The Expat Fear Nobody Talks About
Every time I apply for a visa, something happens that I haven't fully found words for until recently.
There's a moment, somewhere between filling in the forms and waiting for the answer, where I feel it. A quiet but insistent reminder that this country I've built my life in, the one that has become my daily rhythm, my familiar streets, my sense of normal, is not officially mine. That I am here on permission. And that permission can be withdrawn.
After 23 years and 13 countries, I still feel it. And for a long time I wondered why. Why, with all this experience, all this adaptation, all this evidence that I can build a life anywhere — why does a visa application still make something in me go quiet and uncertain?
I think it's because it touches something that most expats carry and very few talk about openly.
The fear of being denied access back into the country we have made home.
Not the country we were born in. The country we chose. The one we arrived in not knowing anyone, where we slowly figured out the supermarket and the bus routes and which café makes the coffee right. The one where we finally started to feel something settle — not completely, never completely, but enough.
That country.
The idea of being told you cannot go back to it is not abstract. It lives in the body. It shows up in the small print of every visa form, in the waiting, in the checking and rechecking of documents, in the particular anxiety of standing at an immigration desk and handing over your passport to someone who gets to decide.
And what makes it harder to hold is that it sits alongside so much that is genuinely good. The adventure, the opportunity, the life you have built. The contradiction again — grateful and uncertain, at home and on borrowed permission, all at the same time.
I sat down recently with Corina Hoch — originally from Germany, now living and working in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, for over ten years — to talk honestly about this. Corina works with solopreneurs on both marketing strategy and mental wellbeing, and she understands from her own life what it means to build something real in a country that isn't the one you started in.
We talked about the visa feeling. About the particular quality of that fear. About how even after a decade in Mexico, the uncertainty doesn't fully disappear — it just becomes something you learn to hold alongside everything else.
What struck me most in our conversation was how quickly we both recognised the same thing in each other. That particular shape of anxiety that doesn't have a name in most languages. The one that says: I have built something here, and it could be taken away, and I would not have chosen to leave.
You can watch our full conversation below.
This is one of the things that sits beneath the surface for so many expat women. Not the big obvious struggles — the loneliness, the starting over, the identity shifts — but these quieter fears that feel almost embarrassing to admit. Because you chose this life. Because from the outside it looks like an adventure. Because the people back home don't quite understand why you'd worry about something as administrative as a visa.
But it isn't administrative. Not really. It's about belonging. About whether the place you've made your own will keep letting you stay.
And the reason it matters to name it — here, openly — is because unexpressed fear has a way of sitting in the body and quietly taking up space. It affects how settled you feel. How present you can be. How much of your energy goes toward the anxiety rather than the life you're actually living.
You are not imagining it. You are not being dramatic. This is a real and rational fear for anyone living abroad on a visa, and it is one of the loneliest ones to carry because so few people around you will understand exactly what it means.
If this resonates — if you recognised something in this that you've been carrying quietly — I'd gently invite you to download the free workbook, Healing While Abroad. It won't solve the visa anxiety. But it might give you somewhere to put it down for a while.
Download Healing While Abroad here
This fear is one of the quieter contradictions of expat life — and if that theme resonates, you might want to read this earlier post about the mixed emotions we carry that don't always have names.