When you decide to move abroad, fear is there. But excitement is louder.
It has to be. Otherwise, none of us would ever get on that plane.
We spend months imagining a better future. Another city, another language, another version of ourselves. We watch YouTube videos, compare neighbourhoods, calculate budgets and convince ourselves that everything will somehow fall into place.
Then reality quietly arrives. One Airbnb bill after another, supermarket receipts that cost more than expected, documents that never seem to arrive, job interviews that don’t go as planned, savings disappearing faster than you’d imagined. And suddenly you realise something nobody had ever prepared you for. You’re not travelling anymore. You’re building a life from scratch.
Don’t get me wrong. Moving abroad is one of the greatest things I’ve ever done. It has challenged me, changed me and opened doors I never imagined. But before reaching that stage, there are emotional steps almost nobody talks about.
If you’re living them right now, I hope this article reminds you of one thing:
You’re not failing. You’re simply becoming an expat.
The Life You Leave Behind
Nobody tells you that moving abroad feels strangely similar to grief.
Not because someone died. Not because your hometown disappeared.
Quite the opposite.
Everything continues exactly as before. Your parents still have dinner together, your friends still meet for coffee, your neighbours still greet each other in the street. Life carries on exactly as it always has. The only difference is that you’re no longer part of it. That is what hurts. You’re not losing people. You’re losing your place in their everyday lives.
One day you’ll go back home expecting everything to feel familiar, only to realise that something has changed. A favourite café has closed. Someone has moved away. Your friends have created new routines that don’t include you anymore. You didn’t lose them. Life simply kept moving while yours took a different direction.
For a long time I felt guilty for feeling this way.
How could I grieve something that still existed? But that’s exactly what it is.
Sometimes grief isn’t about death. It’s about accepting that a chapter has ended. The same happens with your identity.
Back home, you knew exactly who you were. Maybe you were the outgoing one. Maybe you could start a conversation with a rock.
Then you move abroad.
Ordering a coffee suddenly feels like giving a presentation. You rehearse sentences in your head before making a phone call. You smile politely when you don’t fully understand what someone has just told you.
Little by little you start wondering where your confidence went.
The truth is, it didn’t disappear. It’s simply hidden behind a language that still isn’t yours.
Your personality hasn’t changed. You’re just learning how to express it all over again. And that takes time.
Your Brain Needs Time
One thing I never expected was how exhausting every tiny decision would become.
Your brain compares everything. The bread, the buses, the doctors, the supermarkets, the weather, the way people drive, the way strangers greet each other. Even the silence feels different.
At first, it’s almost automatic. Every experience is filtered through what you’ve always known. In your head you hear sentences like
«this was better back home», «we used to do it differently». You’re not being negative. Your brain is simply trying to understand an unfamiliar environment by comparing it with the only reference it has.
After a while, something changes. You stop translating every conversation in your head, you stop checking every supermarket label with Google Translate.
Basically, you stop thinking about how things were done back home.
One day you’ll walk into your local grocery store, buy dinner and realise you didn’t compare a single product with the one you used to buy. It sounds insignificant but it isn’t. That’s the moment your new habits begin replacing the old ones.
Another thing nobody tells you is how impatient you’ll become with yourself.
When I first moved abroad, I thought that after a few months everything would be sorted. I’d have a stable job, the paperwork would be done, I’d finally feel at home.
However, reality had other plans. Every rejection felt like the end of the world. If I didn’t find a job after a few interviews, I convinced myself I’d never make it. If an important document didn’t arrive on time, I was already mentally packing my suitcase. Stress has a remarkable ability to convince us that temporary problems are permanent. It is really important that you convince yourself they’re not.
Building a life abroad isn’t something you accomplish in three months. Sometimes it takes years.
The Loneliness Nobody Talks About
This is probably the hardest part to explain to people who have never lived abroad.
Loneliness doesn’t necessarily mean being alone. You can have colleagues who invite you out, a loving partner waiting for you at home, friends who call you every week, and still feel completely alone.
For a long time I felt guilty saying those words «I feel lonely».
People looked confused.
«But you’re not alone». They were right.
And yet they were wrong.
One afternoon I was talking to an elderly lady at the park.
