I didn’t have a name for what that cost me physically until much later: and it’s something that those with hard-to-place names and faces can recognize immediately…

The jaw that tightens before a meeting where you know you’ll have to sound a certain way. The shoulders that creep up toward your ears mid-sentence, deciding in real time which “version” of you is acceptable here. The held breath right before you switch registers, switch tone, or switch which parts of you get airtime. The way all of this amplifies when doing it in your second, third or eighth language — in a room with different cultural norms than your passport country.

I’ve been thinking about this again recently, after watching a wave of writers here on Substack get told their fluency read as suspicious — too smooth, too effortless, somehow inauthentic. I wrote about that moment separately, and you can read it here if you want the fuller thread.

The pattern underneath it isn’t new because I know it well: cultural code-switching.

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Cultural code-switching vs. code-switching

Code-switching isn't a term that belongs to me. It comes from the Black American experience and became a formal concept in linguistic research starting in the 1970s, linked to W.E.B. DuBois's concept of double consciousness: the need to shift between Standard English and African American English to navigate a world that perceives these two language forms very differently.1

What I present here is my effort to build on that foundation on how it shows up across cultures and countries; not to replace it.

The kind of “switching between selves” I’m discussing today is what long-term expats, immigrants, and third culture kids experience across borders and languages every day.

A quick reminder before we proceed: different bodies carry different layers of alertness into their lives abroad. Someone switching across culture and language brings one baseline of alertness. Someone switching based on how their body is perceived by others brings another level. Neither experience is a hierarchy or a claim as to who’s struggling more. They’re just different things the nervous system prepares for.

That said, chronic stress genuinely recalibrates the body's operating baseline over time. This has appeared in the research interviews I’ve been conducting with people who’ve lived abroad five years or more. Clinically, this is referred to as allostatic load; and it describes the real physiological cost of a system that keeps adjusting to a changing environment rather instead of returning to a fixed baseline.2

Where cultural code-switching shows up

For those whose baseline doesn’t already include the kind of alertness I mentioned above, the research supports the feelings you may struggle to articulate while living abroad:

One long-term expat I spoke to described feeling like a different person depending on the language — “a fraction of” who they were when speaking a language other than the one they grew up in.

Another talked about feeling “a few beats out of step” in conversations with locals, composing a response while the conversation has already moved ahead.

A member of my Substack community put it differently: not a fraction of yourself in each language, but the “thinking” and “feeling” parts finally learning to work together, in more than one language at once.

None of this is imagined.

Researchers studying multicultural individuals have found that switching between languages and switching between cultural frames each place separate demands on cognitive function. This means the mental load isn't just about language, it's also about cognition, doubling the challenge.3 A related study on Third Culture Kids found that this kind of frame-switching correlates with distinct patterns in how bicultural people monitor and adjust themselves across various contexts — patterns that don’t appear as prominently in those who grew up in a single culture, language, and framework.4

The tight jaw, the tense shoulders, the breath held before switching — that’s not performance anxiety or overthinking. It’s your brain managing several operating systems simultaneously, alongside the cognitive load of navigating a different language.

In practice this can look like:

• Composing a response in your head while a WhatsApp thread has already moved three messages past where you intended to reply, then deciding it’s not worth sending anymore;

• Pausing before answering a simple question—like what you want for dinner—while part of you scans for what answer the room expects before realizing what you truly think;

• Noticing your posture change mid-sentence: your jaw tense, shoulders creeping toward your ears without consciously deciding to brace for anything;

• Searching for a word in your second or third language during a professional conversation and losing it completely, with everyone waiting for you to find the right word;

• Realizing later that you agreed to something in a meeting not because you intended to, but because disagreeing seemed more costly in that specific room.

Your brain is running through multiple operating systems at the same time — and sometimes struggling to keep up.

Adaptability is a skill that many of us living abroad, walking the edges of multiple worlds, should appreciate and pride ourselves on.

That adaptability also comes with a cost that we can acknowledge.

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Cultural code-switching: skill or survival mechanism?

The truth? It’s both.

The adaptability is real, as is the long process it took to develop it. You learned to read a room in a language that isn’t your first, to adjust your tone mid-sentence, and to know how much of yourself is safe to share in each space. That’s significant. Most people never have to cultivate it.

But skill and survival mechanism aren’t opposites. Sometimes they represent the same behavior, depending on the day you observe it.

Some days the switching feels almost invisible — a fluency you’ve earned, something more akin to ease than exhaustion. Other days it feels like you spent the whole translating yourself into a version someone else could receive, and you’re not sure when you agreed to that exchange.

