Feeling between two worlds living abroad is something many expats and international people experience, even after spending years building a life in another country.
Feeling between two worlds living abroad is something many expats and international people experience, even after spending years building a life in another country.
I came to the Netherlands for six months. At least, that was the plan — an Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs project, a period of exploration after finishing my Master’s degree. Six months turned into a year. That year turned into something I no longer know how to describe as anything other than “my life now.”
It isn’t a dramatic story. No one forced me to leave, and I wasn’t running away from anything in particular. But if you asked me today who I am, the answer would no longer be simple. And I have noticed, both in the therapy room and outside of it, that I am not the only person this happens to.
When my partner and I arrived here, the hardest part wasn’t the big, philosophical question you might expect. It was the healthcare system. The day the rubbish gets collected. How finding housing works, which documents you need, and who you’re supposed to contact.
Small, boring things — but when they accumulate, they demand an enormous amount of energy to adapt to, precisely at a time when you are already emotionally exhausted by everything that is new.
This is something people rarely anticipate before moving abroad: your identity doesn’t suddenly collapse all at once. What disappears first are the small, automatic certainties — the way “things are done” where you come from, things so deeply rooted that you didn’t even realise they were yours until they suddenly disappeared from the world around you.
Researchers refer to this process as the accumulation of acculturative stress — a constant background pressure created not by one major event, but by dozens of daily micro-decisions and uncertainties.
Psychologist John Berry, one of the most widely cited researchers in cross-cultural psychology, showed that the way people navigate this pressure depends on two questions that, consciously or unconsciously, they are constantly asking themselves:
How important is it for me to maintain my culture of origin?
and
How important is it for me to become part of the new culture?
The combination of these answers can lead to four possible pathways:
Integration — maintaining what matters from your original culture while also building something new — has consistently been associated with better long-term psychological well-being.
But integration is not a moment. It’s a process.
And sometimes, that process hurts.
One thing I wish I had known during those first few months is this: being far from home doesn’t disconnect you from your original identity. It often makes you more aware of it.
Things that were once invisible — language, humour, ideas about respect, family roles — suddenly become visible because you begin to see them through contrast.
Qualitative studies involving immigrants, for example research on Polish people living in Denmark, show that people may feel “more Danish” or “more Polish” depending on the context — at work, with family, with old friends, or with new ones.
This isn’t a contradiction or a weakness of character. It’s actually a normal part of how a bicultural identity develops: it is situational rather than fixed.
After my first year here, I noticed the same thing while speaking with people who had been living away from their home countries for a long time: almost everyone eventually develops a kind of dual identity that they carry with them — not as a burden, but as a genuine part of who they have become.
This is the part many people experience but rarely say out loud: you can have a career that is going well, a partner, and new friends — and still feel deeply lonely.
A recent study by Cigna Healthcare involving internationally mobile professionals found that almost half (48%) of people living and working in a country other than their country of origin reported feelings of loneliness, despite the majority considering their relocation a success.
These things are not contradictory.
You can feel, at the same time, that you made the right decision and that something is missing in a way that is difficult to name.
Research involving international students shows a similar pattern: higher levels of reported loneliness are directly associated with higher levels of anxiety symptoms compared with students who remain in their home countries.
Not because they are “more fragile,” but because their support network — the one built over an entire lifetime — remains physically somewhere else.
If you recognise any of these patterns in yourself, you probably already know what I mean:
I don’t want to give the impression that living away from your culture is only difficult. It isn’t.
From my own experience — and because I travelled extensively even before moving here — I genuinely believe that being constantly exposed to different ways of living gives you something rare: the ability to see that life doesn’t have only one correct form.
That, in many profound ways, we are remarkably similar — capable of the same fundamental kindness and driven by the same basic psychological needs — while at the same time being completely different in our everyday practices.
Research involving international students supports this too. After an initial period of stress and anxiety, many report becoming more independent, more assertive, and more reflective.
Being away from home can, in practice, create the space you needed to redefine yourself — not because your family or community back home was “wrong,” but because being away from automatic expectations gives you the opportunity to consciously choose what you want to keep, what you want to change, and what you want to leave behind.
I believe this is also what brought me even closer to my work as a therapist: seeing, every day, how different the realities people come from can be — and, beneath all those differences, how similar their fundamental needs for safety, belonging, and meaning remain.
If you recognise yourself in what I’ve described so far, there are a few things that genuinely matter:
Don’t force yourself to choose between the “old” and the “new.” Research is quite clear on this: you don’t have to choose a single identity. Integration — keeping what matters from your culture while simultaneously building something new — is consistently associated with better psychological well-being than rigidly holding on to one side or the other.
Name what you feel, not just what you do. It’s easy to focus on the practical side — visas, contracts, moving boxes — and ignore the emotional side until it begins to accumulate. The exhausting small decisions of everyday life matter just as much as the major events.
Look for spaces where both parts of you are accepted. Research consistently shows that genuine social support — not simply “having friends,” but having someone you can openly talk to about this confusion — can make a significant difference between an isolating experience and one that helps you grow.
Talk to someone who understands both worlds. Not every therapist has personally experienced or worked directly with this topic. That can make a difference.
If you’re reading this and feel a knot in your stomach because something feels deeply familiar, I want one thing to be clear:
What you’re feeling is not a sign that you made the wrong decision by leaving.
It doesn’t mean that you’re “too sensitive.”
And it doesn’t mean that you haven’t managed to adapt quickly enough.
In fact, it may be exactly what research suggests happens when an identity is being reconstructed.
It isn’t disappearing.
It’s being reshaped.
If you’d like to talk about what you’re experiencing right now — whether it’s anxiety related to a recent move, loneliness that doesn’t seem to go away, or simply the feeling that you no longer know “who you are” in this new context — you can start with a short conversation, with no obligation.
