The story behind why I do this work actually began years earlier.

When I was 19 years old, I was driving home from university one winter evening during a snowstorm. I hit a patch of black ice and lost control of my car. Within seconds, I was in a head-on collision with a semi trailer (a.k.a. “ the big Pepsi truck”).

In one moment, the future I thought I was building disappeared.

Before the accident, I had a clear direction. I was studying sociology, psychology and criminal justice. I planned to pursue a career with the FBI. I was active, independent, and running regularly. I knew who I was, and I had a fairly clear picture of where my life was headed.

After the accident, everything became uncertain. I spent the next eighteen months recovering from multiple surgeries and injuries. At one point, I was told I might never run again.

But the physical recovery wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part was realizing that I no longer felt like the person I’d been before.

For a long time, I believed that if I worked hard enough, healed fast enough, or simply waited long enough, I would eventually become that version of myself again. After several months passed, I realized that wasn’t going to happen.

The person I had been before the accident belonged to a life that no longer existed. I couldn’t rebuild my future by trying to go backwards; I had to figure out who I was now.

That experience taught me a lesson that has shaped every major transition in my life since:

Sometimes life doesn’t ask us to go back.
Sometimes it asks us to build forward.

I had no idea then how many times that lesson would reappear.

A few years later, I met the man who would become my husband, and eventually moved from the United States to France. Like many people who move abroad, I spent a lot of time preparing for the practical side of the transition. I revived my high school French skills. I researched, planned, and imagined what my new life might look like.

What I wasn’t prepared for was how deeply moving abroad would affect my sense of self.

Life in France wasn’t all that bad. In many ways, it was exactly what I had hoped for (which is what made the experience all the more difficult to understand). I wasn’t unhappy with my life, but some things I’d never had to think twice about back in the US now demanded extra energy, effort, and concentration…and more often than I’d like to admit, they left me feeling incompetent.

Gradually, those things became easier. I learned the language and earned a linguistics degree from the Sorbonne. I built a career, first in an international law firm and later in the advertising world, working on global campaigns for some of the world’s largest beauty brands.

From the outside, my life looked settled. I’d adapted to life in France, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was still missing. It was then I realized that adapting to life abroad and feeling at home in it weren’t necessarily the same thing.

That realization brought me back to the lesson I’d learned years earlier after my accident. I was trying to build a relationship with a life that looked very different from the one I had imagined.

Around the same time, I began noticing that some of the most honest and vulnerable conversations I’d had about life abroad almost never happened in public. They happened with classmates at the Sorbonne, expat colleagues, close friends, and other people who, like me, were trying to build lives far from their home country.

We’d confide in one another about things we didn’t always feel comfortable talking about with loved ones back home. Not because we regretted our decision to move, but because we didn’t want to worry them or make them think we’d made a mistake.

Those conversations changed the way I thought about life abroad.

Again and again, I heard people describe lives that looked successful from the outside: they’d learned the language, built careers, found partners, and settled into routines. And yet many still struggled to explain why something felt missing.

For a long time, I assumed those conversations were just part of adapting to life abroad. But they never really stopped. The people changed and the stories changed, but the questions didn’t. I continued to wonder:

But it wasn’t only what people were saying that stayed with me. It was the fact that so few of them felt able to say it openly. These conversations happened in trusted spaces, between people who understood the experience firsthand. They rarely happened in public. Rarely in the places where someone searching for answers might actually find them.

Years later, another major turning point arrived. A “season of change” that included divorce, corporate burnout, and several more surgeries forced me to step away from advertising and seriously think about what I wanted the next chapter of my life to look like.

As I reflected on everything that had brought me to that point, I realized something: the thread running through my life had never really changed.

Whether I thought I was heading toward law enforcement, medicine, advertising, or something else entirely, I’d always been drawn toward helping people navigate difficult transitions. I also realized that 25+ years abroad had given me something I hadn’t fully appreciated before.

Not just my own experience, but hundreds of conversations and stories. Years of observing the questions people carried with them as they tried to build lives in countries that sometimes still felt completely unfamiliar.

That’s when I understood that those experiences weren’t separate parts of my journey; they’d been preparing me for this work all along.

Becoming a Life Abroad Integration Coach wasn’t a departure from my story — it was a continuation of it.

As I began coaching, the same themes kept appearing. People whose lives abroad looked successful from the outside often described feeling disconnected on the inside. They’d adapted, but they didn’t feel completely settled. They’d built lives abroad, but they didn’t quite feel at home in them.

Eventually, I gave that experience a name: The Life Abroad Integration Gap™.

It’s the gap between adapting externally and feeling at home internally, the space where identity, belonging, confidence, and emotional integration intersect. Where many people assume something is wrong with them, when in reality they’re navigating a part of life abroad that many of us go through, but very few actually talk about in the open.

Today, that’s the work I care about most. Not because I have all the answers, but because I’ve spent many years learning that building a new life isn’t only about changing our circumstances. It’s about learning how to build a relationship with the life we’re living now.

Looking back, I can see that every major transition I went through was preparing me for this work.

Life doesn’t ask us to go back. It asks us to build forward.

I know how challenging it can be to build a life abroad that genuinely feels like home.

That’s why I do this work.

If this story resonated with you, you’re exactly why I created Thrive On Through.

Every week I write about the emotional side of life abroad: identity, belonging, purpose, and what it really takes to build a life abroad that genuinely feels like home.

If you’d like those essays delivered straight to your inbox, feel free to subscribe:

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And if you’d like more day to day reflections and conversations about life abroad, you can also find me on Facebook & Instagram.

Because building a life abroad shouldn’t be something we have to figure out alone.

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After years of living abroad, people often assume you know exactly when you became settled.

It’s a reasonable assumption. After all, many of us spend years working toward that goal. We learn the language, navigate unfamiliar systems, build careers and relationships, and gradually create a life in a place that initially feels foreign. Somewhere along the way, it’s easy to imagine there will come a moment when all of that effort finally pays off. A point where you can confidently say, “This is when I started feeling at home”.

I used to think it would happen that way too.

What surprised me was how difficult it became to identify that moment once it actually arrived. There was no single experience that transformed France from a foreign country into “home” for me. No big realization, no finish line. If anything, the shift was so gradual that I didn’t really even notice it while it was happening.

Looking back now, I can see that emotional integration revealed itself through a series of small changes. Individually, none of them felt particularly significant. Together, however, they transformed my relationship with the country, with daily life, and ultimately with myself.

Over the past several essays, I’ve written about the Life Abroad Integration Gap™: that confusing stage where life abroad may be functioning perfectly well on paper but still doesn’t yet feel entirely like home. I’ve written about why moving forward doesn’t always mean feeling settled, why adaptation and integration aren’t quite the same thing, and why so many expats and immigrants struggle to explain what they’re experiencing during those first years abroad.

What I haven’t spent as much time talking about is what happens next. Because integration rarely arrives in the way we expect it to; more often, it happens so gradually that we only recognize it in hindsight.

One of the first signs showed up in a place I never would have expected: snacking.

When I first arrived, my French fiancé would give me a slightly puzzled look whenever he caught me reaching for a mid-afternoon snack. To me, it seemed harmless enough. If I was hungry, I ate. Growing up in the United States, snacking between meals wasn’t something I thought twice about.

In France, however, meals (and corresponding mealtimes) tend to come with different rules. Eating anything before dinner, no matter how small, can be seen as “spoiling your appetite” and missing part of the “experience” the meal is meant to provide. Dinner isn’t simply about satisfying hunger. It’s often something people look forward to and deliberately make space for.

When I first moved to France, I viewed those differences through an American lens. I compared the two approaches and instinctively judged one against the other. Which way made more sense? Which approach was better?

What stands out to me now isn’t the difference itself. It’s the fact that, somewhere along the way, I stopped evaluating everything. I wasn’t choosing one culture over the other or abandoning my American habits. I just understood the logic behind it without feeling the need to compare it to anything else.

That change may sound insignificant, but I think it marked something important for me. France was slowly becoming a place I understood on its own terms.

Then I started noticing it in places that had nothing to do with food. One example was speaking French over the phone. When I first arrived, making a simple call would require a LOT of preparation in advance. I used to rehearse conversations before dialing the number; I’d write notes for myself and mentally prepare for every possible response. The actual phone call was sometimes easier than the prep work I was putting into it…it was the anticipation beforehand that felt exhausting.

That remained true for quite a while.

Then I got my first job in France working as an assistant in an international law firm. Part of my role involved regularly contacting a travel agency to modify flight itineraries for one of the firm’s partners. His schedule seemed to change constantly, which meant I was on the phone with the same travel agent so often that we were soon on a first-name basis. (Shout-out to Chantal!)

In the beginning, I prepared for those calls the same way I prepared for everything else: I wrote down dates, times, flight numbers, contextual French vocabulary, and key phrases I needed. I rehearsed what I wanted to say before picking up the phone.

Then one day, after hanging up from yet another conversation about changing flights, I found myself smiling.

A few months earlier, I would have needed my notes spread out across my desk before making that call. This time, I just picked up the phone, explained what needed to change, answered a few questions, and moved on with my day.

What struck me wasn’t that my level of French had improved, so much as where my attention had gone. I was no longer focused on the language itself; I was focused on solving the problem. The language issue had somehow blended into the background.

Looking back, I think that’s one of the less-obvious signs of emotional integration. Life doesn’t suddenly become easy overnight. It just stops requiring quite so much effort.

I noticed the way I looked at French bureaucracy was changing, too. When I first began tackling my residency paperwork, every obstacle felt deeply personal. Missing documents, changing requirements, long delays, and contradictory information would often ruin my entire day. The stakes felt high, and every complication seemed to carry a deeper meaning.

I remember standing in a crowded prefecture one afternoon watching an older civil servant sleep at his desk while dozens of people waited. At the time, I could hardly believe what I was seeing. It felt like one of those moments where you start questioning reality itself. I remember thinking Is this for real? Is this seriously happening right now?

Years later, I found myself in another administrative office having to hand over a mountain of paperwork and realized something had changed. The bureaucracy wasn’t any better. The delays hadn’t disappeared. Yet I no longer interpreted every complication as evidence that I didn’t belong here or that something had gone terribly wrong. I’d just shrug and think oh well, that’s France. The country hadn’t changed, but my relationship with it had.

Thinking back to that time, I can see that many of these changes had less to do with France itself and more to do with what was occupying my mental space.

In the beginning, almost everything reminded me that I was living abroad. The language, the paperwork, the cultural differences, and the constant need to adapt took up an enormous amount of mental bandwidth. Over time, they stopped occupying quite so much of it. I spent less time wondering whether I was adapting correctly, and less time imagining the life I might have lived had I stayed in the United States. My attention shifted toward the same things that occupy people everywhere: work, relationships, future plans, family, and the countless ordinary responsibilities that fill a life.

Without realizing it, living abroad had stopped being the central “project” of my life. France was no longer a place I was trying out. It was simply the place where my life was unfolding.

But perhaps the clearest sign of all appeared when I started going back to my home country.

Every time I return to the United States (and still to this day), I experience a bit of reverse culture shock. It begins almost immediately, from the moment I get off the plane and go through customs. The pace feels faster. The cars seem enormous. Everything somehow feels bigger than I remember. And the number of choices seems endless. Even something as simple as ordering a coffee can leave me standing in front of a menu trying to process what feels like hundreds of different options while people wait in line behind me. All I wanted was a coffee and instead, I find myself making decisions about sizes, syrups, flavors, milk alternatives, and options I didn’t even know existed.

What surprises me most about those visits, however, isn’t what they reveal about the US. It’s what they reveal about me.

Over the years, my definition of a “good” life has changed. I’ve grown attached to long meals, slower rhythms, generous vacation time, and a culture that generally accepts that work is part of life rather than the center of it. Every trip home reminds me how much those values have shaped me.

The thing that changed wasn’t the US. The thing that changed was me. Somewhere along the way, France had stopped being a country I lived in and started becoming part of how I saw the world. I think that’s when emotional integration moves beyond adaptation. You aren’t simply learning how the culture works anymore. Part of it has become part of you.

When I think back to my early days abroad, “feeling settled” didn’t mean reaching a point where France felt exactly like the United States, or where every challenge disappeared. It meant reaching a point where France stopped feeling like a place I was adapting to and became the place where my life naturally belonged.

The Real Meaning of Feeling Settled Abroad

Ultimately, I think what most of us are searching for is much simpler than we realize. I don’t think we’re searching for certainty, perfection, or the absence of difficult days. I think we’re searching for a sense of connection. The feeling that the country around us is no longer simply a place where we happen to live, but a place that has become part of our story. And perhaps more importantly, that we’ve become a part of its story, too.

If you’re somewhere in the middle of the Life Abroad Integration Gap™ right now, still wondering when everything will finally click into place, I hope this offers some reassurance.

Because emotional integration rarely arrives all at once. More often, it reveals itself gradually, through tiny events that are easy to overlook while they’re happening.

But one day, you’ll look around and realize something is different.

The country that once felt foreign feels familiar.

The life that once required constant effort feels natural.

And the place you worked so hard to adapt to has finally started feeling like home.

If you’re building a life abroad and trying to make sense of the emotional, psychological, and identity shifts that come with it, you’re not alone.

A lot of what I write about explores the less-visible side of international life: adaptation, belonging, identity, integration, and the process of turning a country you live in into a place that feels like home.

I share daily reflections and practical insights on Facebook & Instagram for expats, immigrants, and globally-mobile professionals navigating life between cultures.

And if you’d like future essays delivered directly to your inbox, you can subscribe to Thrive On Through // Life Abroad here:

Subscribe now

No matter where you currently are in your own journey abroad, I hope this article reminds you that you may be closer to feeling at home than you realize.

Continue Reading:

• What Actually Happens Inside the Life Abroad Integration Gap™

• Why Moving Forward Doesn’t Always Mean Feeling Settled Yet

• Why Life Abroad Can Be Working And Still Not Feel Like Home

Share Thrive On Through // Life Abroad

For a long time, I assumed that feeling at home abroad would happen naturally once I figured everything else out.

It seemed logical enough. Learn the language, build a routine, make friends, understand how the country works, and eventually the feeling of belonging would follow. I don’t remember consciously deciding this, but I pretty much carried that assumption with me for years.

And to be fair, many parts of life did become easier with time.

The first months abroad often feel like an endless series of small challenges. Everything requires attention. Simple tasks take longer than expected. You spend a surprising amount of energy trying to understand systems that locals navigate without thinking twice about them. Even ordinary activities can feel mentally exhausting when they’re happening in an unfamiliar environment.

Over time, though, that intensity begins to fade. You stop checking Google Maps every few minutes. You know which grocery stores carry crunchy peanut butter and caesar salad dressing. Making a doctor’s appointment no longer feels like a major event. You develop routines, favorite hangouts, and habits that make daily life feel more manageable. And eventually, you reach a point where you can get through most days without feeling like you’re constantly trying to catch up.

For me, one of the biggest turning points came when I got my first job in France.

The two years before that felt like preparation. I’d arrived on a student visa and spent much of my time learning the language, understanding how the country worked, and trying to find my footing in an environment that still felt very foreign to me. Although I was living in France, I didn’t yet feel fully established here…it was like I was still building the “foundations” of a life.

Getting my first job changed that.

For the first time, France no longer felt like a place I was preparing to live in someday. It felt like the place where my life was actually happening. I’d found work and was beginning to build a career, and I was settling into a version of everyday life that felt far more permanent than anything that had come before it. It was the moment my life abroad started feeling less temporary and more established.

For a long time, I assumed that was what settling in would feel like.

After all, I had done the things I believed were necessary to build a life abroad: I’d learned the language, developed routines, found work, and begun creating a future for myself in France.