Both realities co-exist. I haven’t encountered anyone living abroad long-term who doesn’t find this to be true at some point.

What I do know is that naming this experience changes the dynamic. It doesn't alter the cultural code-switching itself — that's a fact of your life now. But acknowledging it shifts the hidden belief that something is “wrong” with you for finding it tiring. The truth is your nervous system is operating as it was designed to, just with more intensity while living abroad.

Sometimes it helps to have that experience witnessed; you don’t have to make sense of it alone:

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

Subscribe now

Jetlagged, mindlessly moving through a clothing store, I miscalculated the distance between myself and a woman at a rack. There was an entire aisle I could have taken. Instead, without consciously deciding to, I chose the path that grazed her shoulder — the roce, as I’d come to think of it, the Spanish instinct to take the route in closest proximity to someone even when the wider option is right there.

She whipped her head around to face me and in outrage practically shouted, “Excuuuuuuse meeee!!!”

I mumbled an apology four times at the floor and got out of there as fast as I could.

My nervous system toggle was faulty that day. My body had recalibrated to a country where personal space closes without apology, and it hadn’t checked whether the room it was standing in agreed.

Now, when someone gives me the roce on a Madrid sidewalk, I barely register it. Not because I stopped noticing. Because my nervous system stopped treating it as data worth flagging.

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The baseline that moves in life abroad

That's the part nobody tells you before you decide to move abroad long-term — not that your nervous system will stay alert longer than it needs to, though it will. That it can also, eventually, forget what alert used to feel like as the default. The vigilance never fully resolved. But your baseline has moved along with your body.

This isn't just a feeling.

Chronic stress genuinely recalibrates the body's operating baseline over time — researchers call this allostatic load, and it describes the real physiological cost of a system that keeps adjusting to a changing environment rather than returning to some fixed, original setting.1

There's also a more basic mechanism at work: habituation, the well-documented way a response to a repeated stimulus simply decreases the more it's encountered.2 The roce on a sidewalk is a small, almost comic version of exactly this. Something that once registered as a full violation of personal space now barely registers at all.

In the research conversations I’ve been having this year, there’s a pattern that’s universal across the board: the body doesn’t recalibrate to life abroad on the same timeline as the situation.

What gets missed in most conversations about adjusting to life abroad is that this cuts both ways. The same system slow to release an old threat is also, eventually, slow to notice a new kind of safety has arrived. You can be genuinely fine, by any measure, and still carry a body that hasn’t updated its files.

Sometimes it updates in the wrong direction first, and you find out from a stranger in a shop in your hometown.

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Why big things get easier and small things don't

Here’s the part I wish someone had told me sooner, because it’s the part that isn’t just about the migratory grief I talk about on this Substack.

You’d think a nervous system worn down by years of adapting would just be depleted across the board. But this research pattern is starting to emerge among long-term expats, immigrants, and globally mobile folks. Different people I spoke to described something almost identical: the capacity to handle a genuine crisis had expanded over years abroad, while the tolerance for small daily irritations had narrowed at the same time.

In practice, that can look like:

• Handling an actual emergency — a health scare, a lost passport, a genuine crisis — with more steadiness than you would have had before you left;

• Getting disproportionately flustered by a delayed train, a bureaucratic form, or an interruption that, by any objective measure, shouldn’t affect you that much;

• Noticing that the gap between those two responses doesn’t track with how “resilient” you’d otherwise describe yourself.

This is still an emerging pattern in the research — not something I’d call settled yet — but it fits with what allostatic load actually describes: a system recalibrating its baseline under sustained demand, not a system running out of resources evenly across the board.

A body that’s been adjusting for years to life abroad doesn’t necessarily get weaker everywhere. It seems to specialize — staying steady where the stakes are real, and spending whatever’s left on the things that shouldn’t cost anything at all.

That’s not a flaw to fix. It’s closer to a skill you didn’t know you were building, learned from repetition you wouldn’t have chosen, and honed by your nervous system toggling back and forth between your “there” and “here”.

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When the hum stops being an alarm

One woman in this research reframed the whole thing in a way I haven't stopped thinking about.

She described the low-grade hum of life abroad — the background effort of living between worlds — not as strain to manage, but as a frequency. Something only she could hear, but not necessarily an alarm bell. Sometimes, she said, it could be grounding instead of alerting, if she let it.

I don't think that reframe is available on command; it’s earned. You can't just decide the hum is a frequency and have your body agree with you.

