of communal instinct. People historically survived harsh winters by relying on one another, and that shaped many unspoken social habits. But modern life has created mixed messages. COVID required us to isolate when we were physically contagious. That was necessary. The problem is that the same instinct was quietly transferred to emotional struggle. People began stepping back when they were lonely or overwhelmed, as if emotional pain were something others needed protection from. Emotional pain is not contagious. Joy and comfort are. We need to understand which medicine applies when, because withdrawing from connection is often the opposite of what a struggling person needs. This confusion has left many people unsure of when to reach out and when to retreat.

In that context, my approach to reciprocity can be difficult for people to interpret. They may hesitate because they are not used to people saying what they need so openly or offering help so freely. They may worry about boundaries or obligations because they are trying to navigate conflicting cultural instructions. None of this comes from bad intentions. It comes from a lack of shared models. The misunderstandings that sometimes form around me are not personal. They are structural.

My own relationships often have multi-directional imbalances. In some directions I give more than I receive, and in others I receive more than I can immediately return. That is not because anyone is taking advantage. It is simply what happens in any living system. Capacity moves. People shift in and out of need. A healthy network allows that movement without shame. In the systems that shaped me, imbalance was normal and expected. Support flowed where it was needed instead of trying to remain symmetrical.

Explaining this model now is not about defending myself. It is about making the structure visible so people understand the system I am trying to build. When you can see the values beneath it, the confusion dissolves. What may have looked like manipulation reveals itself as consent and clarity. What may have looked like greed reveals itself as responsibility and the desire to share whatever I have. What may have looked unfamiliar becomes understandable once the cultural and personal context is visible.

The model itself is grounded in the belief that people thrive when support circulates, when needs are named honestly, when generosity is guided by capacity and sincerity, and when relationships are treated as living things. It does not come from one culture or one teaching. It grew from years of lived experience, from being part of communities where people had to show up, and from recognizing the places where modern life pushes us away from our instinct for connection.

This is the architecture behind how I give and how I ask. It is the practical expression of the worldview shaped in me over twenty years abroad and refined through the relationships and teachings I have encountered here. It is not designed to extract anything from anyone. It is meant to help create a web where everyone participates according to their ability and where no one is left alone. It is the only system that has ever felt honest, sustainable, and human to me, and it is the one I am trying to build around me now.

Part Three: Values & Stories as Seeds of WebbSprout 

There is another layer to this story that sits under everything else, and it has to do with the limits of belonging and how identity, culture, respect, and lived experience shape each other in ways that aren’t always comfortable to name. During those twenty years abroad, I occupied a space that most white North Americans never experience. I faced overt, targeted racial discrimination, men assuming things about me because of my skin colour or because of stereotypes about Western women, following me home, threatening me, treating me as though they were entitled to me on sight. At other times, people yelled at me on the street because they assumed I was American, and geopolitical tensions gave them permission to unload anger on a total stranger. But more often people would just invade my space and want to practice English and get to know me whether I liked it or not. Personal space and boundaries were things I had to learn to adapt to fit in.

And then there were the structural barriers. As a foreigner, I couldn’t always access the same phone plans, the same contracts, the same independence that locals had. Even medical care required mediated access. I had surgery where I didn’t receive proper informed consent, not because anyone wanted to harm me, but because the system wasn’t built to include me in the decision-making process. Expectations around authority, hierarchy, and compliance didn’t align with my needs, especially around autonomy in medical contexts. The misunderstanding wasn’t cultural “difference,” it was structural misalignment, and it had real consequences for my health that I’m still managing.

All of this shaped why I eventually returned to Canada. I often say I came home because I wanted community and witness in my life again, and that’s true. But I also needed safety, familiarity, and a system I could navigate as my health worsened. Aging in a place where I didn’t speak the language fluently and didn’t have lifelong networks wasn’t sustainable. To rely on the systems in Korea long-term, I would have needed to become far more culturally integrated than I ethically or realistically could. I loved the country deeply, but I would always be outside its most important support structures.

Part of that distance came from language. After twenty years, I still wasn’t fluent in Korean. I had high-functioning survival Korean, I could take taxis, handle daily life, and support my classroom, but my brain never made the shift into conversational fluency. A lot of that came from my work in international schools, where English was the shared language across a student body that spanned Korea, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and beyond. My daily interactions with parents and colleagues came from every cultural direction, and English was where we met. Most Koreans also wanted to speak English with me, which meant Korean immersion was limited even when I wanted it. So I lived between languages, between systems, between cultural understandings, without fully settling into any of them.