Yet internally, the experience felt less straightforward than that.

Part of the confusion came from the fact that my life in France looked more established than it actually felt. From the outside, it probably resembled the settled life I had spent years working toward. But internally, there was still a slight distance between myself and the life I was living.

I was participating in French life, but I hadn’t developed the same emotional attachment to it yet. Part of me was still measuring my life against the version that might have unfolded if I had stayed in the U.S. Sometimes consciously and sometimes not, I found myself comparing the two as though one life was still being evaluated against the other.

I wasn’t unhappy, and I wasn’t questioning whether I wanted to stay in France. The best way I can describe it is that France was where my life existed, but it hadn’t fully become home yet.

When you first move abroad, you tend to think of adjustment as the destination. The difficult part is getting through the culture shock, learning the language, navigating the bureaucracy, and finding your footing. Once you’ve managed those things, it’s easy to assume you’ve arrived.

But what if adaptation is not the finish line?

What if it’s actually the beginning of a completely different stage?

Over the years, I’ve spoken with many immigrants whose experiences sounded remarkably similar. Their lives abroad were functioning well. They had jobs, relationships, routines, and growing confidence in their adopted country. Some had been living abroad for several years.

There was often a common thread running through those conversations. They weren’t struggling in the way they had during the early months abroad, yet many of them seemed to be navigating a version of the same question I’d wrestled with myself.

That in-between space can be surprisingly confusing because it doesn’t fit the narrative most of us expect. If you’re overwhelmed during your first few months abroad, it makes sense. If you’re homesick, people understand that too. But what do you make of the experience when life is objectively working and you still don’t feel entirely at home inside of it?

Why Feeling At Home Abroad Takes Longer Than Adaptation

What I’ve learned over the years is that adaptation and integration don’t always unfold at the same speed.

Adaptation is largely practical; it’s learning how to function inside a new environment. It’s understanding systems, developing routines, solving problems, and becoming capable of navigating daily life.

Integration feels different.

It develops more gradually and is often much harder to recognize while it’s happening. It grows through familiarity, repetition, relationships, shared experiences, and the countless ordinary moments that slowly change your relationship with a place.

I truly believe that part of integration involves gradually stopping the comparison between the life you’re building and the life you might have lived somewhere else.

In my early years abroad, I often found myself measuring one against the other. I didn’t do it constantly, but I did it often enough that part of my attention remained fixed on a life I wasn’t actually living.

I think this is one of the reasons that integration can take longer than adaptation. It’s difficult to fully invest yourself in the life you’re building when part of you is still evaluating it against an imagined alternative.

Over time, however, that comparison begins to fade. Your attention shifts away from the life you might have lived, and settles more fully into the life you’re actually living. A neighborhood becomes familiar. Friendships deepen. Cultural habits that once felt strange start feeling normal. You stop interpreting every experience through the lens of where you came from, and begin engaging with life more fully on its own terms.

Individually, those moments may not feel particularly significant. But together, they slowly change your relationship with the place you’re living.

Then one day, often without realizing exactly when it happened, you notice that you’re no longer comparing your life to the one you left behind. The country around you no longer feels like something you’re trying to understand. It’s simply become part of the backdrop of your everyday life.

And that’s when many people discover that adaptation was never the end of the story.

Adaptation teaches you how to live abroad.

But integration is what slowly allows that life to feel like home.

Many of the experiences that shape life abroad don’t fit neatly into the milestones people tend to focus on.

They don’t always show up in language exams passed, visas renewed, promotions earned, or years spent in a country. They often unfold internally, through shifts in identity, belonging, perspective, and the gradual process of building a life between cultures.

Those are the experiences I explore here.

If this essay resonated with you, you can follow along on Facebook & Instagram, where I share daily reflections on the emotional realities of life abroad, adaptation, integration, and the process of turning a country you live in into a place that feels like home.

And if you’d like future essays delivered directly to your inbox, you can subscribe to Thrive On Through // Life Abroad here:

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No matter where you currently find yourself in your journey abroad, I hope this article reminded you that adaptation and integration are not always the same thing — and that some of the most important changes happen long after life starts looking settled from the outside.

Continue Reading:

• Why Moving Forward Abroad Doesn’t Always Mean You Feel Settled Yet

• What Actually Happens Inside the Life Abroad Integration Gap™

Living abroad can create this strange disconnect where the people back home think you’ve fully adjusted long before you actually feel that way yourself.

After a while, family and friends start assuming you’ve adjusted. You sound more comfortable abroad and your routines seem established. You’re functioning in another language, building relationships, posting photos from places that look exciting and beautiful.

From their perspective, you’ve settled into your new life. Meanwhile, you may still be mentally rehearsing phone calls before making them.

I think this is one of the reasons the first years abroad can feel so emotionally confusing. The outside and inside of the experience often stop matching long before anyone realizes it.

In the beginning, people usually expect you to struggle a bit. If you’ve just moved abroad and feel overwhelmed, emotional, or disoriented, nobody finds that surprising. You’re adjusting to a new country, a new system, a new culture, and sometimes a new language all at once.

At that stage, people tend to check in more. They expect stories about culture shock, confusion, homesickness, and administrative chaos. There’s an understanding that you’re still finding your footing.

But somewhere along the way, the assumptions begin changing.

Usually around the 6-12 month mark, your life abroad starts looking more stable from the outside. You’ve figured public transportation and you know which grocery stores you like. You probably have routines by then, favorite places, maybe even friendships and social plans. Your photos no longer look like “new expat survival mode”. Your life starts appearing relatively “normal” again. And that’s often the point where people back home begin assuming you’re fully settled.

Sometimes they even romanticize your life abroad a little. From their perspective, you’re living this exciting international life. They see photos of dinners in beautiful places, weekend trips, another language slowly appearing in your vocabulary on social media posts. You sound more comfortable talking about your daily life abroad. You’ve survived the move and seem functional. Adapted.

Meanwhile, what’s actually happening internally can feel very different.

I remember a moment in France during my first year abroad, when I went into a crowded pharmacy to ask about some medicine for my sore throat and cough (one of the many “-itises” that I picked up during my first year abroad). By that point, I was functioning fairly well day-to-day. I could manage basic conversations, navigate the city, and handle most routine interactions without major problems.

From the outside, I probably looked like I’d completely adjusted.

But halfway through speaking with the pharmacist, I lost track of what she was saying because she spoke faster than my brain could translate. Immediately, I could feel my body tense up. I became hyperaware of the line forming behind me, the people waiting, the pressure of responding quickly enough, and the embarrassment of having to ask her to repeat herself again. The conversation itself was an ordinary one, but I walked out feeling emotionally exhausted afterward.

I think moments like that are part of what people often misunderstand about the first years abroad. By that stage, many expats and immigrants no longer look visibly overwhelmed. But internally, ordinary situations may still require enormous mental and emotional effort underneath the surface.

What makes this phase even more complicated is that, sometimes, expats help reinforce the misunderstanding themselves. I remember conversations with friends and family back home where people would say things like:

“Your French must be fluent by now”
“You’ve really settled in there”
“You have the most amazing life”

And most of the time, I didn’t correct them. Partly because I didn’t want to worry them. The people who love and care about you want reassurance that you’re okay. They want to believe the move worked out and that you’re building a good life abroad. And in many ways, I was…but there was another layer to it.

Admitting that things still felt difficult sometimes also meant confronting my own fears about what the struggle meant. When you’ve invested enormous amounts of time, energy, money, and emotional risk into building a life abroad, it can feel surprisingly vulnerable to admit that you still don’t feel fully comfortable there yet — especially to the people back home. Because somewhere underneath it all is the fear that saying “This is harder than I expected” might sound dangerously close to admitting “Maybe I made the wrong decision”.

So instead, many expats learn how to present a version of adaptation that feels easier for everyone (including themselves) to believe in. You let people think you’re fully fluent because, technically, you speak the language now. You let them assume you’ve completely adapted because correcting the perception feels emotionally complicated. Part of you wants it to be true already, too.

I think this creates a sort of loneliness that many expats struggle to put into words.

From the outside, people think you’re thriving. Meanwhile, internally, you may still be navigating moments that feel unexpectedly difficult. Maybe you still rehearse phone calls before making them, or feel drained after social interactions in another language. You may still spend enormous energy trying to interpret humor, tone, cultural expectations, or subtle social dynamics that used to feel automatic back home.

Over time, people simply stop seeing how much effort daily life still requires. And once people stop seeing the struggle, they often assume you’ve fully adjusted.

I remember another moment in my early years abroad when someone back home proudly introduced me to one of their friends by saying “Oh, she’s basically French now”.

I laughed because I understood what they meant. From their perspective, I’d built a life in France. I spoke the language, had relationships there, understood the culture more deeply than when I first arrived. My life abroad no longer looked temporary.

But internally, I still had moments where I felt completely American. Moments where I still felt slightly outside of things, socially-speaking. Moments where I still struggled to express myself exactly the way I wanted to in French. And moments where existing between cultures all day long still felt mentally tiring.

None of those things were visible from the outside. I think this misunderstanding affects those of us living abroad more than we sometimes realize. Because when everyone around you assumes you’ve fully adjusted, it becomes much easier to question yourself when you still don’t completely feel that way internally. You start wondering:

“Why am I still struggling with this?”
“Shouldn’t this feel easier by now?”
“Why do I still feel slightly out of sync?”

Especially when, from the outside, your life already appears stable.

Your external life abroad may simply be progressing faster than your internal sense of familiarity, belonging, confidence, and emotional ease can fully catch up with. And that process usually takes more time and unfolds much more slowly than people expect. Deeper integration isn’t just about learning how a country functions. It’s also about rebuilding a sense of self inside an entirely new environment. It’s about learning how to exist naturally in another language, learning how to feel emotionally safe in situations that once felt unfamiliar, and learning how to stop monitoring yourself all the time.

That kind of adjustment tends to happen through repetition, through hundreds of ordinary moments that slowly stop feeling so challenging and requiring so much effort.

At some point, you realize certain things that once felt exhausting no longer need the same level of mental preparation. A phone call that would’ve triggered anxiety in the past, starts feeling relatively manageable. You spend time with people and notice you’re actually present in the conversation instead of being self-cautious the entire time. Little by little, situations that once felt emotionally draining begin feeling more natural.

Individually, those moments may not seem particularly significant. But over time, they begin changing how life abroad actually feels internally. The country slowly becomes less like a place you are constantly trying to adapt to, and more like a place where you can simply exist.

If you’re somewhere in the middle of that process right now, still feeling more uncertain internally than your life appears externally, you’re far from alone.

Most people living abroad are not moving through this experience as effortlessly as they appear to be from the outside. They’re simply learning, day by day, how to build familiarity inside a life that once felt completely foreign.

And one day, often when you least expect it, you may suddenly realize something surprisingly comforting:

You’re no longer trying so hard to feel at home there. You just do.

Living abroad often looks much more settled from the outside than it actually feels internally, especially during those first years when you’re still learning how to exist naturally inside a completely different environment.

A lot of what I write about comes from trying to put words to those less visible parts of the experience: the emotional, psychological, and identity shifts that many expats and immigrants go through, but don’t always know how to explain.

If this resonates with you, you can follow along on Facebook & Instagram, where I share daily reflections on the emotional realities of life abroad and the process of building a life between cultures.

And if you’d like future essays like this delivered directly to your inbox, you can subscribe to Thrive On Through // Life Abroad below.

No matter where you currently find yourself in your journey abroad, I hope this reminded you that adjustment is often far less linear — and far less visible — than people assume.

Continue Reading:

• Why Moving Forward Abroad Doesn’t Always Mean You Feel Settled Yet

• What Actually Happens Inside the Life Abroad Integration Gap™

• What the First Year of Living Abroad Actually Feels Like (And Why It Rarely Feels Linear)

One of the strangest parts of living abroad is realizing how different “doing well” can look from actually feeling well.

At a certain point, life starts functioning again. You stop getting lost every time you leave the house. You know which grocery store carries the things you like. You figure out the transportation system, open the bank account, manage the paperwork, and eventually develop routines that resemble a normal life.

From the outside, it often looks like you’ve adjusted. And in many ways, you have.

This is usually the stage where people around you start assuming you’re settled. Sometimes you start assuming it, too. After all, you’ve made it through the hardest part, haven’t you?

But then something catches you off guard.

You’re sitting at dinner with people you genuinely like, yet somehow still feel slightly outside the conversation. Or you have one of those moments where you realize how much mental energy you still spend interpreting things that used to feel automatic back home. Sometimes it happens when you return from visiting your home country, and feel strangely disconnected in both places at once.

Life is moving forward. But internally, something still feels out of sync.

Over time, I’ve come to think of this as a kind of “integration gap” that many people experience abroad.

People often expect adjustment to happen in a straight line. The assumption is that once you become functional abroad, the emotional side naturally catches up. But those two things don’t always move at the same pace.

In the first months abroad, most people expect things to feel difficult. There’s usually enough novelty and adrenaline to explain the overwhelm. You’re learning everything at once, and nobody’s surprised that you feel disoriented.

But somewhere around the 6 to 12 month mark, daily life usually starts becoming more manageable. You become more capable. You may even start feeling relatively stable externally. And that’s often where confusion sets in, because “functioning” and “feeling settled” are not the same thing.

You become competent long before you become fully at ease.

I remember a period in France where, on paper, everything looked ok. I had an established routine, reliable friendships, and enough language skills to navigate daily life without major problems. If someone had asked me then how things were going, I probably would’ve said “good” (and I would’ve meant it).

But I also remember walking home one evening after meeting friends for dinner and realizing I felt really tired, but it had nothing to do with being busy.

The dinner itself had been perfectly pleasant. Everyone was kind and I followed along with the conversation (and even participated a little!) It was a great evening overall.

And yet, I’d spent nearly three hours concentrating. Concentrating on timing, language, and humor. On whether I had interrupted at the wrong moment. On trying to keep up with references I only partly understood. On following a group conversation moving just slightly faster than my brain could comfortably process in French at that point.

It struck me that what looked effortless from the outside, still required enormous effort internally. That realization stayed with me because, until then, I hadn’t fully understood the difference between appearing adjusted and actually feeling at ease. Your life begins looking more settled before your nervous system actually feels settled…and that disconnect can feel pretty disorienting.

In the beginning, the difficulties feel evident and expected. Later on, they become subtler. You start thinking things like “Why do I still feel off when everything is technically okay now?” That question can create a surprising amount of guilt, especially when other people see your life abroad and assume you’re thriving all the time.

I’ve spoken with many expats and immigrants over the years who describe this same tension. Their life abroad is objectively moving forward; they’ve built careers, relationships, routines, and stability. Some have even been abroad for years. But internally, they still don’t feel fully at home inside the life they’ve built. Not because they’re unhappy or because they made the wrong decision, but because integration is about more than logistics.

You can learn how a country functions relatively quickly. Learning how to emotionally relax into your life there often takes much longer.

I think part of what makes this experience so difficult is that very little of it is externally visible. When you first move abroad, people tend to offer support more naturally. They expect culture shock. They understand homesickness and know you’re adjusting. But once you become “functional”, the assumption is often that the adjustment process is over.

Meanwhile, internally, you may still be rebuilding things people cannot see: your sense of belonging, your confidence in social situations, your identity in another language, and your understanding of where you fit now, both in your adopted country and sometimes even in relation to the place you came from. Those things rarely resolve themselves on the same timeline as practical adaptation.

I remember another moment that made this especially clear to me. Years after moving to France, someone asked me a simple question during a work meeting. Normally, it would have been easy to answer but for some reason, I suddenly couldn’t find the exact wording I wanted quickly enough.

So I simplified my response.

