Nobody Tells You This: The Hidden Cost of Living Abroad
There are two kinds of people in the world, roughly speaking. There are people who stay — who build their lives in one place, surrounded by people who have known them for decades, embedded in the familiar rhythms of a culture they understand without thinking. And there is real wisdom in that. Roots matter. Continuity matters. There is something genuinely valuable about being known, about having people around who remember who you were before you became who you are now.
And then there are people who go.
I didn't start travelling until my forties. I came to it late, which maybe is why it hit me the way it did — not as an adventure with a return ticket, but as something that changed the shape of my life permanently. Moving to another country as an adult is one of the most disorienting things a person can do, and almost nobody tells you the truth about it beforehand. The practical side alone is staggering — the visas, the credentials, the paperwork that never ends, the systems that don't transfer, the bureaucratic maze of building a life somewhere that wasn't built for you. But that is the easy part, in a way. You can figure out paperwork. You can find the right forms, hire the right people, wait in the right queues.
What you cannot prepare for is the loss of your familiar self.
When you live in the culture you grew up in, you move through the world with a kind of effortless fluency you never notice until it's gone. You know what things mean. You know the unspoken rules — how close to stand, when to speak and when to stay quiet, what a certain tone of voice signals, what counts as rude and what counts as warm. Even the humour makes sense without explanation. You are legible to the people around you, and they are legible to you, and this creates a kind of invisible scaffolding that holds your sense of self in place without your ever having to think about it.
Abroad, that scaffolding disappears. Even in countries that share your language, the words don't always mean the same things. The customs are different. The professional culture is different. The way people relate to each other is different. And you find yourself in the exhausting position of having to think consciously about things that used to be automatic — translating yourself constantly, wondering if you have misread a situation, unsure whether the difficulty you are having is a real problem or just culture shock, uncertain which version of yourself to bring to any given room.
This is not weakness. This is what happens to any human being when the familiar context that usually reflects them back to themselves goes quiet. Identity, it turns out, is not just an internal thing. It is also relational, cultural, contextual. It lives partly in being understood. And when understanding has to be rebuilt from scratch, the self can feel strangely uncertain — even to itself.
What keeps people going, in my experience, is not the absence of difficulty but the presence of something that makes the difficulty worth it. For me it has always been this: the experiences, the people, the way of seeing the world that only becomes possible when you have stood outside your own culture long enough to see it clearly. The version of yourself that emerges from that process — more flexible, more curious, more genuinely comfortable with uncertainty — is not available any other way. I don't regret it. I have never regretted it, even in the hardest moments. But I would not pretend it has been easy, and I think the pretending is part of what makes it harder for people who are struggling.
The Instagram version of expat life — the sunsets, the freedom, the reinvention — is real, but it is incomplete. The grief is also real. The loneliness is real. The identity confusion is real. And it deserves to be taken seriously, not performed away.
Something else happens for people who have lived abroad long enough, and it doesn't always get talked about. You reach a point where you no longer fully belong to your country of origin either. You go back and find that the familiar has become slightly foreign — that your references have shifted, your tolerances have changed, your sense of what is normal has been quietly recalibrated by everything you have lived. You are too changed for home, and not yet fully rooted where you are. You exist in the in-between, and it is a genuinely strange place to inhabit. Not bad, necessarily. But lonely in a specific way that people who haven't experienced it can struggle to understand.
This experience has a name — third culture — and it belongs not only to adults who have moved countries but to digital nomads moving between countries and time zones, never quite landing anywhere long enough to put down roots, and to the children raised between worlds, carrying two cultures inside them without belonging completely to either. If you grew up this way, or if you are raising children across cultures now, the questions of identity and belonging run even deeper. Where am I from? Where do I belong? Who am I when the context keeps changing? These are not small questions. They are the questions that bring people to therapy, and they deserve to be taken seriously.
Expat therapy is, at its heart, about accompaniment through that process. Having someone who understands the specific texture of this kind of dislocation — not just theoretically but from the inside — can make an enormous difference. Someone who won't minimise what you are carrying with "but you chose this" or "at least you get to live somewhere beautiful." Someone who can hold the complexity: that it is hard and worth it, that you are grieving and growing, that the disorientation is real and it will not last forever.
If you are living abroad and finding it harder than you expected — harder than you feel you are allowed to admit — I want you to know that what you are experiencing is normal, it is real, and it is workable. You are not failing at the adventure. You are doing something genuinely difficult, and you deserve support that actually understands that.
I work with expats online, across time zones, because I know what it is to need good support and not have it easily available where you are.
If that resonates, I'd be glad to connect.
Megan Shea is a trauma-informed psychotherapist and holistic counsellor working with adults online across Australia, Bali, and worldwide. She specialises in identity, transition, and the particular challenges of building a life far from home.