My world outside of school reflected that same pattern. I travelled widely across Asia, countries like Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia shaped me in ways I still carry. I spent meaningful time in Australia. I hopscotched through parts of Europe and across Canada and the United States in the in-between years. But even with all of that exposure, what I learned wasn’t belonging. It was breadth. Depth of empathy. Perspective. The ability to hold multiple realities at once.

And that leads to the last piece, the reason I lasted twenty years abroad wasn’t only because I found community, it was because I built it. Intentionally. Deliberately. Over and over again.

At each school I worked in, but especially my final one, I was trusted to shape curriculum, contribute to accreditation, and help set the tone for the school’s values and character education. We used Understanding by Design, which allowed us to start with what mattered, real understanding, curiosity, empathy, and work backward to create meaningful learning. We embedded mindfulness, character strengths, inquiry-based projects, and community-building into daily classroom life in ways that weren’t ornamental, they were central.

One of the projects I’m proudest of was bringing the spirit of Saskatoon’s Folk Fest into an International Day that transformed the whole school into a living cultural festival. Classrooms became regions of the world. Families prepared activities and food. Kids taught and learned from each other. There were talent shows and hallways full of colour and pride and connection. I was invited into homes, to embassy gatherings, to family celebrations from Malaysia to Saudi Arabia to Japan. These weren’t token gestures, they were relationships formed through years of building trust and showing up.

And in the classroom itself, we created something that worked almost accidentally. Because we didn’t have the infrastructure for exclusion, no standardized curriculum, no streaming, no rigid separation of students, we ended up with naturally inclusive, mixed-ability, mixed-language classrooms where every child stayed in the community. We worked across grades. Older kids supported younger ones. Teachers collaborated across subjects. We structured learning around relationships, creativity, accessibility, and real-world understanding. Monthly assemblies and yearly traditions became the connective tissue of a shared childhood.

Those kids, and  all the kids I taught over those 20 years… some years, a small class the entire year (who I remember so clearly) to the years of English teaching where there was a constant rotation of kids where on any given month I had hundreds of report cards to write, but still a few kids endured in my heart to this day. And  many of those kids remain connected to me today. They are living proof that inclusive, curiosity-based, relational learning is not a fantasy. It works. I helped build it. I lived inside it. And it sustained me in a country where I otherwise might not have lasted as long as I did. 

I survived twenty years abroad not because I fit, but because I built. Because I created community where I didn’t have one. Because connection was something I wove, not something I inherited. And that is the thread that leads directly to WebbSprout.

WebbSprout isn’t nostalgia or an attempt to recreate an international school in Canada. It’s not me trying to force a system that doesn’t belong here. It is the continuation of what I know is possible. When you build an ecosystem deliberately, with curiosity, reciprocity, integrity, and care, people flourish. Kids flourish. Families flourish. And I flourish too.

But the heart of it is that I am doing this through the values I brought back, not through coercion or persuasion or manipulation. I don’t want to convince people. I don’t want to trick anyone into understanding. I want to be transparent about who I am, the experiences that shaped me, and the kind of community I’m trying to build. I want people to see the model clearly, because once they understand the values beneath it, everything else makes sense.

What I am finally realizing is that if I keep explaining this one conversation at a time, I will keep being misunderstood. People cannot see the system if they only hear fragments. I need a bridge between the world I lived in abroad and the world I’m building here, a way for people to understand the roots of my work and the values they grew from.

That’s why I’m creating the Story Seed Bank. It is my way of gathering the stories, connections, and lived experiences that shaped me and shaped my students, past and present, so people can see the patterns for themselves. It’s a way for others to step into the web I’ve been weaving my entire adult life, and to understand the kind of community I’m trying to grow now.

This is the world I built then. And this is the world I’m working to rebuild now, and  I invite anyone this resonates with to join and share your own story. 

Part Four: Being WebbSprout

By the time I reached this final part of my narrative, I realized that the act of telling the story had revealed the story itself. As I wrote my way through the earlier chapters, the pattern underneath my life began to show, like roots slowly exposing the shape of the tree they have been holding up all along. In putting my experiences into words, I finally saw how much meaning they carried, and how every connection, every fracture, every misunderstanding, and every act of love has shaped me. It feels right that this chapter turns toward my relationships, because it was through other people’s reflections of me that I learned to understand myself. And it is through telling the truth of who I am, without begging for understanding, that I can finally see the synthesis of everything I have lived: something unique, something aligned, something I can stand inside without apology.

When I reach out to people and form connections, I am forming a reciprocal bond with expectation. I am beginning to recognize that the relationship mistakes, the flounders, have always been expectation mismatches. I just had not seen them through the lens of values alignment until now. I look at certain people, like one of my ex-girlfriends. I had to make a complicated choice to step away from her because of values. She wanted me to prioritize her safety on a day when she had every right to ask for that priority, but doing so would have required violating a different principle. An ethical one. The principle of holding space for people who show up for me. The principle of maintaining inclusion even symbolically. Being inclusive is too core a value for me to subject one partner to the exclusion I myself have faced.