The meeting moved on, and nobody thought anything of it. But afterward, I remember feeling frustrated, not because my French was “bad”, but because I still occasionally felt like a diluted version of myself externally, compared to who I knew myself to be internally.

The gap between who you are internally and how easily you can express yourself abroad can last far longer than people expect. Over time, though, repeated exposure begins changing things. Without fully realizing it, you begin building a different kind of resilience — the kind that develops through repetition, familiarity, and continued participation in a life that once felt completely foreign.

Little by little, certain things that once required enormous effort begin happening more naturally. You notice you spent an entire afternoon without mentally translating anything. You react naturally in conversation instead of rehearsing it first. You stop feeling like you’re “performing” your life abroad and start feeling more present inside of it. It doesn’t happen all at once, but you come to realize that your relationship to the country had been slowly changing long before you became consciously aware of it.

I think this is important for expats and immigrants to understand because so many people assume they should feel settled simply because they’ve been abroad “long enough”. But feeling settled abroad does not happen according to a fixed schedule. In reality, it unfolds gradually, and usually more slowly than people expect.

Sometimes life abroad asks for patience long after things already look stable from the outside. And perhaps that’s one of the more honest realities of building a life somewhere new: moving forward and feeling settled are not always the same milestone.

Sometimes one arrives well before the other. And often, the real shift abroad is not when life becomes functional.

It’s when it finally stops feeling like something you have to constantly manage.

This article is part of a larger conversation about the emotional realities of life abroad — the parts people don’t always talk about openly.

If you’re an expat or immigrant navigating life abroad and want thoughtful, honest support along the way, I share free daily encouragement, reflections, and practical insights over on Facebook & Instagram at Thrive On Through.

Because adjusting to life abroad is rarely just about logistics — and you don’t have to navigate it alone.

When people imagine what it’ll feel like to move abroad, they often assume the adjustment will happen in a fairly straightforward way. The beginning will be challenging, of course. There will be practical hurdles, moments of confusion, and the general discomfort that comes with being somewhere unfamiliar. But over time, things will settle. You’ll adapt, find your rhythm, and gradually feel more at ease in your new environment.

It’s a reassuring way of thinking about it, and in some ways, it helps make the decision to move feel more manageable. The reality, however, is often quite different.

For many people, the first year of living abroad doesn’t unfold as a steady progression from difficult to easy. Instead, it can feel uneven and, at times, contradictory. There are periods where things seem to fall into place and you feel capable (even confident) in your day-to-day life. And then there are moments where that sense of ease gives way to something more uncertain again, often without any specific reason.

What surprises most people is not that the beginning is difficult, but that this sense of fluctuation continues long after they expected it to pass.

In the early stages, there’s usually a certain momentum that carries you forward. You’re occupied with setting up your life, navigating new systems, and learning how things work. Even when it feels overwhelming, there’s a clear sense of purpose in what you’re doing. You’re building something, piece by piece, and that gives the experience a sense of direction.

Over time, many of the practical aspects of life begin to stabilize. You know how to get around, you understand the basic systems, and you no longer feel like everything is unfamiliar. From the outside, it looks as though you’ve adjusted, and in many ways, you have. But this is often the point where a different layer of the experience begins to surface.

You could be talking with someone, having just a normal conversation. And halfway through, you notice yourself thinking more than you used to and pausing slightly before responding. You adjust how you say something and find yourself paying attention in a way you didn’t have to before. The conversation ends, and everything was fine. Nothing went wrong. But later on, you find yourself replaying parts of it, wondering if you said things the right way, or if you came across clearly, or if you missed something altogether.

Individually, these moments don’t really seem significant. They’re easy to dismiss (and often they are)…but over time, they begin to shape how you experience your daily life in a way that can be difficult to articulate to others.

This is often where the doubt starts to creep in. By this stage, you may feel that you should be more settled than you are. You’ve been in the country long enough to understand how things work. You’re managing your daily life, meeting your responsibilities, and, on paper, everything appears to be functioning as it should. And yet, there can still be a sense that something has not fully clicked into place.

It’s at this point that many people assume they simply need more time. And time does play a role, but what’s happening here isn’t just a question of familiarity. It’s something more subtle and, in many ways, more personal.

When you move abroad, you don’t leave behind the way you understand and move throughout the world; you carry it with you. The habits, instincts, and ways of communicating that felt natural in your home environment were shaped within a context that made sense to you. The cues were familiar, and the feedback you received from your surroundings was consistent.

In a new country, that same way of operating doesn’t always translate in the same way. The environment responds differently, and over time, you begin to adjust to that difference. You may find yourself holding back slightly, simplifying how you express yourself, or gravitating toward situations where you feel more certain of how things will unfold. These adjustments are rarely conscious decisions; they tend to happen gradually, as a natural response to an environment that no longer reflects things back to you in a familiar way.

This is part of why the experience of living abroad can feel so non-linear. You aren’t simply moving from a state of not being adjusted, to one of being fully settled. You’re navigating a process where different aspects of your life and sense of self are adapting at different rates of speed. Practical stability can come relatively quickly, while your internal experience takes longer to align with your new environment.

The result is a sense of movement that doesn’t follow a straight line. You can feel at ease in one moment and uncertain in the next. You can feel that you have found your footing, only to realize that something still feels slightly out of place.

This “in-between” phase is what I refer to as the Life Abroad Integration Gap™. It’s the space where your life is functioning, but it doesn’t yet feel fully like your own. You aren’t necessarily struggling every single day, but you don’t feel entirely settled either. Because it doesn’t present as a clear problem, it can be difficult to recognize, and even more difficult to talk about.

For many expats and immigrants, this phase begins within the first year and can extend longer than they initially expect. The exact timeline varies, but the experience itself is remarkably consistent.

Understanding this can shift the way you relate to that first year entirely. Instead of interpreting these fluctuations as a sign that something isn’t working, you can begin to see them as part of a process that’s still unfolding. The moments of uncertainty don’t mean you’re going backwards. They’re simply part of the way this kind of adjustment happens.

Over time, things can begin to settle, but not in the way most people expect. It isn’t a sudden realization or a clear turning point; it happens more gradually than that. You may begin noticing that certain interactions feel easier, that you’re thinking less about what you’re doing, and that you recognize yourself more in the way you go about your daily life.

And then subtly, without even realizing when it happened, your life abroad feels less like something you’re managing, and more like something you’re actually living. It’s usually the point people were hoping to reach all along: not just having a life that’s functional, but one that feels like it actually belongs to them.

It may take longer than expected and it may not follow a straight line, but it does happen eventually. And when that day comes, it’ll feel like a real accomplishment for having taken the path that it did.

If this part of the experience has ever left you questioning yourself, you’re not alone. It’s something I see often, and something I’ve been exploring more openly in my work.

I share more of these reflections on Facebook & Instagram, where I help you understand the parts of life abroad that no one warned you about.

I’m also currently developing a 21-part video series, Life Abroad, Explained, where I go deeper into this phase and what’s actually shaping the experience.

There’s a point in life abroad where the intensity of the beginning phase starts to ease up. You’re no longer dealing with everything being unfamiliar. You’ve begun to understand how things work, at least enough to move through your day without constantly running into obstacles. Tasks that once felt complicated have become manageable. Situations that once required effort now feel more predictable. And yet, something doesn’t feel as settled as you expected it would.

This can happen earlier on than people think. Sometimes it shows up within the first few months, once the initial momentum of the move begins to slow down. Other times it becomes more noticeable as you move further into your first year. There isn’t a fixed point where it begins, which is part of what makes it difficult to recognize.

What you’re experiencing in that moment is not usually tied to one clear problem. It isn’t something you can point to and say, “this is what’s wrong.” Instead, it tends to come from a series of internal shifts that are happening at the same time, often quietly enough that they don’t immediately stand out.

This is what lies behind the Life Abroad Integration Gap™. It’s not a single issue that needs to be solved, but a phase where different layers of your experience are adjusting at different speeds.

One of the first changes you may notice is how much more aware you are in situations that used to feel automatic. Back home, most of your daily life didn’t require much thought. You moved through conversations without needing to analyze what you were about to say. You made decisions without second-guessing them afterward. There was a sense of ease in how you interacted with your environment, because you understood it without having to think about it.

Living abroad changes that dynamic. Even once you’ve started to settle into your surroundings, that automatic layer doesn’t fully return in the same way. You might find yourself pausing before speaking, choosing your words more carefully, or replaying conversations afterward to check that you said what you meant to say. Decisions that would have once felt straightforward can take longer, not because they’re more complicated, but because there’s more to process.

None of this feels significant on its own, but over time, it creates a continuous level of mental engagement that wasn’t there before. You’re not necessarily doing more, but it can feel like you are, simply because so much of what used to happen naturally, now requires your attention.

At the same time, your external life is beginning to take shape. You’re building routines and figuring out how to navigate your environment. You may be working, studying, meeting people, creating a sense of structure around your day. From the outside, it can look like things are moving forward in a positive direction.

Internally, however, the experience can be less straightforward. There are moments where you don’t feel as certain as you expected to feel by now. You might hesitate in situations where you would’ve previously felt confident, or notice that you’re second-guessing yourself in ways that are unfamiliar. There can be a feeling of not fully recognizing yourself in the way you respond to things, even in ordinary situations.

This is often where people start to question themselves. It can feel like a loss of confidence or a step backward, especially if you were used to feeling more grounded in your home country.

But what’s happening here is not a loss..it’s a period of adjustment where your sense of self is catching up to a new context. The way you experience yourself is closely tied to the environment you are in, and when that environment changes, it takes time for that internal alignment to re-establish itself. Alongside this, there’s a level of ongoing effort that tends to go unnoticed, until it begins to pile up.

A big part of living abroad, especially in the beginning, involves constantly interpreting things. You’re reading situations more carefully, paying attention to cues that might not come naturally, and adapting your responses based on what you observe. This can apply to language, but it also extends beyond it, into social expectations, cultural norms, and the unspoken ways people communicate.

Each of these adjustments might could be manageable if approached one by one. None of them feel like a major challenge on their own. But because they are continuous, they create a kind of background effort that doesn’t fully switch off.

Over time, this can lead to feeling drained, even if your day hasn’t been particularly demanding. It’s not the kind of exhaustion that comes from overwork, but a different kind of fatigue. You may notice that things take more energy than they used to, or that you don’t feel as comfortable in your surroundings as you expected to feel once the initial adjustment period has passed.

Another part of this phase is the way that progress and feeling settled don’t always move in sync with each other. You could be making real progress in your life abroad and building something stable, creating connections, and becoming more comfortable in your environment. At the same time, you might be feeling that something hasn’t quite fully come together yet.

There may be moments where you feel grounded and present, followed by moments where you feel slightly disconnected or unsure of your footing. It can be super confusing when this happens, because it doesn’t fit into a clear narrative of either “struggling” or “settled.” Instead, it sits somewhere in between, where things are working in many ways, but not yet fully integrated.

What makes this phase particularly difficult is how easy it is to overlook. There’s no clear marker that signals its beginning, no single issue that demands your attention. You’re functioning and adapting, and from the outside, everything can appear to be moving in the right direction.

Because of that, it’s easy to assume that what you’re feeling is simply part of the process that will resolve itself with time. And in some cases, some parts do settle naturally as you become more familiar with your environment.

But this phase isn’t only about getting used to a place. It’s about how your internal experience aligns with the life you’re building there. Without that alignment, it’s possible to continue moving forward while still feeling slightly out of step with your own life.

The shift begins when you start to understand what’s actually happening beneath the surface. When you recognize that these experiences are connected (rather than random), they begin to make more sense. The hesitation, the extra effort, the sense of disconnection, all become part of a larger process rather than isolated issues.

This understanding can change the way you relate to what you’re experiencing. Instead of trying to push through or fix something that feels off, you can begin to approach it with more clarity and see where you are in the process. That alone reduces a significant amount of the pressure.

From there, it becomes easier to find a sense of steadiness that doesn’t depend on everything feeling familiar. You begin to rebuild a way of moving through your life that feels more consistent and more aligned with who you are, even within a different country. Over time, this creates a certain stability, one that comes from feeling more at home in yourself within your life abroad.

If you find yourself somewhere in this phase, whether you’ve been abroad for a few months or closer to a couple of years, there’s nothing unusual about what you’re experiencing.

This is a part of life abroad that many people move through, even if it’s not often talked about in a clear or structured way. It doesn’t follow a fixed timeline, and it doesn’t look exactly the same for everyone. But understanding it can make a big difference, because it gives you a way to make sense of what might otherwise feel random and unclear.

And once that clarity is there, it becomes much easier to find your footing and continue building a life abroad that not only works on paper, but also feels like it truly belongs to you.

If you recognize yourself in this phase, this is exactly the kind of work I do with clients — helping them make sense of what’s happening and move through it in a way that feels more steady.

You’re always welcome to reach out if you want to talk through where you are in this.

It came up in different ways, at different stages of life abroad, but there was a common thread running through it — a point where things looked like they were working on the outside, but didn’t quite feel settled on the inside.

I recognized it because I had experienced it myself.

This essay is the first time I’m putting that pattern into words in a more structured way, and it’s something I’ll be exploring more in future pieces, from different angles and through different stages of the experience.

If you’re at the beginning of your life abroad, I hope this gives you a clearer sense of what you might encounter along the way. And if you’re already somewhere in the middle of it, it might help you make sense of what you’re experiencing now.

You’ve already made the move and started building a life here. You handled the logistics. You figured out how things work, at least enough to get through your day without everything feeling like an obstacle, and from the outside, it looks like life is coming together.

But that’s not quite how it feels.

There are moments where something feels slightly out of place, where you move through your routine but aren’t fully in it. Decisions take more effort than they used to, and you catch yourself hesitating, second-guessing, or pulling back in situations where you’d normally feel more certain.

Nothing is clearly wrong…and yet, something isn’t quite right either.

The Part No One Prepares You For

When people talk about moving abroad, they tend to focus on the beginning: the decision, the excitement, and the practical side of getting from one country to another and setting up a new life.

In the early stages, there’s momentum. Everything is new, and that carries you forward. You’re learning constantly, adapting quickly, figuring things out as you go, and even the challenges can feel meaningful because they’re part of the experience.

But eventually, that phase passes, and life settles into something more routine. The unfamiliar starts to feel normal, and that’s often when a different kind of experience begins to surface.

I remember standing in a grocery store in Paris years after I had moved, trying to find something simple I had bought many times before and not being able to find it anywhere. The frustration that came up felt completely disproportionate to what was happening.

It had very little to do with what I was looking for. It was everything underneath it; the accumulation of small, ongoing adjustments, the mental translation, the awareness of being slightly out of sync with the environment around me, the effort it takes to function in a place where things don’t quite land the same way they do back home.

That’s often where this experience starts to show itself.

When Your Reference Points Shift

Living abroad changes more than your surroundings; it changes how you experience yourself within them.

Back home, you don’t put much thought into everyday tasks. You understand how things work without needing to analyze them, and you move through conversations, decisions, and daily life without constantly checking yourself. There’s a sense of recognition between you and your environment that makes everything feel more straightforward.

Abroad, that recognition isn’t always there. You might notice it in small ways: by pausing before you speak, replaying conversations afterward, and feeling less certain in situations that used to feel simple. It doesn’t mean you’ve become less capable; it means the context has changed, and you’re responding to it.

I’ve worked with people who were confident and established in their home countries, who found themselves hesitating over interactions that would have felt effortless before. It wasn’t because they lacked ability, but because they were operating in a different set of cues, expectations, and feedback. One client put it simply: “I have to think about things I never used to think about before.”

That shift can be subtle, but over time it has an impact.