But I've noticed it happening in smaller ways than I expected — a shoulder brushing mine on a sidewalk, registering as nothing at all, when it once would have registered as an entire country's worth of difference.

Most of the people I’ve spoken with in this research are, by every visible measure, doing well. Careers, families, systems built and rebuilt more than once. That’s exactly why the lag is so easy to miss — both by the people carrying it and by everyone around them.

The nervous system doesn’t check in with your résumé before deciding what to brace for.

What I wish someone had told me sooner

The low-grade hum is instantly recognizable to anyone who’s lived abroad long-term — because we’re all aware of the effort it takes to navigate life somewhere new. But I wish someone told me that the nervous system baseline will move in both directions. Adjusting from your “there” to “here”, and back again.

The same recalibration that costs you also eventually gives something back — not resolution, but recognition. A body that’s slower to trust safety is not the same as a body that never will.

Some days you’ll still misjudge the distance, apologize four times, and hurry out of a store. Some days a shoulder will brush yours and you won’t even notice until later that you didn’t flinch.

Both are evidence the system is still listening. It’s just slower than you are.

And if this named something you’ve been carrying without a word for it, you don’t have to sort through it alone:

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

Subscribe now

It didn’t arrive in a single move or milestone. This country has assembled slowly, almost imperceptibly, in the spaces between my homes and languages — in the streets I left behind, the rooms I learned to read, and the quiet hum of my nervous system adapting again and again.

When I look back now, what surprises me most is not how much I’ve lost, but how much has taken root inside. There are corners of Madrid, Los Angeles, and a dozen other in‑between places that live in me at the same time. My passport still names one country. My body carries several, no matter where I go.

Over the last seven months of research conversations, I’ve heard versions of this from so many of you. A long‑term expat “who realized that parts of their soul were left in different countries that could never be fully reassembled”. Someone who described it as “belonging to myself across all cultures at once”. Another who said that after enough years abroad, “the only place that consistently feels like home is an inner landscape no one else can see.”

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The interior country as a research pattern

When I step back from the individual stories, this interior country shows up less as a metaphor and more as a repeating structure.

Over time, long‑term expats, immigrants, TCKs, and returners I’ve spoken to have described something similar: a sense that their life no longer lives in any one place, but in an inner landscape stitched together from several.

It’s the feeling of carrying multiple cities in your body at once. The way a certain kind of light, or pavement, or afternoon silence in one country can suddenly pull up a version of you from another. People talk about streets they still walk in their minds long after they’ve moved on. Languages they drop into when they need to feel like themselves again. Kitchens, cafés, and commutes that no longer exist in their daily life, but still feel oddly present — like rooms in an internal house they can visit whenever they need to.

What links all of these is not nostalgia for a single “home,” but a kind of layered familiarity. The interior country is where those layers live side by side. It’s the place in you that knows how to reconcile the fact that your memories, attachments, and identities now span more than one map.

How my interior country travels with me

“Home” was never a single place for me — even before I moved to Spain, I was already a first-generation daughter of immigrants. People often assigned me a story before I opened my mouth. So moving to Madrid in 2010 added another layer around identity that I’ve been writing about, researching, and navigating ever since.

So what does my interior country look like?

It shows up in the way I see a crosswalk sign blinking to change from green to red, and the initial urge to run to beat it, immediately followed by the reminder that I’m really in no rush.

It shows up in the way my husband and I have created a specific version of Spanglish that’s been shaped by our particular mix of obscure pop culture references, musical parodies in both English and Spanish, inside jokes formed by travel mishaps, and tribulations and triumphs over ten years of marriage.

It shows up in the way the breeze rippling through eucalyptus can instantly transport me from Madrid to New England, Morocco, Singapore, India, and my solo trek walking the Camino de Santiago.

It shows up in the way I seamlessly switch between “I/yo” and “our/nuestro” and “you all/vosotros/ustedes” when speaking about Los Angeles, California, the US, the Philippines, Madrid, and Spain.

I carry all of these parts with me. Some days that’s lonely. Most days, it’s just… life. You’re always acutely aware of the loss involved, but at a loss for words for how to share it with people around you who don’t see the complexity you’re carrying.

It took naming the grief of life abroad out loud — without trying to tidy it up with an Instagram filter — that helped me find others like you who’ve raised your hands in recognition.

How this Substack has evolved

My initial essays on Edgewalkers Collective came from journal entries, showing I was trying to reckon with living with these multiple lenses at once.