She casually mentioned that she had gone to water her daughter’s plants while she was on holiday. Such an ordinary sentence. Yet it stayed with me all day. Because I can’t ask my mum to water my plants. If something breaks, I solve it. If I get sick, I organise everything myself. If I need help, there isn’t someone around the corner who’s known me my whole life. That’s the loneliness nobody talks about. Not the absence of people. The absence of your safety net.
I miss the version of myself that I had spent years building there : the one who knew exactly where to go, who to call and how everything worked.
Living abroad often creates a strange identity crisis because you no longer feel completely at home in your home country, but you don’t fully belong in your new one either. For a while, it feels like you’re floating somewhere in between.
And if you’ve ever questioned whether moving abroad was the right decision…
Believe me : almost every expat has.
Reality Is More Expensive Than You Think
Nobody warns you how quickly life becomes real, especially if you’ve moved straight out of your parents’ home.
The fridge won’t refill itself, toilet paper doesn’t magically appear, laundry won’t wash itself. You’ll leave work exhausted only to realise you still need to do grocery shopping, cook dinner and somehow understand labels written in a language your brain is already tired of processing.
You’ll buy products simply because the packaging looks familiar and half of them won’t taste anything like you expected. But you’ll laugh about it later. Probably.
Living abroad teaches you something that travelling never can: responsibility.
I mean… not the romantic version. The everyday one. Paying rent, managing your budget, calling customer service, finding a doctor.
There are moments when you wonder whether you were ever truly ready for adulthood. The truth? Nobody is.
The Day You Stop Surviving
The beautiful thing about moving abroad is that resilience doesn’t arrive all at once. It grows quietly, without you noticing.
One day you’ll remember how terrified you were to make your first phone call, and now you barely think about it.
You’ll remember crying after your first job rejection, only to smile months later at how convinced you were that your life was over.
The day someone finally hires you, you’ll probably cry with happiness.
A year later, you might cry because you want to quit that very same job. And that’s perfectly normal.
Progress doesn’t always look exciting. Sometimes progress simply means having different problems than you had before.
Eventually, life stops feeling like survival. You begin making plans again, thinking about holidays, buying furniture instead of temporary solutions, decorating your apartment, looking beyond next month.
That’s when you realise you’re no longer trying to stay afloat. You’re finally living.
You’ll Never Be the Same Again
«So where is home?»
You may not know the answer. Your hometown still feels like home, but your apartment abroad also starts feeling like home. Then you visit your family and realise you miss your life abroad.
A few weeks later you’re back abroad and suddenly miss your hometown again.
Eventually you stop trying to choose, because perhaps home isn’t one place anymore. Home is every place that helped you become who you are.
Moving abroad also gives you something incredibly rare: a chance to reinvent yourself. Nobody knows your past, nobody remembers your mistakes, nobody has any expectations of you
That kind of freedom is terrifying, yet incredibly liberating.
The person who boarded that plane carrying only a 25 kg suitcase had no idea what life would look like a year later. Neither do you today, maybe.
One morning you’ll wake up, make coffee, answer a phone call in another language, complain about public transport like everyone else does and realise something almost unbelievable: what once seemed temporary now feels completely ordinary. That’s when you’ll understand you’ve stopped surviving.
Essentially, you grew into someone you had never met before.
And maybe… that was the whole point of leaving in the first place.
Before you go…
If you’ve recognised yourself somewhere in these words, I want you to remember one thing. You’re not weak. You’re not dramatic. You’re certainly not crazy for wondering whether you made the right decision.
Moving abroad isn’t only about changing countries, it’s about rebuilding an entire life while trying not to lose yourself along the way.
Some days you’ll want to book the first flight home. Other days you’ll stop in the middle of the street, look around and realise you’re exactly where you once dreamed of being.
Neither feeling makes you a bad expat, it simply makes you human.
So be patient with yourself. Give yourself permission to miss your old life while building a new one. Because one day, without even noticing, you’ll wake up and realise that what once felt impossible has become your everyday routine, and that’s one of the greatest achievements of all.
💭 A Moment to Reflect
If you’ve already moved abroad, which part of this article felt the most familiar?
If you’re still dreaming about leaving, which challenge worries you the most?
I’d genuinely love to hear your story in the comments. After all, no two expat journeys are ever the same.