Why This Phase Is Easy to Miss

Part of what makes this experience so frustrating is how easily it slips under the radar. You’ve built a life and you’re functioning ok. You’re doing what you came here to do, and from the outside, everything can look fine.

So when something feels off internally, it doesn’t always make sense. There’s no clear problem to solve and no obvious next step, which makes it easy to assume it will pass or that you just need to push through it.

But what’s happening here isn’t tied to a single issue you can fix. It has more to do with alignment: how your internal experience fits with the life you’re living now, and how that has evolved over time.

When that isn’t fully processed, it tends to show up as friction. Decisions feel heavier, energy isn’t as steady, and there’s a sense of disconnection that’s hard to explain, especially when everything looks fine on the surface.

The Life Abroad Integration Gap™

Over time, I started to see this pattern more clearly, not just in my own experience but in the people around me and in the clients I began working with. People who had been abroad for years (sometimes decades), who had built full, functioning lives in their new countries and yet still felt like something hadn’t quite settled.

This is what I call the Life Abroad Integration Gap™: the phase where you’ve started building your life abroad, but internally, things haven’t fully settled yet.

It’s the space between arriving and actually feeling at home in your life...not just externally, but internally.

This is also the part of life abroad that I focus on in my work.

What Actually Helps

Working through this phase doesn’t mean changing everything about your life. It starts with understanding what you’re experiencing, rather than questioning yourself for it, and noticing where you’ve adapted in ways that don’t fully fit anymore.

From there, it becomes easier to reconnect with parts of yourself that may have been set aside along the way, and to build a sense of steadiness that isn’t entirely dependent on everything around you feeling familiar.

I’ve seen people move through this in a way that creates a real shift. Life doesn’t suddenly become perfect, but it starts to feel more grounded, more coherent, more like their own...and that changes how everything else is experienced.

A Different Way to Look at It

Most people assume that feeling settled abroad is just a matter of time, that if you stay long enough, things will eventually click into place on their own. And sometimes they do, but not always in the way that people expect. Because what’s happening in this phase isn’t just about getting used to a place; it’s about how you relate to your life within it.

You can build routines, create stability, even feel comfortable in your environment, and still have a sense that something hasn’t fully settled yet. Not because you’ve missed a step, but because this part of the process tends to get skipped.

The external side of life abroad gets a lot of attention, while the internal side usually doesn’t — and without that piece, it’s easy to stay in that in-between space longer than you need to, waiting for something to shift on its own.

Where This Leaves You

Wherever you are in your first months or years abroad, this is a phase many people move through in their own time.

If you’re currently going through this, there’s no need to push harder or force things to fall into place. And you don’t have to stay in this in-between space longer than you need to.

Sometimes the shift starts with understanding what’s actually happening beneath the surface, because once that becomes clearer, it’s much easier to find your footing again.

And from there, you can begin to build a life abroad that doesn’t just work on paper, but actually feels like yours.

———

If this is the part of life abroad you find yourself in, this is exactly the kind of work I do with clients, helping them make sense of it and move through it in a way that feels more steady. If you’d like to talk through where you are in this, you’re always welcome to reach out.

A few months after I moved to France, somewhere in between learning the language, trying to make new friends, and going through a stretch of being constantly sick with one ‘-itis’ after another, I started questioning things.

Why does this feel harder than it should?

Nothing serious had happened and nothing “big” was going wrong (unless you count running out of acetaminophen and tissues every couple of days)…that’s what made it even more confusing to me.

I had already dealt with most of the initial logistics. I knew how to get to and from my French classes by myself. I could manage rudimentary conversations (as long as they didn’t require using the past or future tenses). I could run errands, and handle the basics of daily life without too much trouble.

On paper, things were pretty much working. But something still felt off, and I couldn’t quite explain why.

It started to show up in the little moments. I remember being in a conversation at Sunday lunch with my fiancé’s family and knowing exactly what I wanted to say. It was all there, fully formed in French (albeit imperfectly). But instead of just saying it, I hesitated. I paused for a second too long, trying to make sure I had it right, trying to make sure it would come out the way I intended.

And then the moment passed. The conversation moved on, and I didn’t say anything.

What stood out to me wasn’t that I didn’t have something to say. It was that I didn’t trust or believe in myself enough to say it. That wasn’t something I was used to.

Before moving abroad, I didn’t think about how I was participating in conversations; I just spoke, reacted, and responded in the moment. Everything was easy.

But now, that ease was gone. And what replaced it wasn’t confusion…it was hesitation. There was a gap between what I wanted to do and what I actually did in the moment.

Over time, I started to notice something that wasn’t easy to admit: my self-confidence had taken a hit and I didn’t trust myself in the same way. I was still capable, mind you. I could still function…but in those everyday situations where I would normally accomplish tasks without thinking, something had very visibly changed.

I hesitated more. I second-guessed myself more. I even found myself holding back in situations where I would have normally stepped in, without thinking twice. And because I didn’t have a clear explanation for it, I tried to explain it away. I told myself I was overthinking, that I just needed more time and that things would settle once I got more comfortable.

But that didn’t fully explain what I was experiencing. What made it even more confusing was that nothing on the outside reflected it. If something had clearly gone wrong, it would have made more sense.

Instead, everything looked fine, and that made it harder to take the feeling seriously. It wasn’t about any one situation in particular; it was about how I was experiencing myself across all of them.

That’s the part that’s difficult to put into words. You can still do everything you need to do. You can manage your life, have conversations, and handle responsibilities. From the outside, it can look like you’ve adjusted but internally, it doesn’t feel the same.

There’s less ease, less immediacy, and less certainty in how you move through things…and over time, that starts to affect how you see yourself.

At first, I thought it was a confidence issue, that I needed to push through it, speak more, try harder to get back to how I used to feel. But the more I paid attention to it, the more I realized it wasn’t that simple.

There are parts of how you move through the world that depend on familiarity more than you think: the way you respond without thinking, the way you step into a moment without hesitation, the way you trust your instinct in real time.

When that familiarity is gone (even slightly), your experience of yourself changes with it. You’re still the same person, but you don’t have the same “access” to yourself in the moment.

At the time, I treated that as something I needed to fix. I kept trying to get back to how things used to feel, but that approach never really worked, because I was trying to solve the wrong problem.

This wasn’t about getting better at daily life, or even just adjusting to a new environment. It was about learning how to feel like myself in a place where everything around you was different. And without a way to understand that, it was easy to turn it into something personal, to assume it meant something about my level of confidence, my abilities, or even my decision to move in the first place.

Looking back now, what changed things for me was understanding what I was actually experiencing. Once I could see it for what it was, the feeling didn’t disappear right away, but it stopped carrying the same weight. It stopped meaning that something was wrong.

This is one of those parts of living abroad that doesn’t get talked about much. It’s the part where your life is already working, but your sense of self within it hasn’t fully caught up yet. And when you don’t have a way to understand that, it’s easy to make it mean something about you, that you’ve lost something or that you’re not showing up the way you used to.

But what’s actually happening is something more gradual. You’re learning how to move through your life again in a place where everything around you is different.

And over time, that ease does come back. Just not all at once, and not in the way you expect.

———

I’ve been working on a video series that breaks this down more fully, because once you can actually see what’s happening, the experience starts to make a lot more sense.

If you want me to send you the details when it’s ready, just comment INTERESTED below.

When people think about moving abroad, they usually expect a learning curve. There’s often a new language, a different culture, and new systems to figure out.

What they don’t always expect is how much that experience can affect the way they see themselves; not just in practical terms, but on a deeper level.

This is something that often goes unnoticed until you’re in it:
Your sense of competence is closely tied to your ability to express yourself.

Before I moved to France, I never really thought about that connection.

Language was just something I used. It didn’t occur to me that it was also shaping how I experienced myself in the world.

In my native language, I felt comfortable. I could explain things clearly, react quickly in conversations, and express ideas without having to think too much about how to form them. If I wanted to make a joke or add something light to a conversation, it came naturally. It wasn’t something I questioned.

Then I moved abroad, and that ease disappeared almost overnight.

I could still communicate, albeit with a little difficulty. I eventually learned how to handle day-to-day situations, have conversations, and do what I needed to do, but something felt different.

Conversations took more effort. I had to think before speaking, simplify what I wanted to say, and sometimes let things go altogether because I couldn’t find the right words quickly enough.

And over time, I started to notice something: I didn’t feel as confident as I used to. That feeling of being less competent living abroad can be hard to explain until you’ve experienced it yourself. But what I didn’t understand at the time is this:

Nothing was wrong with me. I hadn’t lost my ability. I’d lost my ease of expression.

When you move abroad, your intelligence doesn’t drop; your ability to express it gets temporarily restricted. And when that happens, it creates the illusion of incompetence, and because you experience that every day, it starts to feel real.

There were moments where I understood something perfectly but struggled to explain it clearly. Moments where I had an idea, but couldn’t express it with the same precision or confidence I was used to. And that creates a strange disconnect, because you know what you’re capable of, but it doesn’t always come across that way, to others or even to yourself.

I also noticed how much this affected my personality in conversations. In English, I’ve always been someone who enjoys those small, quick exchanges. I like making people laugh; it’s part of how I connect with others.

But in French, for a long time, that part of me didn’t really show up. Humor requires timing and it requires ease. And when you’re still constructing sentences in your head, that ease just isn’t there.

I remember sitting in conversations at work, thinking of something I could say that would normally feel effortless…and then just not saying it. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t quite get there in time.

It’s not just that you can’t find the right words. It’s that the version of you that knows how to connect, suddenly isn’t available. And that’s where it becomes unsettling, because it stops feeling like a language issue, and starts feeling like a “you” issue.

After a while, I started speaking less. It wasn’t necessarily obvious to others, but enough that I could feel it. I was still present, still engaged, but I wasn’t participating in the same way I would have before.

And that’s where the feeling of being “muted” started to come in. It wasn’t that I had become a quieter person…it was that I didn’t have full access to how I expressed myself.

I think this is something a lot of expats and immigrants experience, even if they don’t always talk about it. When your language skills are limited, your ability to show who you are becomes limited too. And because we’re so used to equating how we express ourselves with who we are, it’s easy to start feeling like a “reduced” version of yourself: less articulate, less witty, less…you (even when none of that is actually true).

Looking back, I can roughly break this experience into three phases:

1. Compression: You can’t express yourself fully.

2. Distortion: You start questioning your competence and who you are.

3. Reintegration: Your expression begins to return, in a new and often deeper way.

I remember one moment very clearly that shifted something for me. I was at work, in a conversation with my colleagues, and I said something slightly funny. Not by accident (or because I used the wrong word, which happened on occasion).

I said it intentionally, and they laughed. The conversation moved on to something else right away, but I remember feeling like I had hit a mini-milestone in that brief second, realizing that what I said landed exactly the way I meant it to.

I didn’t react or make anything of it in the moment, but when I got home that evening, you’d better believe I gave myself a little pat on the back. It wasn’t the kind of thing that anyone else would notice or care about, but one that mattered to me. Because it meant that something had come back; a part of me that hadn’t been fully accessible was starting to show up again.

That’s the part of this experience that takes time. You can learn to function in another language relatively quickly. You can understand, respond, manage your daily life. But feeling like yourself in that language is something else entirely. That develops more slowly.

It’s also the part most people try to push through on their own. They focus on learning the language, but don’t realize they’re also rebuilding their identity. And most people aren’t prepared for that part.

The way we speak is tied to years of experience. It’s shaped by how we think, how we connect, how we react in the moment. When you move abroad, you’re not just learning new words. You’re learning how to express yourself again, and that process isn’t just practical. It’s deeply personal.

If you’re in that stage now, where you feel like only part of you is coming through, it can be frustrating in a way that’s hard to explain to others. You know there’s more of “you” there; you just can’t always access it yet.

But that changes. It may change slowly over time, and without much fanfare, but it changes. You’ll eventually find yourself speaking more easily. You’ll react more naturally. You’ll say something without overthinking it, and it sounds right.

And then it happens again. Until one day, you’re in a conversation and you recognize yourself in it. Maybe not perfectly and maybe not exactly in the same way as before, but enough to know that you’re back.

Nothing was lost, but something is being rebuilt. And that process deserves more attention than most people give it.

Because this isn’t just about adapting to a new country.

It’s about learning how to be yourself again…in a completely new environment.

If this resonated with you, you’re in great company.

This is something many people experience when they move abroad, but it’s not always talked about in this way.

I share more reflections like this, along with practical insights on navigating the emotional and identity side of life abroad, over on Facebook & Instagram.

If you’re in that in-between stage and want support, perspective, or simply to feel a little less alone in it, you’re welcome to join me there.

When people imagine life abroad, they usually picture charming cafés, cobblestone streets, weekend trips to new cities, and a feeling of adventure around every corner.

And yes, sometimes life abroad really does look like that.

But if you’ve ever actually lived abroad for any length of time, you know there’s a deeper side to the story, because the emotional journey of relocating to another country is far more complex than the Instagram version.

When I first moved to France years ago, I arrived with two suitcases and a head full of expectations about what life abroad would look like. Some of those expectations were accurate. Many of them were not.

Like most people preparing to move overseas, I had focused heavily on the logistics: Paperwork. Housing. Language classes. How daily life might work in a new country.

What I hadn’t fully anticipated was the emotional journey that would unfold along the way.

Over the years, both through my own experiences and through conversations with other expats, I began noticing something interesting: many of us seem to move through a similar set of emotional stages after relocating abroad.

Understanding those stages can make the whole experience feel far less confusing.

So if you’re currently living abroad and wondering why your emotions sometimes feel like they’re all over the place, here’s something reassuring.

You’re probably right on schedule.

Stage 1: The Escape Stage

Before the move, everything feels full of possibility.

You imagine the life waiting for you in your new country. Perhaps it’s a fresh start, an adventure, or simply the feeling that maybe, just maybe, life will be better there.

There’s something incredibly powerful about the idea of beginning again somewhere new, and a different country can feel like a blank canvas.

I remember very well the anticipation I felt before some of the major turning points in my own life. When you’re standing on the edge of a big transition, it’s natural to imagine the best version of what the future might look like.

At this stage, the focus is mostly on hope. And hope is a powerful thing.

Stage 2: The Arrival High

Then you arrive.

The first weeks or months can feel exhilarating. Every street is new and every café feels like a discovery. Even ordinary errands suddenly feel slightly adventurous.

You might find yourself walking down a street and thinking I actually live here.

When I first settled into life in France, there were moments when even simple things felt exciting, like grocery shopping in another language, learning the rhythm of the neighborhood, and slowly recognizing streets and landmarks that had once felt completely unfamiliar.

There’s this amazing feeling that comes with realizing that this faraway place you once dreamed of living in, has now become part of your daily life.

This is the honeymoon phase of expat life.
But like most honeymoons, it eventually gives way to something more complicated.

Stage 3: The Bureaucracy Wall

Sooner or later, reality arrives. And sometimes it shows up in the form of paperwork.

Anyone who has lived in France (or in almost any foreign country) knows this moment well. Suddenly you’re navigating unfamiliar systems, trying to interpret official letters written in complex administrative language, or standing in an office wondering whether you’ve brought the correct document…again.

I remember arriving at one early appointment with a carefully organized color-coded folder of paperwork, feeling confident that I had finally brought everything that was required.

Within a few minutes it became clear that another document was needed: one I hadn’t even known existed.

Situations like that can feel incredibly frustrating in the moment. Over time, however, they become part of the strange orientation education that comes with living abroad.

This stage isn’t just about bureaucracy, though. It’s about the realization that everyday life in another country often requires more patience, more flexibility, and sometimes a much greater sense of humor than you expected.