I have been forced many times to make choices in relationships that I never expected to face. It has been hard to explain to partners why I asked for what I asked, or why I pulled away when I did. That has led to a checkered relationship history and a lot of people who I did not have the capacity to explain things to, because I realized their core understanding of who I am was so fundamentally flawed that it was never a matter of defending myself against one small thing. There was an entire web of ideas and impressions forming against the web I have been trying to build, a web of people bonding over shared grievances, shared misunderstandings of my expectations, my generosity, and my sense of responsibility.

If people perceive my actions through a traditional capitalist, acquisition-based lens, then everything I do looks entirely different. I can understand why some would judge me harshly. I would judge me harshly if I were actually the person they think I am. That is why the injustice of the character attacks hurts so much. 

The only thing that hurts more is the severed connections, the people I have lost because of those misunderstandings and misalignments of values. Being told I am doing something that I fundamentally am not. Being accused of manipulation when what I have actually been doing is advocating for my needs, living the model of authenticity I teach, building a life around my authentic self, teaching students to advocate for themselves, and believing deeply that I am allowed to do the same. That I am allowed to take up space. To show my pain and vulnerability. To exist as I am, especially now in a world full of uncertainty.

Part of what grounds me is the global network I still hold. Every day, I reach across continents to a student, a colleague, a partner far away, or a friend I have not checked in on. Those connections exist in real time and real space and they tell me things too. That is where I feel most relevant. The books I have read, the people I have met, the places I have lived, they become relevant. I was once part of a project where students around the world looked out their windows and shared what they saw. In that moment I realized I was witnessing history in real time. Later I understood that I could shape it, that the paths those kids walked, the life-changing global experience they had, were partly influenced by my voice. I was part of something bigger, a pattern of change, a glimpse of what education can be.

Since returning home, I have stayed connected to global partners, autistic self-advocates, service providers, thinkers, perspectives, and opinions, even the chaos of American politics and other parts of the world that dominate the news cycle. Through those connections, I have eyes on the ground everywhere. It augments my John Oliver, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert habit, and my hope that maybe late-night comedy really is one force capable of taking down a reality television host turned president intent on destroying every institution that ever laughed at him. That is probably the most accurate assessment of Trump I have ever seen, other than simply calling him a bully.

With that perspective, I look at the world and feel a sense of foreboding. The patterns of history do not lie. The oncoming AI and biotech revolutions, arriving on the heels of a pandemic’s social upheaval, signal exponential change that no one is ready for. The only weapon we have against the indifference of that global order, against the infrastructure of AI that will likely surpass our raw processing power before we are ready, is to combine human minds the way I have seen happen in a classroom where every kid shows up as themselves and collaborates genuinely.

Consent. Communication. Collaboration. Critical thinking. Creativity. Those five Cs are the core of everything I do. Day by day, I get out of bed because I believe we can make the world better. Because I believe in justifying the wonder in a child’s eyes. Because I believe that through fire and destruction, we are reborn. We cannot stop the fire that is already burning in the world. We cannot shout louder to save our safe spaces; the forces threatening them do not care about our boundaries. We need more than signs. We need organization. We need a chorus of voices united against what is coming. We need to put aside the internal purities and the endless politically correct recalibrations about which version of reality we all agree to this week.

Everyone has a different perspective. Everyone has a right to their own opinions. If we keep cancelling each other over ideological imperfections, we lose the chance to come together against the actual threat. We do not see it clearly because we are living in it, but social media fractures us, algorithms isolate us, and our insulated communities reinforce our belief that self-care alone is enough. I do not want a world where we are all living in separate bunkers taking care of ourselves as everything burns.

It is through tending gardens together, through finding our common human history, that we survive. Through language. Through shared storytelling. That is how humans originally created the world we know, through innovation built on connection. Now we need to balance that global consciousness with community action, with meeting our physical and emotional needs for connection and collaborative support. We need to be ready for what is coming.

We need strong, resilient networks built on values. We need to reject the broken status quo that led us here. My path is not the only answer. It may not even be the right one. But it is an alternative I am willing to fully embrace, and one I hope others can find inspiration in. I hope they build their own ecosystems in ways that resonate with their values. Biomimicry gives us so many models for how to live sustainably with the earth. We can do more than give lip service to treaties through land acknowledgments. We can learn. We can do better. We can be partners in stewardship of Turtle Island and of our pale blue dot as a whole.