Expat Life Is Full of Contradictions. That Doesn't Mean Something Is Wrong With You.
Nobody tells you that you can be living your dream and falling apart at the same time.
That you can be genuinely grateful for the life you've chosen and still cry in a city where nobody knows your name. That you can feel brave and terrified in the same afternoon. That the adventure and the overwhelm don't take turns, they arrive together, hand in hand, and you have to learn to hold both.
After 23 years living abroad, 13 countries, and more fresh starts than I can count, this is the thing I know most deeply about expat life:
It is rarely one thing. It is almost always two.
Moving to a new country is supposed to be exciting. And it is. I have stood in places so beautiful they made me catch my breath. I have eaten food I didn't have words for. I have watched sunrises from rooftops in countries I never imagined I'd live in.
But those same streets that take your breath away are also streets where you don't know if you're safe. Where you don't know the rules, written or unwritten. Where something as simple as ordering a coffee becomes a small adventure in humility.
In Vietnam, I once tried to order a coffee and could not pronounce the word correctly no matter how many times I tried. The woman behind the counter looked at me with patient bewilderment. I ended up with something I hadn't ordered, laughed until I nearly cried, and then a kind stranger stepped in and ordered for me. I was grateful in a way that's hard to explain, not just for the coffee, but for the reminder that kindness doesn't need a shared language.
That's the thing about expat life. The frustrating moments and the beautiful ones are often the same moment.
I bought the wrong bus ticket in Japan once. What should have been a 40 minute ride became a four hour mission across routes I didn't recognise, in a country where I couldn't read the signs. I was tired and a little panicked and trying very hard not to show it. An elderly man noticed. He could barely speak English. But he sat down next to me, helped me find the right bus, and then rode the whole way with me, far out of his way, just to make sure I arrived safely.
I have never forgotten him.
I was chased by police in Russia for wandering into a monastery I wasn't supposed to enter, I genuinely couldn't read the warning signs. I was embarrassed and flustered and also, privately, a little delighted. The photos I took that day were some of my favourites from the whole time I lived there.
I have filled in the same form three times at a bank in Chile because I couldn't remember my new phone number or my new address, and felt an almost absurd wave of relief when I finally had a bank account, something so ordinary, so taken for granted at home, that had taken weeks to achieve.
I have been lost in a city in China where I couldn't speak the language, my phone battery dead, walking in circles for hours trying to find my flat. I was in tears by the time I finally found the door. And the next morning, I realised I now knew my neighbourhood better than I had in weeks.
I have had a motorbike accident in Asia, taken myself to the hospital, tried to understand what was being said to me, tried to figure out how to pay, all while I was in pain and completely alone. And in the middle of that, frightened and hurting and not knowing what would happen next, a doctor who was off duty came in especially because he heard there was a foreign patient who needed help. He spoke English. He stayed until everything was sorted.
These moments broke me a little and built me a little, often at the same time.
There is also the quieter kind of contradiction. The one that doesn't make a good story but sits with you anyway.
Being happy to be here and missing home so much it aches. Wanting this life and wanting the one you left behind. Feeling strong, genuinely strong, and also so tired of having to be.
Not being able to explain any of this to the people back home, because how do you describe something that contains its own opposite? How do you say I love this life and I am struggling in it without one cancelling the other out?
For a long time I found the only place I could put it was my journal. Not in neat words or tidy reflections, but in marks, in colour, in images that didn't need to make sense. Art gave me somewhere to put the things that were too tangled for language. Somewhere to hold both truths at once without having to choose between them.
I think this is one of the most important things I've learned from 24 years abroad:
You don't have to resolve the contradiction. You don't have to decide which feeling is the real one. You are allowed to be grateful and heartbroken. Brave and exhausted. At home and homesick. Certain you made the right choice and quietly wondering.
Both things can be true.
And if you are somewhere in the middle of that right now, holding two things that feel like they shouldn't be able to exist together, I want you to know that I understand it. Not in theory. In the actual lived, messy, sometimes laughing sometimes crying reality of it.
This is why I do the work I do. Not because I have it figured out. But because I know what it feels like to carry both, and I know that having somewhere to put it down, even just for an hour, changes something.
If you'd like somewhere to start, my free workbook Healing While Abroad was made for exactly this. A quiet space to feel what you've been carrying, one page at a time.
With warmth,
Janaline