Things that used to feel simple suddenly require much more effort and as a result, many expats find themselves emotionally exhausted during this phase.

Stage 4: Identity Shock

This is the stage that surprises many people the most.

Living abroad doesn’t just challenge your logistical abilities…it can challenge your sense of identity.

You may notice that expressing your personality in another language is a lot harder than you expected. Jokes don’t land the same way, and conversations require more concentration.

Sometimes you know exactly what you want to say in your native language, but when you try to say it in another language you suddenly feel less articulate than you’re used to being.

I’ve watched many intelligent, capable people go through this stage; people who are extremely confident in their home country but temporarily feel unsure of themselves abroad.

It can feel as if parts of your personality are sitting just behind the language barrier, waiting for you to catch up.

This stage can feel uncomfortable, but it’s also a sign that something important is happening.

You’re adapting.

Stage 5: The Loneliness Gap

At some point, many expats encounter another unexpected challenge: loneliness.

Back home, relationships usually develop slowly over years. Friendships grow through shared experiences, familiar routines, and long histories together.

When you move abroad, that entire support system disappears almost overnight.

Even if you meet wonderful people in your new country, building meaningful friendships takes time.

I’ve spoken with many expats who often admit the same thing: they love their new country, but sometimes they miss the comfort of being surrounded by people who have known them for decades. They miss the shared memories, the inside jokes, and the ease of conversations that require no explanation.

These feelings are incredibly common, even if we don’t always talk about them openly.

Stage 6: The Identity Rebuild

Gradually, something begins to shift.

You start developing new routines and recognize familiar faces in your neighborhood. The language becomes easier and daily interactions begin to feel more natural.

At some point you realize you’re no longer navigating everything as a newbie. You understand how things work and you know where to go when you need something. Life begins to feel less like constant adjustment, and more like something you’re actively shaping.

This is when many expats start to rediscover their confidence. They aren’t the same person they were before the move, but often a slightly more resilient version of themselves.

Living abroad has a way of revealing strengths you didn’t know you had.

Stage 7: Thriving Abroad

Eventually, the new country stops feeling entirely foreign.

You have favorite places, familiar routines, and a rhythm that feels comfortable. You begin to feel grounded again (geographically and emotionally).

Life abroad becomes rewarding in a deeper way - not because everything is perfect, but because you’ve grown through the experience. And that growth changes you.

The Lesson Most Expats Eventually Learn

If there’s one thing living abroad teaches us, it’s that adapting to a new country is not just a logistical process. It’s an emotional journey, too.

Every stage brings its own challenges, but each stage also brings growth. The moments when you feel uncertain, frustrated, or out of place are often the same moments where resilience and perspective begin to develop.

In many ways, living abroad asks us to reinvent ourselves…and that reinvention can become one of the most meaningful parts of the experience.

A Final Thought

Living abroad doesn’t just change where you live.

It changes how you see the world, and sometimes how you see yourself.

Adapting to life in another country is not simply about learning a new language or navigating a different system. It’s about learning how to rebuild a sense of identity and belonging in an entirely new environment.

And that journey looks a little different for everyone.

So I’m curious:

Which stage of living abroad has been the most surprising or challenging for you so far?

Continue the Conversation

If this article resonated with you and you’d like more reflections about the emotional side of life abroad, you can explore more articles here: https://www.thriveonthrough.com/blog

I also share thoughts and conversations about life abroad on my Facebook profile if you’d like to follow along: https://www.facebook.com/paristocrat

Many of the reflections I share come from conversations with expats navigating the same questions, doubts, and adjustments that come with building a life in another country.

Living abroad is an incredible adventure, but it also stretches you in ways you don’t always expect.

And sometimes the most valuable thing we learn along the way is how to Thrive On Through the journey.

When people start thinking about moving abroad, most of the conversations focus on practical things like healthcare systems, transportation, cost of living, visa requirements, and where to connect with other expats.

All of those things matter, of course. They help you understand how daily life might function in another country. But after living abroad for many years, I’ve come to believe that another skill matters just as much as logistical preparation: your ability to pivot.

Life abroad has a way of testing that ability again and again. Plans shift and expectations change. What once seemed straightforward becomes more complicated.

The people who adapt most easily are not always the ones who planned the most carefully. They’re often the ones who can adjust direction without losing sight of what matters most to them.

Looking back at my own life, I realize that learning how to pivot started long before I ever moved overseas.

In 1995, when I was a junior in college, I was involved in a head-on collision with a semi-tractor trailer. It was the kind of accident that interrupts the life you thought you were building.

At the time, I had my sights set on a career with the FBI. I was studying sociology, psychology, and criminal justice, and preparing for the physical requirements that would eventually be necessary to become an agent. The injuries from that accident changed things, however. Running, which had once been effortless, was no longer something my body could reliably do. In a matter of moments, the path I had been working toward disappeared.

At first, it felt like everything had been taken away from me. I had spent years preparing for a specific goal, only to realize that my body would no longer cooperate with that plan. But after the initial shock settled, I started asking a different question.

If I couldn’t help people through law enforcement, maybe I could help them heal.

That thought led me toward medicine. Upon my return to my university studies, I became a pre-med student and began preparing for a future in healthcare. For a while, that path made sense. I could see the next steps clearly and I was willing to put in the work required to get there.

Then life surprised me again.

In 1998, when the internet was still new and most people were just beginning to explore what it could be used for, I met the man who would later become my husband. We met in an online chat room, which at the time felt less like a dating tool and more like a strange new window into the wider world. People logged in simply to talk to strangers from other countries and compare notes about how life worked in different places.

We weren’t looking for anything romantic. At first it was just conversation and curiosity. But over time our connection deepened, and it slowly became clear that my future might eventually involve moving to France.

That realization created another crossroads.

Medical school in the United States meant years of study and a significant amount of debt. Taking on that level of financial commitment didn’t make much sense if I was likely to relocate overseas in the near future.

So once again, I pivoted. Not because I lacked determination, but because the context had changed.

Moving to France brought its own set of adjustments. Anyone who has navigated French bureaucracy knows it can test your patience in ways you never expected. There’s paperwork, appointments, requests for additional documents, and long waiting periods. Plans didn’t always unfold the way I thought they would.

Over time, though, I learned something important about living abroad:

The ability to adapt is often more valuable than the ability to predict what will happen.

I enrolled at the Sorbonne to study French and eventually earned a degree in linguistics. That decision opened a door I hadn’t anticipated.

My first job in France was at an international law firm. I started as an administrative assistant to the managing partner, helping bridge communication between English and French speakers. Eventually that role expanded. I was in charge of bilingual IT training for the firm’s legal staff, helping attorneys and employees navigate new systems in both languages. It wasn’t the career I had imagined when I was younger, but it was meaningful work that allowed me to grow professionally while building a life in another country.

Years later, another turning point arrived.

The financial crisis of 2008 created uncertainty in many industries, and it pushed me to reflect on what I wanted for the next chapter of my professional life. That reflection led to another pivot.

I went back to school to study copywriting and began working as a freelance creative copywriter. Eventually I joined an international advertising agency and spent more than a decade working on campaigns for one of the world’s largest beauty brands. For 12+ years, that work became a central part of my professional identity.

And then life shifted again.

After a period that included multiple surgeries, a long recovery, the COVID lockdowns, a divorce, and an exhausting corporate burnout, I found myself asking new questions about what I wanted moving forward.

It wasn’t a decision that happened overnight, though. I took a sabbatical year to rest and regain perspective, something that felt both necessary and unfamiliar after so many years of constant activity.

During that time, something interesting resurfaced.

The original desire that had once led me toward law enforcement and medicine — the desire to help people — was still there. It had simply been waiting for a new form.

That realization led me to enroll in the Integrative Wellness Academy, where I trained as an Integrative Wellness and Life Transition coach.

Today, my work brings together many parts of my life experience: the years spent navigating life abroad, the professional transitions I’ve lived through, and the certifications I’ve received in life coaching and wellness.

Helping people who are moving abroad and adjusting to life abroad feels like a natural continuation of the path I started exploring many years ago.

When I look back at the different chapters of my life, a pattern becomes clear: each major transition required a pivot. Not an all-out reinvention, but a shift in direction that allowed me to keep moving forward when the original plans I had no longer fit.

This is one of the reasons I often encourage people who are considering a move abroad to think about something beyond logistics. Researching healthcare systems, transportation networks, and visa rules is important; those details shape the practical side of daily life. But there is another layer that matters just as much: your internal flexibility.

Living abroad has a way of confronting you with situations you cannot fully anticipate. Expectations don’t always live up to reality. Systems function differently than you assumed they would. Opportunities appear where you didn’t think to look, while other plans might easily be tossed out the window.

Preparation helps, but it doesn’t eliminate uncertainty.

What helps more is the ability to recalibrate your inner compass: to ask new questions, and to adjust direction while staying connected to the deeper motivations that brought you abroad in the first place.

In many ways, resilience shows up as the willingness to pivot, when life changes direction or unfolds in a way that requires a different response.

Some of the most fulfilled people I know living abroad are not the ones whose plans unfolded exactly as expected. They are the ones who learned to adapt and stayed curious. The ones who allowed their lives to evolve alongside the places they chose to call home.

Looking back now, I can see that every pivot in my life carried something valuable forward. The desire to help others never disappeared; it simply changed shape as my circumstances changed.

And perhaps that’s one of the deeper lessons that life abroad teaches: you don’t have to have everything perfectly mapped out in order to build a meaningful life in another country.

What matters more is your willingness to adjust when the road bends, because sometimes the life you end up building isn’t the one you originally planned.

It’s the one that slowly takes shape as you learn to pivot, again and again, toward the direction that feels most aligned with who you are becoming.

Life abroad rarely unfolds exactly the way we imagine. Learning how to pivot is often part of the journey.

If you’d like thoughtful insights and practical perspective as you navigate your own life abroad, you can follow Thrive on Through on Facebook & Instagram, where I share daily support for expats and immigrants adjusting to life overseas.

I’m also preparing a 21-part video series about life abroad, designed for those moments when things don’t go according to plan. If you’d like to be the first to hear when it launches, staying connected there is the best way to find out.

If you’ve lived in France long enough, you’ve probably developed a complicated relationship with paperwork.

I was a guest on a podcast recently where we talked about some of the more challenging parts of life abroad. We covered the language first. That part felt predictable: Yes, it’s humbling and exhausting, and sometimes you feel like your intelligent adult self has temporarily disappeared.

But then we moved on to something else: French bureaucracy.
Or as many expats eventually call it, bureaucrazy.

The host asked about my own experiences with l’administration française, particularly when I was applying for residency paperwork and, later, for French nationality. I had to laugh; not because it was funny at the time, but because distance has a way of softening the sharp edges of those memories.

At the time, it did not feel funny.

When I first began the residency process, I approached it the way any well-organized, Type A personality would: I requested the official list of required documents. I made a checklist. I gathered every paper carefully. Birth certificates. Utility bills. Translations. Copies of copies. I put everything into neat folders.

I showed up prepared…or so I thought.

The first appointment was my introduction to how things really work. I was told I was missing a document that was not on the list. When I pointed this out, I was informed that the list I had must be outdated.

Frustration does not even begin to cover it.

So I went home, found the missing document, and made new copies.

At the next appointment, I was told I needed three copies of something I had brought only two of. Again, this had not been specified anywhere. Again, I was told the guidelines had changed.

It felt random. Arbitrary. As though the rules were shifting mid-game.

There is something uniquely destabilizing about not knowing whether you have done enough, especially when the stakes feel high. Residency. Nationality. Your legal right to remain in the country where you’ve built your life.

You start to feel small and powerless, and dependent on decisions that seem to be made behind a curtain that you’re not allowed to see.

At one appointment, I remember standing in a crowded office where dozens of people were waiting. An older civil servant (“older”, as in close to retirement age) sat at a desk with his feet up, eyes closed, very clearly asleep. No one said anything. We all just waited.

It was one of those moments where you start questioning reality. Is this really happening? Is this part of the process?

The waiting became its own test. Not just of time, but of temperament.

France, in its own way, has cured me of certain Type A tendencies. I used to believe that if you prepared well enough, organized thoroughly enough, and followed instructions carefully enough, you could control the outcome.

French bureaucracy does not respond to that mindset.

There were moments when I walked out of offices with my heart pounding. Moments when I felt a mix of anger and anxiety. Moments when I thought: What if this doesn’t work out? What if I did everything right and it still isn’t enough?

One of the biggest lessons I learned during that time was the importance of language. Not just conversational language. More like what I call “bureaucratic language”.

In certain situations, being able to negotiate matters. Sometimes the first answer is “no”. And if you accept that first “no” without question, the conversation ends there. Other times, if you stay calm and ask another question, something shifts.

I saw this clearly when dealing with my French driver’s license. The initial response I got from the person behind the counter suggested that what I was requesting was not possible. But with patience, clarity, and the right vocabulary, the conversation moved. What had seemed fixed suddenly became flexible.

That doesn’t mean every “no” turns into a “yes.” But it does mean that how you show up matters.

If you don’t yet speak the language fluently, having a friend with you can change everything. Not only because they can help translate words, but because they understand tone, nuance, and when it’s appropriate to gently push back.

There’s something deeply humbling about the moment you realize you are not fully in control of your own timeline.

The waiting game is real. You submit paperwork and then you wait…for weeks. Sometimes months. You check the mailbox more often than you want to admit. You replay conversations in your head and wonder if you misunderstood something.

That uncertainty has a way of working on your nervous system.

For me, it brought up more than just irritation. It touched something deeper: the desire for stability. The need to know that my life here was secure. The fear of building something that could, in theory, be taken away because of a missing stamp or an overlooked photocopy.

Living abroad often tests you in ways you don’t anticipate. You expect to be challenged by language or culture, but you don’t necessarily expect to be reshaped by administrative processes.

And yet, that is exactly what happened for me.

Somewhere between the third unexpected document request and the fourth long wait in a crowded office, something shifted. I realized that my usual strategy of tightening my grip on things was not helping.

I could still be organized and thorough, but I had to let go of the illusion that preparation guaranteed the outcome I wanted.

That realization was uncomfortable, but it also freed up a surprising amount of energy.

Instead of trying to predict every possible obstacle, I started focusing on what I could control, like showing up with the right mindset. Staying calm and asking questions respectfully. Accepting that delays were part of the process.

France did not change its system for me, but I changed how I moved within it.

There is a certain amount of growth that comes from navigating a system that doesn’t bend easily. You learn patience, not as a personality trait, but as a survival skill. You learn that anxiety rarely speeds things up. You learn that sometimes progress looks like waiting without spiraling.

But you also gain empathy.

Every person sitting in those waiting rooms has a story. A reason they’re there. A hope tied to that folder of documents. When you look around, you realize you’re part of something much bigger than your own frustration.

Eventually, my residency paperwork was approved. And some years later, my nationality application was processed. There was no big celebration or moment of triumph, just a letter in the mail. A simple confirmation that the long process had led somewhere.

Looking back, I can see that bureaucrazy was more than an administrative hurdle. It was part of my integration.

It forced me to engage with the country not just socially, but structurally. It required me to understand how things actually function here. It pushed me to speak up in another language, and stretched my patience in ways I didn’t think I needed.

And yes, it even cured me of my Type A personality.

If you are in the middle of your own paperwork saga right now, feeling like the rules keep shifting and the waiting is endless, I see you.

It is frustrating and it can feel unfair. It can even make you question your decision to move in the first place.

But it is also part of the deeper process of building a life abroad. Not the glamorous part. Not the Instagram-worthy part. The real part.

Living overseas asks you to surrender a certain amount of control. It asks you to tolerate ambiguity and to stay grounded when the outcome is not guaranteed.

Over time, that changes you.

You become more adaptable, more patient, and less attached to perfect timelines. You learn that progress sometimes happens silently behind the scenes, even when it looks like nothing is moving.

And one day, you open the mailbox and realize that what once felt impossible has finally become your reality.

French bureaucracy may always carry a touch of bureaucrazy. But if you stay long enough, you start to see it differently. Not as an enemy, but as a rite of passage.

It isn’t about conquering the system. It’s about growing into the kind of person who can navigate it without losing yourself in the process.

And maybe that’s the real shift. Not that the system becomes easier, but that you become steadier inside it.

Living abroad keeps shaping us in ways we don’t always see while we’re in the middle of it.

If you’d like a grounded place to reflect on the emotional side of life overseas — the language struggles, the paperwork, the identity shifts, the waiting — you can follow Thrive on Through on Facebook & Instagram. I share daily thoughts and perspective for expats and immigrants building real lives abroad.

I’m also working on a 21-part video series about life abroad, especially those early chapters that feel confusing, humbling, and undefined. If you’d like to be the first to know when it launches, subscribing (it’s free!) is the simplest way to stay in the loop.

When you first move abroad, you don’t realize all the ways that being far from home can affect you.

At first, distance feels mostly practical: you focus on time zones, plane ticket prices, and the effort it takes to stay in touch. But at some point, something happens, and you realize your life abroad now runs on two tracks at once. One is here, in the place where you’ve built your routines. The other is still tied to the people, places, and stories that shaped you, even if you haven’t lived there in years.

Just last week, I was in line at a bakery, half listening to the conversation in front of me, thinking about what I needed to get done that afternoon. Then my phone buzzed. I glanced down and saw a headline that made my stomach drop. You know, the kind of article you don’t want to open, but you also can’t ignore.

Two minutes later, I was still standing there, trying to make a perfectly ordinary decision, while something heavy settled in my chest. The woman behind the counter was waiting. The people behind me were waiting. The street outside looked exactly the same as it had five minutes earlier. And somewhere else, across the Atlantic, things were clearly not the same at all.

Life abroad doesn’t come with a pause button. Your day keeps moving, even when your attention is suddenly pulled somewhere else. You finish paying, step back onto the sidewalk, and you carry two very different realities at the same time.

This is part of the emotional landscape of living abroad that no one really prepares you for. You can expect to miss people and you can expect certain places to feel far away. What’s harder to anticipate is how distance changes the way you process news, family events, and nationwide tragedies. Your life is anchored here now, in another language, another system, another rhythm…but your nervous system still remembers where it came from.

When something happens back home, it never announces itself when and how you expect. It might come in an email or a WhatsApp message in the middle of your workday. Sometimes it’s personal: a family crisis, a health scare, or news you wish you could respond to in person instead of through a screen. Sometimes it’s larger than that: a national story, a court case, or a wave of images and headlines that make it hard to look away, even when you’re thousands of kilometers from where it’s unfolding.

Either way, you’re left holding it while the world around you continues as if nothing unusual is going on.

There’s a kind of dissonance in it. The place where you live now keeps asking for your attention: emails still come in, appointments still need to be kept, and people still expect you to show up. At the same time, part of you is somewhere else, trying to make sense of something that feels urgent, painful, or overwhelming.

It might show up in small ways. Maybe you’re listening to someone talk, but your focus keeps drifting. Or you reread the same paragraph three times and still don’t know what it said. Or maybe you’re a little like me, finding yourself going through the motions of your day with a kind of divided attention: present enough to function, but not fully focused.

For many expats and immigrants, this becomes a familiar pattern over time. Your physical body and your life is here, but your emotional reference points don’t move quite as easily or as quickly as your address did.

That can be especially complicated when the news from home touches on something personal, or when it connects to values and histories that still feel like part of you. You may want to do something, and respond in a way that feels meaningful. Some people find ways to show up from a distance: they donate money, they send emails, and they make phone calls to elected officials. They show up to demonstrations in their new home country. They have conversations that feel necessary, even when they’re hard.

Others don’t know what to do with the distance. For some, the problems can feel too immense; the gap can feel too wide. And even when you care deeply, it isn’t always obvious what “help” looks like from where you are now.

On top of that, there’s the pressure of living in two worlds at once. The place you’re in has its own history, its own concerns, its own daily rhythm. And the place you’re from still lives inside you. You’re constantly adjusting, whether you notice it or not, between those two frames of reference.

Over time, most people living abroad get better at noticing when that pull is getting heavy. You start to recognize when you’ve taken in too much news for one day. You get more honest about when you need to talk to someone who understands both sides of your life. You learn (sometimes through trial and error) how to stay informed without letting it take over every bit of your nervous system.

After a while, your tolerance for complexity shifts, and you begin to live with a much wider emotional range than you had before. You realize that distance doesn’t necessarily weaken connection; in some ways, it sharpens it. You notice more quickly what still matters to you. You become more aware of which stories you carry, and which ones you need to put down for a while.

You may also find that your relationship to your home country changes over time. Maybe not all at once, but gradually, as your life elsewhere becomes more rooted. Some things start to feel less immediate. Other things hit even harder than they used to, precisely because you’re not there.

There’s no single “right” way to deal with it. Some days, you’ll feel suspended between two places. Other days, you’ll feel grateful for the distance, even as you stay emotionally connected. (At the moment, mine tend to “flip-flop” between the two, often in the same week.)

What helps most, in my experience and in the work I do with expats, is allowing that complexity to exist without trying to stomp it out. You don’t have to choose one place to care about, and you don’t have to resolve the tension in order to keep living your life. You’re allowed to build something here and still be affected by what happens there.

Living abroad stretches your emotional range. It asks you to hold more than one story at once: the one you’re living day to day, and the one that still shaped you long before you left.

Some days, that looks like scrolling past a headline and deciding you don’t have the capacity to open the article. Other days, it looks like standing in a bakery line, realizing that your body is in one place and your heart is very clearly in another.

Over time, you get better at carrying both.

You learn how to stay present where you are without cutting yourself off from where you come from. You find your own ways of staying connected, setting boundaries, and choosing when to engage more deeply and when to step back.

And maybe that’s one of the better skills that life abroad teaches you: how to live in one place and still care about another. How to buy the baguette, keep walking, and keep building a life that has room for more than one place to matter.

Living abroad continues to shape us, often in ways we don’t realize. If you’d like a grounded place for reflection and perspective as you navigate your own life abroad, you can follow Thrive on Through on Facebook & Instagram, where I share daily insights about the emotional side of living overseas.

I’m also working on a 21-part video series about life abroad, especially for those early chapters when everything still feels a bit undefined. If you’d like to hear about it first when it launches, staying connected there is the easiest way.

When people talk about moving abroad, the conversation usually focuses on the external changes like the country, the language, the food or the logistics.

People ask why you chose that particular place, how long you plan to stay, whether you’re working, whether you’ll come back home “one day.” The story tends to center on geography, as if crossing a border is the most important thing that happened. But for many expats, especially those who stay longer than expected, something else is going on underneath.

Sometimes moving to a different country is less about escaping a place and more about getting closer to yourself. It just doesn’t always look that way from the outside.

I didn’t move abroad with any intention of “finding” myself. I moved to be with my French fiancé and to figure out whether the relationship actually had legs once we were no longer on vacation. I needed to see who we were in daily life, not just in the romantic version of it.

So I moved to France because I was moving toward something: a relationship, and what I thought might become a marriage. I wasn’t trying to be changed by the experience; the idea of self-discovery wasn’t part of the plan.

And for a long time, life felt full and structured. I built a career: I had a role, a routine, a clear sense of who I was in the world. I wasn’t asking big existential questions; I was busy living the life I had built. It was only much later, after corporate burnout and then divorce, that everything shifted.

The original reason I had built my life abroad around was gone. The structure that had been holding everything together had disappeared and without it, I was left face-to-face with myself in a way I hadn’t been before. I wasn’t a creative copywriter anymore, nor was I anyone’s wife. Suddenly I didn’t know how to answer the simplest questions: Where does that leave me? Who am I now?

I still remember standing in the half-decorated apartment I had just moved into after signing the divorce papers and thinking What now? The future felt wide open in a way that was both freeing and unsettling. Like starting over with a clean slate, without a clear idea of what I was supposed to write on it. I realized I could become someone new, even if I didn’t yet know who that was. That was when the real inner work began.

Over time, I’ve come to see how often this same shift happens in expat lives, even when the reasons for moving are different.

At first, a move abroad usually feels practical. You’re following a job, a relationship, an opportunity, or a sense that something needs to change. You might not have the language yet to describe what feels off in your current life; you just know that staying where you are no longer fits.

So you move.

And for a while, the novelty carries you through. Everything feels intense and immediate. You’re busy figuring things out: how to open a bank account, how to get your phone on a new network, how to navigate everyday interactions without feeling foolish. The effort of simply living your life absorbs all your attention.

That phase can feel exhilarating, but it can also feel exhausting. Eventually, once the surface-level challenges become manageable, something else emerges.

You realize that the move didn’t replace you with a new version of yourself; it removed some of the familiar structures that used to define you.

Your routines shift.
Your social identity feels muted.
Your sense of competence takes a hit.
And suddenly, you’re left with more space than you’re used to.

This is often when expats start feeling unsettled in ways they didn’t anticipate. Not because the move was a mistake, but because the usual reference points are gone. You’re no longer being reflected back to yourself in the same way, especially when your job title, your social circle, and even your sense of humor land differently.

You start noticing parts of yourself that were easy to ignore before: the parts that relied on business and external validation. The parts that stayed quiet because there wasn’t time to listen.

Living abroad has a way of stripping things down. Without familiar cues, you begin asking questions you didn’t plan on asking: What actually matters to me? What drains me? What feels true when no one is watching? What kind of life am I building? Not just here, but internally?

These questions don’t come with urgency. They tend to surface slowly and gradually, often in ordinary moments like standing in line somewhere, walking home alone, sitting in a café without a phone signal, or cooking for yourself more often than you used to.

You might feel more alone than expected during this phase, even if you’re not isolated. That loneliness isn’t always about missing people…it’s often about missing the version of yourself that felt grounded and recognizable. And yet, this is also where something important begins to take shape.

When you’re no longer performing the roles that once defined you, you start to notice what remains: what you reach for instinctively, what brings relief, and what steadies you when everything feels unfamiliar.

For some expats, this shows up as a deeper connection to their body. They begin noticing how stress registers physically and how language fatigue affects their nervous system. They become more aware of when they’re pushing themselves too hard socially, and when they’re withdrawing out of fear.

For others, it shows up emotionally; feelings that were postponed back home rise to the surface: grief, anger, sadness, and relief (sometimes all of it at once!). Living abroad doesn’t create these emotions, but it gives them room to breathe (and sometimes take over).

There’s also an identity shift that often surprises people. In your home country, you may have been known as competent, reliable, social, and articulate. Abroad, those traits don’t disappear, but they’re harder to access in the same way. You might feel less expressive in another language, less spontaneous and less confident in unfamiliar environments.

That can feel destabilizing, but it can also be revealing. Because underneath the competence and fluency, there is still you: the part that adapts and observes. The part that learns to listen more closely before acting. Over time, many expats discover that they’re developing a different kind of confidence: one that isn’t based on mastery, but on resilience.

This is where the move begins to feel less like a disruption and more like a realignment.

You may find yourself choosing relationships more intentionally. Saying no more often and letting go of expectations you didn’t realize you were carrying. Creating routines that support you, rather than impress others.

This doesn’t mean life abroad suddenly becomes easy, and it doesn’t mean that the challenges disappear. Bureaucracy remains frustrating, language barriers still exist, and cultural misunderstandings still happen. But your relationship to yourself and how you handle those challenges changes.

You begin to trust your capacity to handle uncertainty. You stop measuring your progress against external timelines. You recognize that adaptation isn’t something you complete, but something you practice.

For many long-term expats, this internal shift becomes one of the most meaningful outcomes of the move…not because it was planned, but because it unfolded naturally once the noise quieted down.

You didn’t move abroad to find yourself. You moved for practical reasons or for love, out of curiosity or out of necessity. But along the way, you find yourself paying closer attention to what calms you, to what overwhelms you, to what feels aligned, and what no longer does. And that awareness starts shaping your life in subtle ways.

You might choose a different pace than you would have back home. You might prioritize well-being over productivity. You might stop forcing yourself into versions of success that don’t fit anymore.

This is often when expats realize that returning home wouldn’t automatically bring relief…not because home is the wrong place, but because you’ve changed. Your internal compass has shifted, and you’re no longer the person you were when you left.

That realization can be disorienting, but it can also be grounding - it reminds you that the real work of moving abroad isn’t just about learning how to live somewhere else. It’s about learning how to live with yourself in a new environment, under new conditions.

If you’re in the early stages of life abroad and feeling unsettled, it may simply mean that the external scaffolding you relied on before is gone, and you’re in the process of discovering what holds you up now.

And if you’ve been abroad for years and feel like this life continues to change you, that makes sense too. Some transformations don’t announce themselves. They show up gradually, in how you respond to stress, how you define home, and how you relate to uncertainty.

Moving abroad doesn’t magically reveal who you are, but it does create conditions where you can’t avoid yourself as easily. Sometimes that’s uncomfortable and sometimes it’s clarifying. Sometimes, it can be both.

Over time, many expats realize that the most lasting shift wasn’t geographic at all. It was internal, like a silent recalibration, a deeper sense of self-trust, a closer relationship with who they are beneath the roles and routines.

In that sense, moving to a different country can become something else entirely.

Not an escape.
Not a reinvention.
But a becoming.

Living abroad keeps changing us, often in ways we don’t see right away. If you’d like a grounded place for reflection and perspective as you navigate your own life abroad, you can follow Thrive on Through on Facebook & Instagram, where I share daily insights about the emotional side of living overseas.

I’m also working on a 21-part video series about life abroad, especially for those early chapters when everything still feels a bit undefined. If you’d like to hear about it first when it launches, staying connected here is the easiest way.

France has a curious relationship with dogs.

You can bring a dog into a café without anyone batting an eye. Dogs nap under restaurant tables, ride calmly on public transport, and wait patiently while their humans linger over coffee. And yet, many parks in Paris don’t allow dogs at all, even on a leash. You can sit next to a dog at lunch, but not walk one freely through certain green spaces. If you’re a “dog person”, it’s a contradiction you notice fairly quickly once you’re living here.

It’s also one of those details that seems insignificant until you’re new, trying to find your bearings, and suddenly very aware of where you’re allowed to go, where you’re not, and how welcome you feel as you move through your new environment.

This came back to me recently after I was invited to speak in a move-abroad group. Someone offered a simple piece of advice for people relocating to France: having a dog can sometimes make things easier. Not because it magically solves the challenges of moving abroad, but because it opens doors to small interactions. It gives you a reason to get out of the house, and can help create situations where people talk to you.

That observation stayed with me for a bit, not only because it was clever, but because it added meaning to something I’ve experienced more than once in my 25+ years of living abroad.

Dogs aren’t the solution to expat loneliness…but sometimes they can make the early days feel a little less empty.

When you first move abroad, loneliness doesn’t always arise the way you expect. It can often show up in subtle ways: walking through unfamiliar streets with no one to text, spending weekends without big plans, realizing you don’t yet have “your people” (or even your “places”, for that matter).

You can be surrounded by people and still feel alone.

In those early months, connection can feel like something you’re supposed to figure out. You’re told to join groups and make friends, learn the language faster and integrate. But the pressure to do all of that at once can make you want to retreat instead of reach out to others.

This is where a dog can change that.

A dog doesn’t care if you speak perfectly. It doesn’t ask you to explain who you are or where you’re from. It simply needs to be walked, fed, and played with…and that alone can be enough to change how your days feel.

I didn’t understand this consciously when I first moved to France. I’ve always been a “dog person” and I knew that having a dog beside me during those early years would make things more bearable. It gave structure to days that otherwise felt too open, too quiet and unfamiliar.

Having a dog meant having more of a routine. We walked the same routes and passed by some of the same neighbors. We became recognizable…not fully known, but no longer invisible. And when you’re new in a country, being seen at all matters more than you might initially think.

I didn’t realize it until recently, but my dogs have carried me through many chapters and transitions of life abroad. Fluckie helped me through the initial periods of homesickness, when everything felt foreign and slightly out of reach. Effy helped me get through prolonged post-surgical recovery periods. She was also there to help with the isolation of multiple COVID lockdowns, when my world was suddenly limited to a tiny apartment, and my daily routine with her was the only thing keeping time from blurring together. And then there was Roxie, who helped me get through career burnout and divorce, when emotional stability felt fragile and inconsistent. Her endless supply of cuddles and kisses cheered me up at a time when it seemed like nothing ever could.

Through all of those chapters, having a dog meant I was never entirely alone in my apartment, or in my head.

That doesn’t mean that having a dog fixed anything. It didn’t erase grief or uncertainty, but it grounded me in the present moment in a way that was surprisingly stabilizing. There’s something about caring for another being that keeps you tethered to daily life, even when your inner world feels unsettled.

France, for all its contradictions around dogs, makes space for this kind of companionship in everyday life. Dogs are woven into routines here. And because of that, they become an easy point of contact between people.

You don’t have to be fluent to exchange a smile over a dog. You don’t have to explain your story to chat briefly on a sidewalk. You don’t have to be “settled in” to be acknowledged. Those small interactions add up.

What I find interesting is that this doesn’t only apply to people who actually have dogs. There’s a deeper lesson here, about how connection forms when you remove the pressure.

Dogs create low-stakes moments. They give you permission to be present without performing, and offer companionship without expectation. And for someone adjusting to life abroad, that can make a real difference.

Moving abroad can feel extremely lonely at times…not because you’re isolated, but because meaningful connection takes time to build. And during that time, you’re often left with a gap between the life you left and the one you haven’t fully created yet.

Dogs can fill that void. They don’t replace human relationships, but they can help get you through challenging moments while you’re waiting for deeper relationships to form.

This is something I see again and again with expats and immigrants, whether they’re pre-move, newly arrived, or years in. The early phase of life abroad often feels emotionally heavier than people anticipate, because the familiar markers of belonging aren’t there yet.

You don’t know where you fit in. You don’t know who to call. You don’t know which version of you will emerge in this new country you’re living in.

In that space, companionship of any kind can help regulate those feelings of disorientation. For some people it’s a dog. For others it’s a routine, a regular walk, a favorite café, a class, or a volunteer role. The form may vary, but its underlying function is the same: creating steadiness while everything around you is evolving.

What having a dog taught me is that connection doesn’t always arrive in the ways we expect. It doesn’t always come through instant friendships or social breakthroughs. Sometimes it arrives through repetition, through showing up in the same places and being recognizable before you’re really known. And sometimes, it comes through presence.

In a way, France’s mixed rules around dogs kind of mirror expat life. You’re welcomed in some spaces and restricted in others. You learn where you belong through experience, not explanation. Over time, you stop pushing against every boundary and start understanding the way things work in your new environment.

That learning takes patience but within it, there’s also an invitation: to let connection unfold gradually, without forcing it.

If you’re in the early stages of settling abroad and feeling more alone than you anticipated, it’s often because you’re between chapters: the life you knew is behind you, and the one you’re building hasn’t fully taken shape yet.

Companionship, in whatever form it takes, can help bridge that gap.

Dogs won’t solve all the challenges of living abroad. Neither will perfect integration or flawless language skills. But sometimes, they make the days feel warmer, the streets less empty, and the waiting more tolerable.

And that, in the early chapters of a life abroad, can be enough to keep you moving forward…one walk at a time.

Living abroad brings up more than logistics. Often it brings up parts of ourselves we didn’t expect.

If you’d like ongoing reflection and perspective as you navigate life abroad, you can follow Thrive on Through on Facebook & Instagram, where I share daily insights from long-term life overseas.

I’m also preparing a 21-part video series about life abroad, created for people in the early stages of moving and settling in — the questions, the adjustments, and the parts no one really prepares you for. Staying connected is the easiest way to hear about it first.

There was a post I saw recently in a move-abroad Facebook group that stayed with me longer than I expected.

Someone who was contemplating a move to France asked a simple question. They loved a particular Trader Joe’s frozen mushroom blend and wondered whether there was something similar they could find in France. It wasn’t an emotionally-charged question or a life-or-death one…just a small, practical detail from someone clearly in the middle of planning something big.

The responses were…mixed.

Some people were kind and reassuring; others were helpful and specific. And then there were the comments that went in a very different direction. Comments that implied the question itself was evidence that the person wasn’t ready to move abroad. That if you cared about frozen mushrooms, you were missing the point of living in France entirely. That you should either fully embrace local markets and wild mushrooms or maybe not move at all.

I found myself thinking: The mushrooms aren’t the point.

What’s really happening in moments like this has very little to do with food, and a lot to do with how the human mind tries to cope when it senses a major transition ahead.

Before you even move abroad, the waiting begins. You wait for paperwork, you wait for approvals, you wait for answers that don’t always arrive when you expect them to. And all the while, your nervous system is registering the fact that something enormous is about to change.

Moving to a foreign country is not just a logistical event; it’s a psychological one. Even when you’re excited, even when you’ve wanted it for years, and even when you’re convinced that it’s absolutely the right decision.

Your mind knows that your environment, your language, your routines, and your support systems are about to change. On some level, it registers this as uncertainty, and uncertainty often feels like risk.

So, in moments like this, the brain does what it’s designed to do: it looks for safety.

Sometimes that safety shows up in big questions. Where will I live? How will I work? Will I be okay here?

And sometimes it shows up in very small ones. Can I still buy the things I like to eat? Will anything feel familiar when I arrive?

When I moved to France in my early twenties, I didn’t yet have the language or self-awareness to articulate this, but I absolutely lived it. I remember stuffing my suitcase with things that, in hindsight, make me laugh: Mountain Dew. Cookies & Cream Pop-Tarts. Makeup I was convinced didn’t exist outside the U.S. Medications I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find the equivalent for. If I could have brought string cheese, Twinkies, and Chick-fil-A with me, I would have found a way.

At the time, it felt practical, sensible, even. Now I can see that it was also deeply emotional.

Those items were anchors: they smelled like home, and tasted like familiarity. They gave me a small sense of continuity when everything else around me felt new, confusing, and slightly overwhelming. In the early days abroad, when your language skills are limited and your confidence takes a hit, those familiar comforts can feel surprisingly grounding.

There’s one thing that often gets forgotten in these conversations: bringing comfort foods from home doesn’t mean you aren’t open to discovering new things or adapting to a new life abroad.

Some of the harshest comments in threads like the one I read assume that caring about familiar items means you’re rejecting the culture you’re moving into; that if you ask about Trader Joe’s mushrooms, you somehow don’t appreciate French markets, seasonal produce, or culinary traditions.

But human adaptation isn’t that black and white, and it doesn’t usually work that way.

Most people moving abroad are doing two things at once: they’re opening themselves to new experiences while also trying to regulate the stress of enormous change. These impulses aren’t in opposition; they coexist.

In the early days, discovery often happens alongside homesickness. Curiosity walks hand in hand with longing. You might marvel at the quality of produce in a French market and still miss the comfort of foods you associate with safety and familiarity. Both can be true.

Over time, the balance shifts.

One of the joys of living abroad is how your tastes evolve without you forcing them to. You start discovering things you never looked for before. Fresh mushrooms from a local market that taste richer than anything you remember buying frozen. Seasonal ingredients that shape how you cook. Frozen food shops like Picard that become oddly reassuring in their own way.

But that transition takes time, and it’s rarely helped by shame.

What struck me most in reading the kinder responses to that mushroom question was how much more supportive they were when they acknowledged the emotional layer underneath. People calmly explained what was available in France, offered alternatives, and reassured the person that they’d be ok. Some even pointed out that yes, you can find frozen mushrooms, and yes, you can also prepare and freeze your own when they’re in season.

That kind of response doesn’t just answer the question; it calms the nervous system. It says: you’re not ridiculous for wondering, and you’re not weak for wanting familiarity. You’re allowed to look for different ways that help you arrive abroad with a little more ease.

And that matters more than we often realize.

Because the truth is, focusing on small details when big things are happening is totally normal; it’s a coping mechanism. When the world feels uncertain, the mind narrows its focus to what it can grasp. It reaches for the known, the predictable, and the comforting; it’s a form of self-preservation.

I still bring comfort items back with me when I travel. Jalapeño Cheddar Cheetos. Chick Fil-A sauce. Everything but the Bagel seasoning (though I recently found something here that I consider an acceptable substitute). These things no longer carry the emotional weight they once did, but they still make me smile…they remind me of where I come from, even as my life has firmly taken root elsewhere.

Discovering new culinary delights and holding onto familiar comforts are not mutually exclusive stages: they overlap, weave together, and evolve at their own pace.

If you’re researching a move abroad and find yourself asking questions that feel small or oddly specific, it may help to pause before judging yourself for it. Often those questions are less about the item itself and more about reassurance. They’re about wanting to know that you won’t lose yourself entirely in the process of change.

And if you’re someone who has already lived abroad for years, it’s worth remembering how fragile those early stages can feel. Not everyone asking questions is resistant to change; many are simply trying to steady themselves before stepping into something unknown.

Moving abroad asks more of us than we sometimes admit. It stretches our identities, challenges our assumptions, and humbles us in ways we didn’t anticipate. And in the middle of all that, it’s okay to want a familiar flavor, a recognizable routine, or a small reminder of home.

The mushrooms were never really the point.

What matters is how we respond to one another in these moments: with curiosity instead of contempt, with reassurance instead of dismissal, and with the understanding that behind most practical questions is a human being, just trying to find their footing.

And that kind of response can make all the difference at the beginning of a life abroad.

Living abroad has a way of bringing all kind of emotions to the surface, often in ways we don’t anticipate.

If you’d like ongoing reflection and perspective as you navigate that process, you can follow Thrive on Through on Facebook & Instagram, where I share daily insights on life abroad.

I’m also working on a 21-part video series, designed for people in the early stages of moving and settling in: the questions, the adjustments, and the parts no one really prepares you for.

If you’re interested, following and subscribing are the easiest ways to ensure you’ll hear about it when it launches.

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There’s a point in adjusting to life abroad that doesn’t really come with a clear name. You don’t arrive in it suddenly; a lot of times, there’s no big moment that marks the shift. You just start noticing small things that don’t quite line up with how things look on the surface.

On paper, you look like you’re functioning. You know the systems. You can manage conversations and are no longer in constant problem-solving mode. You’ve figured out most of the practical stuff, and daily life runs more smoothly than it once did.

And yet, something feels off.

It’s not a crisis, and it may be hard to explain to the people around you. Maybe you feel more tired than you expected, less motivated, and less in tune with yourself than you usually do. Maybe you even catch yourself thinking, I should feel more settled by now.

That thought alone can be unsettling, because when everything seems to be working, it’s hard to know what to do with a feeling that says something still isn’t right.

When the Obvious Challenges Fade, and Something Else Takes Their Place

Most people expect living abroad to be hardest at the beginning, and in many ways, it is. The early phase is full of visible challenges. There’s language barriers. Administrative headaches. Cultural misunderstandings. Loneliness with a clear cause. You can point to those things and say, That’s why this feels hard.

But later on, when many of those challenges ease up, the discomfort doesn’t always disappear - sometimes it just changes shape. You’re no longer struggling with the basics, but you may notice that everything still seems to require a bit more effort than you expect: decisions feel heavier and social interactions can take more energy (even when they’re pleasant). There’s a sense that you’re managing well, but not fully at ease.

For me, this showed up most clearly through language.

Until I moved abroad, I didn’t realize how deeply my sense of identity was tied to my ability to express myself. In my native language, I felt articulate and competent, sometimes even witty. I could jump into conversations easily, and trusted my ability to communicate who I was.

In French, all of that seemed to disappear.

On paper, I was doing fine: I had taken the classes; I knew the grammar rules. I had a solid vocabulary and could conjugate verbs and get my point across when needed. From the outside, I probably looked capable enough. But inside, it felt very different.

I remember having dinner conversations with my French friends, carefully building a sentence in my head, rehearsing it over and over, waiting for the right moment to speak. And more often than not, by the time I felt ready to jump in, the conversation had already moved on.

Those moments left me feeling muted and frustrated, like my personality was being filtered down to the bare minimum. I worried that no one was ever really going to get to know me, because I couldn’t express myself the way I wanted to.

Slowly (and somewhat unexpectedly), this began to chip away at my confidence. I started seeing myself as hesitant and clumsy. I became overly cautious about pronunciation, afraid of making a mistake and being judged. It surprised me how quickly that internal shift happened. I appeared competent on the surface, but inside, I didn’t feel grounded at all.

I began second-guessing all my decisions, which frustrated me even more. How could someone who felt so sure of herself in one country end up doubting herself so deeply in another?

When “Fixing It” Feels Like the Obvious Answer

My first instinct was to treat this as a problem to solve. I assumed the answer was simple: I just needed to improve my French. I needed to speak faster, find better words, and stop hesitating so much. I told myself if I could just get more fluent, I’d feel like myself again.

So I tried harder.

I studied more. I paid closer attention to how others spoke, and pushed myself to participate in conversations even when it felt uncomfortable. I focused on fixing the surface issue, convinced that confidence would naturally follow.

That response makes sense…many expats do the same thing, not only with language, but with other parts of life abroad as well. When something feels off, the instinct is often to double down: Be more disciplined. Stay busy. Be more positive. Make more of an effort socially. Trust that if you just keep going, the feeling will resolve itself.

None of that is unreasonable.

But over time, it became clear that something deeper was going on. My discomfort wasn’t coming from a lack of motivation or resilience…it wasn’t even really about language. It was about the gap between how my life looked on the outside and how steady I felt on the inside.

The version of me who once felt grounded hadn’t yet caught up to the life I was living in this new context. My external world had stabilized, but my internal reference points were still shifting.

And when those two don’t align, it’s easy to feel unsettled without quite knowing why.

The Part of Expat Life No One Really Prepares You For

Living abroad doesn’t just ask you to adapt to a new environment. Over time, it asks you to reconsider who you are within it.

That question doesn’t usually appear in the early days. It tends to surface later, once the logistics are mostly under control and you’re no longer distracted by constant urgency.

You may notice it when you feel less clear about what you want, when the things that once motivated you no longer seem to carry the same weight, or when you realize that feeling capable doesn’t automatically translate into feeling grounded.

When this happens, it can be hard to make sense of it. This is the moment when life abroad moves beyond logistics and starts reshaping you from the inside out.

The Fatigue of Holding It Together

One of the most common experiences at this stage is a particular kind of fatigue. Not the kind that comes from doing too much in a single day, but the kind that builds over time when you’re constantly adjusting yourself to fit your surroundings.

You may have learned how to navigate another language, another culture, and another system. You’ve likely developed a strong tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity - those are real strengths. But carrying them day after day, year after year, can be draining if there’s no space to pause and acknowledge what it’s taken from you as well as what it’s given.

Many expats become very good at managing life abroad, while slowly losing touch with themselves along the way.

Why Clarity Can Feel Harder Than It Used to

Clarity often relies on familiarity: Being understood without effort. Knowing instinctively how you come across. Feeling aligned between what you think, what you say, and how you’re perceived.

Living abroad can disrupt that alignment, even long after the initial adjustment period. Language plays a big role, but it’s rarely the only factor. Cultural norms, communication styles, and subtle differences in social expectations all shape how you experience yourself.

When those things are constantly shifting, it can become harder to trust your instincts or feel confident in your decisions. You may second-guess yourself more, and feel torn between different versions of your life and different versions of yourself. What’s familiar inside you is being recalibrated.

Becoming Someone New Doesn’t Erase Who You Were

One fear that often surfaces during this phase is the sense of having lost the person you used to be. Like me, you might remember how you felt before you moved: how easy it was to express yourself and how comfortable you felt in your own skin. And you may wonder if that version of you is gone. In most cases, it isn’t. It’s simply no longer the full picture.

Life abroad adds layers. Some of them are challenging; others are enriching. All of them shape how you relate to yourself and the world. The work isn’t about going back - it’s about integrating who you’ve become.

That process takes time, and it often feels less linear than we expect.

What This Phase Is Really Asking of You

If you’re living abroad and find yourself feeling unsettled in ways you can’t easily put your finger on, it may simply reflect where you are in the adjustment process: a point where your inner world needs the same care and attention you once gave to the practical side of your move.

For many expats, that work looks like slowing down long enough to notice what’s changed internally, not just externally. Paying attention to how decisions feel now. Relearning what steadiness means in this chapter. Creating space to reflect, rather than pushing forward on autopilot. It’s less about doing more, and more about orienting yourself from the inside again.

When you begin to regain your footing internally, things often start to feel more manageable again. Decisions come from a place that feels more anchored and familiar inside yourself. That inner steadiness becomes something you can carry forward, even as life continues to change.

Living abroad keeps evolving, long after the practical pieces are in place. If you’d like daily reflections on expat life and free support as you move through those phases, you can find me on Facebook & Instagram.

I’m also preparing a 21-part video series about life abroad. If you’re interested, following me on social media is the easiest way to ensure you’ll hear about it when it launches.

I didn’t set out to write an article about waiting. The idea came to me recently after I was invited to speak to a group of people preparing to move abroad. I was asked to reflect on what felt hardest in the beginning and what still shows up now, after many years of living in France. As I was answering questions and thinking back over my early days here, a theme kept resurfacing. It wasn’t the paperwork or the language barrier, or even the culture shock. It was waiting.

Waiting seems to be woven into life in France in small but persistent ways. In fact, it begins before you even leave your home country. You wait for visa paperwork to be approved and official letters that may or may not arrive when you expect them to. You wait for confirmation emails, appointments, stamps, and signatures. You tell yourself this is just the pre-move phase, that once you arrive, things will feel more settled.

Then you arrive, and the waiting continues.

You wait at the airport carousel for luggage that takes its time to finally appear. You wait to see if the boxes from your previous life will arrive in three weeks’ or three months’ time. You wait to hear back from landlords, banks, schools, phone companies, and internet providers. You wait for your appointment time, even when you arrived early and followed all the rules. You wait, because that is simply how things unfold here.

In France, waiting doesn’t always come with apologies or explanations. A delivery window might be listed as “between 9:00 and 12:00,” which could mean 9:15, or 11:58, or not at all that day. A package may show as “out for delivery” and remain in that mysterious state for hours. A technician might arrive two hours later than planned, and no one acts particularly surprised by this. It’s not a failure of the system. It is the system.

In the beginning, this can feel deeply unsettling, especially if you come from a culture where efficiency, predictability, and speed are treated almost like personal virtues. Early on, I remember taking delays personally. I would feel irritated, then anxious, then frustrated with myself for feeling irritated. Why wasn’t I handling this better? Why did a late delivery have the power to derail my entire afternoon?

What I didn’t understand yet was that waiting in France is not a temporary inconvenience you eventually outgrow. It’s a rhythm you learn to move with, and that adjustment takes time.

Waiting shows up in daily life in small, almost comical ways. You wait in line at the bakery while the person ahead of you chats leisurely with the cashier. You wait while paperwork is reviewed in silence. You wait while someone finishes a conversation before turning their attention back to you. You wait because things happen one at a time here, not all at once…and life doesn’t rush to accommodate your schedule.

At first this can feel like resistance, almost like the country itself is pushing back. Over time, it begins to feel more like an invitation to slow down (even if you didn’t ask for one).

What makes waiting especially challenging in the early years abroad is not just the delay itself. It’s the uncertainty layered on top of it. When you’re new, you don’t yet know what’s normal and what’s a problem. Is this delay expected, or should I be worried? Is it appropriate to follow up, or would that make things worse? You spend a lot of energy trying to read situations correctly, and often the waiting becomes emotionally charged.

There’s also the deeper kind of waiting that doesn’t get talked about as often: the waiting to feel settled, and to feel capable again. The waiting to recognize yourself in your own life. You’re waiting for confidence to return, for routines to form, for relationships to deepen, and for life overall to feel less challenging.

I didn’t realize how much patience this kind of waiting requires. It’s not passive; it asks something of you. It asks you to sit with discomfort, to resist the urge to push or force, to trust that things are unfolding even when you can’t see how.

Over the years, my relationship with waiting has changed, not because France suddenly became faster, but because I stopped expecting it to operate like somewhere else. I stopped measuring my days by how efficiently I could move through them, and began to leave more space in my schedule — not because I had mastered patience, but because experience taught me that things rarely go exactly as planned.

That shift didn’t happen all at once; it happened little by little, in small moments. Like the day I stopped rearranging my afternoon around a delivery that might or might not arrive. Or the moment I realized that being five minutes late did not carry the same weight here. The realization that waiting did not mean nothing was happening; it simply meant it was happening on a different timeline.

There is a subtle lesson embedded in all of this. Living abroad asks you to loosen your grip on control. Waiting exposes the places where you’re still trying to manage outcomes, still trying to make things move faster through sheer effort. Over time, you learn which things are worth pushing and which things require patience instead.

This doesn’t mean you stop advocating for yourself or become endlessly accommodating; it means you learn discernment. You learn when waiting is part of the process and when it’s a signal to speak up. That distinction takes time to develop, and you only learn it by living it.

Waiting also changes how you experience time itself. In a culture that doesn’t rush through every interaction, moments stretch. Conversations last longer. Meals take their time. Even inconveniences invite you to notice your surroundings. You become aware of how often impatience comes from wanting to be somewhere else, instead of where you are.

I used to think that adapting to life abroad meant becoming more efficient, more capable, more fluent. Now I think it has more to do with becoming more spacious: learning to pause without panicking, and learning to let things unfold without assuming something has gone wrong.

For those preparing to move abroad, this can be one of the hardest adjustments to anticipate. You can prepare for paperwork and logistics. You can research neighborhoods and schools. It’s harder to prepare for the emotional work of waiting without clear timelines or guarantees.

And for those already living here, waiting doesn’t disappear after the first year; it simply changes shape. You wait for clarity around next steps. You wait for opportunities. You wait for certain things to feel easier than they did before. Some forms of waiting are practical; others are deeply personal.

What changes over time is your relationship to it. You begin to trust that not everything needs immediate resolution. You begin to recognize that pauses are not always setbacks. Sometimes they’re there to give you space, sometimes they’re there for protection, and sometimes they’re there just because that’s how life works here.

If you’re in the thick of this adjustment now, it may feel tiring. It may feel like everything requires more patience than you expected. If so, don’t take it as a sign that you’re doing something wrong. It means you’re learning how to live within a different rhythm, one that asks for presence more than speed.

There’s something about this process that strengthens you. You become less reactive and learn to sit with uncertainty without rushing to fill it. You discover that your sense of stability doesn’t have to depend on things moving quickly.

Over time, waiting stops feeling like an obstacle and starts feeling like a teacher. It shows you where you’re still gripping onto things too tightly. It reminds you that adaptation is not about fixing everything, but about learning how to stay steady while things unfold.

Life abroad doesn’t stop asking you to wait. But it does offer you the chance to meet that waiting with more ease than you once thought possible.

And one day, you might find yourself sitting in a café, waiting for something that used to make you anxious, and noticing that you feel calm…not because life has become predictable, but because you’ve learned how to live inside the pause.

That, too, is part of building a life here.

Living abroad teaches you things slowly, often through moments like these. If you’d like ongoing support and perspective as you settle into your life overseas, feel free to follow Thrive on Through on Facebook & Instagram for daily expat reflections.

I’m also preparing a 21-part video series about life abroad, focused on supporting those in the early phases of settling in and adjusting. If that sounds like something you’d want to explore, staying connected is the best way to hear about it first.

January has a way of inviting reflection, especially when you live abroad.

As the calendar turns to a new year and emails slow down for a moment, there’s suddenly a little space to think. Not in the dramatic “new year, new me” sense, but in a more practical way. You start wondering what the months ahead might hold, and whether this year will feel different from the last one.

For those living abroad, that question can sometimes carry extra weight.

Some of you reading this may be counting down the weeks to a big move, feeling excited, nervous, and worried you’ve forgotten something. Others might have just arrived and are still riding that strange mix of adrenaline and exhaustion that comes with setting up life in a new country. And then there are those of you who have been abroad for some time: the kids are settled and the routines are in place, but something still feels missing.

All of these moments have one thing in common. They tend to show up at the start of a new year, when life pauses just long enough for the bigger questions to surface.

One question I like to ask my clients is “What would you like your life to look like, six months from now?”

Six months from now might feel abstract for some, but for expats it can be a helpful starting point to gain perspective. It’s close enough to feel real, and far enough away to allow for change. Thinking in six-month increments can reveal things you don’t always notice when you’re focused on daily logistics.

Before a move, six months feels like a countdown. After arrival, it can feel like a test. And once things have settled, it often becomes a checkpoint where people start asking themselves whether the life they’ve built actually feels like home.

Before the Move: The Anxious Imagining Stage

If you’re preparing to move abroad in the coming months, your mind is probably busy filling in the blanks. On the outside, you may look excited but on the inside, you might find yourself running through worst-case scenarios late at night. Will I cope with the language? Will I make friends? What if I feel isolated? What if this turns out to be harder than I expected?

This stage is often full of mental preparation, but very little emotional grounding.

A lot of future expats focus on what they need to avoid: things like culture shock, loneliness, making mistakes, and just generally feeling lost. It’s natural to focus on these but it can also create tension, as if you’re bracing yourself for impact rather than imagining what it might feel like to settle in.

Six months after arrival, many people look back and realize that the hardest parts weren’t the things they anticipated. It wasn’t the bureaucratic paperwork they feared, but the moments when they felt invisible at a crowded market. It wasn’t the language barrier, but the way their personality felt dulled when they couldn’t express themselves fully. It wasn’t the logistics, but the emotional energy required to rebuild themselves in a new environment.

If you’re in this pre-move phase, “six months from now” isn’t about having everything figured out. It’s about feeling steady enough to arrive (even if nothing is permanent yet), being able to navigate daily life without constantly second-guessing yourself, and trusting that you can land somewhere new, live in the in-between for a while, and make adjustments as you go. It’s about realizing that certainty can come later, and that what you need first is enough steadiness to take the next step.

Acquiring that sense of inner steadiness matters more than perfection.

Just Arrived: When Excitement Meets Overwhelm

For those who have recently moved abroad, January can be a strange time. On the surface, you’ve done the big thing: you moved, you made it. But along with the excitement comes a significant amount of exhaustion.

Many new expats are surprised by how tiring the early months feel, even when nothing is “wrong.” Everything takes more effort: simple tasks require concentration, your nervous system is constantly alert, trying to make sense of unfamiliar cues. Even positive experiences can feel draining.

This is often when people start asking themselves what kind of life they actually want to build abroad.

At first, survival takes priority: just getting through the day, learning the basics, and managing logistics. But once the immediate chaos settles, a different question emerges. How do I want this to feel? Not just as an adventure, but as a life?

Six months from now, many people hope they’ll feel more grounded, less reactive, and more like “themselves”. They want to wake up without that constant feeling of being on alert, and have moments of ease (even if they don’t last long).

What some expats don’t realize is that feeling of ease doesn’t arrive all at once. It shows up in small ways over time: a conversation that flows more naturally, a place that feels familiar rather than confusing, a day that doesn’t feel like a performance.

These small things are easy to overlook, but they’re often the real markers of progress.

Past the Unpacking Stage: When the “Bigger” Questions Arise

Then there are the expats who are no longer new, but not quite settled either.

From the outside, things look stable. Work is underway, the kids are in school, and you generally know how to get things done. But on the inside, questions begin to form that are harder to articulate.

Is this enough? Is this what I want my life here to feel like? Have I been so focused on adapting that I forgot to check in with myself?

This stage is common after the first year or two abroad. The “honeymoon” is over: adrenaline fades, and what’s left is a more honest view of daily life. This is often when people notice subtle forms of dissatisfaction; it doesn’t necessarily take the form of overwhelming unhappiness, but a sense that something could be more aligned.

Six months from now, many people in this stage hope to feel more connected, more grounded. Less like they’re living on the surface of their own experience. They might want deeper friendships, more meaningful routines, or simply a stronger sense of belonging.

These desires don’t always announce themselves loudly. They tend to show up as restlessness, boredom, or a vague sense of disconnection.

What Six Months Can Realistically Offer

One of the most helpful shifts expats can make is moving away from outcome-based thinking. Six months doesn’t need to result in fluency, a perfect social circle, or a fully realized sense of home.

What it can offer is movement.

In six months, you can feel more familiar with your surroundings. You can begin to trust yourself in this environment, and notice which parts of life abroad drain you, and which ones quietly support you. You can make small adjustments that compound over time.

Expat research consistently shows that adjustment is not linear. People cycle through phases of excitement, frustration, adaptation, and reevaluation. Knowing this doesn’t eliminate the discomfort, but it can reduce the self-judgment that often accompanies it.

When people look back after six months, what they often value most isn’t achievement. It’s the feeling of having found their footing: of being a little less lost, and of knowing where they stand.

Asking Better Questions

Rather than asking what you should accomplish in the next six months, it can be more useful to ask how you want to experience your life abroad.

Do you want to feel calmer in your body? More confident navigating daily interactions? Less lonely in the evenings? More connected to who you were before the move, and who you’re becoming now?

These questions don’t demand immediate answers; they simply create direction.

Expats who feel more settled over time are often the ones who give themselves permission to evolve. They allow their expectations to shift and stop measuring their experience against imagined timelines. They recognize that building a satisfying life abroad is less about checking off boxes and more about alignment.

A Different Way Forward

As this year begins, you don’t need a dramatic, fool-proof plan. You don’t need to reinvent yourself or overhaul your life. What often makes the biggest difference is clarity: about what matters to you now, in this season, in this place.

Six months from now, you might not feel fully at home, but you can feel more at ease, more oriented, and more connected to yourself within your life abroad.

And that is no small thing.

A Gentle Invitation

Over the past 25+ years, I’ve seen how much it helps expats to step back and look at their lives from a slightly wider angle, in order to move beyond survival mode and begin shaping something more intentional.

I’m currently in the process of creating a program designed to help expats reflect on where they are now and map out what a more satisfying, grounded life abroad could look like over the months ahead. Not as a rigid plan, but as a flexible blueprint that supports real life.

If this newsletter sparked reflection for you, I’d love to hear your thoughts. You’re welcome to leave a comment, share where you find yourself right now, and subscribe if you’d like to be among the first to hear when the program launches.

Wherever you are on your expat journey, “six months from now” is closer than it seems. And the small, thoughtful steps taken now can shape that future in ways that feel both grounded and hopeful.