What started as a way to better understand and connect with other long-term expats, immigrants, and global citizens 5+ years abroad on Substack has slowly become a research corpus that, as of today:

• Includes nearly 40 conversations, 1 in-person workshop, 49 countries of lived experience — and continues to be updated every week with your stories;

• Underpins the 30 essays published here on Edgewalkers Collective;

• Has been presented to a room of intercultural educators, practitioners, and researchers at an international conference in Valencia, Spain.

That’s been, objectively, amazing.

But if I’m being honest, I’m still reckoning with how to map and navigate my interior country. It’s something I suspect that I’ll always be navigating, adding new layers each year.

This is the part I don’t write about as often as I share here on Substack: seventeen years of switching between registers, languages, and lenses didn’t just leave a residue of fatigue. It also built something more like a discipline — the capacity to hold more than one true thing in view at once, on purpose, and use that as a tool rather than survive it as a strain.

It’s something I realized has shaped my interior country as much as it’s shaped those of you who’ve reshared an essay, left a comment, or spoken to me in my research interviews.

For each one of those interactions — the ways they’ve shaped both the research and reinforced my sense of belonging to a truly remarkable community — I’m deeply grateful.

My birthday gift to Edgewalkers

If you recognize some version of this interior country in yourself, you’re probably already tending it without calling it that. It can show up in:

• Routes you return to. The walk that exists in more than one city you’ve called home. The bench, the café, the stretch of pavement that doesn’t look like much, where something in you settles a notch before you’ve consciously arrived.

• Languages you reach for. The one that shows up when you’re tired, or delighted, or telling the truth without editing first. Noticing which moments pull which language forward is one way of listening to what your interior country already knows.

• Objects you keep close. A mug, a recipe, a piece of clothing that’s moved with you more than once. Not sentimental in the abstract — anchoring, in the specific.

Noticing what your body already returns to is usually enough to make that inner place feel a little more real, and a little less lonely.

If you’d like to go further

What did the above audio bring up for you?

Tell me about your in-between in the comments. (I read every one — and I suspect the rest of us will recognize ourselves in your story.)

And if this interior country feels a little crowded or hard to find your footing in right now, you don't have to map it alone.

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

Subscribe now

“By the time anyone asks how I’m doing, I’ve already got three versions ready. One for people who want the truth. One for people who want reassurance. One for people who just want the conversation to move on.”

They said it almost as a joke. Then paused.

"I didn't realize how much energy that takes until I said it out loud."

I know this pattern. It’s shown up across seven months of research conversations with fellow globally mobile people.

It’s also appeared — sometimes viscerally, sometimes invisibly — as a consistent presence in my lived experience of nearly two decades living abroad. Nobody taught it to me. I built it, one conversation at a time, in places I had to earn my footing in.

If I’m being honest, it happened before my first one-way ticket to Spain. I grew up code‑switching as a Third Culture Kid (TCK) — American at school, something else at home, reading rooms before I understood not everyone did that automatically.

Every room became a small calculation, because you’re still reading the question behind the question. “How do you like living here?” isn’t really asking what you think. It’s asking whether you’re going to be easy or difficult to have this conversation with.

So you pre‑write your responses depending on who you’re speaking to, how well you know them, or how much bandwidth you have that day.

You learn to read the question behind the question.
You decide which register matches the room.
How much directness (or lack thereof).
How much cushion to add before each ask.
Whether this is a “fine” conversation or a “no really, how are you?” conversation, and whether the person asking actually wants to know the difference.

A toolkit gets built this way, quietly, over years. It hums in the background of an ordinary day living abroad.

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Self-translation, not dishonesty

This isn’t dishonesty. That’s distinction matters. It’s closer to translation. Because you’re not lying about how you are — you’re choosing which true thing to lead with, based on what the room in front of you can hold.

This seems to be close to universal for people living between languages and cultures:

• Research with bilinguals suggests that your body reacts more strongly to emotional content in your first language, while your second language often asks more of your brain — more effort, more monitoring, less automatic feeling.1 In my research interviews, people have named this directly — one participant described feeling like “only a fraction” of herself in a language that wasn’t her first, even if she was fluent.

• Studies on cultural code‑switching2 — the constant swapping of language or social register — suggest it’s not just a social skill; it’s a neurological workout, repeatedly activating the parts of the brain responsible for self‑control and conflict‑monitoring. That code‑switching becomes repeated activation of the brain’s self‑monitoring systems, which over years can carry a real physical cost — especially for people who feel they have to keep doing it to be understood.

• There’s even evidence that naming emotions in a second language doesn’t soothe the nervous system in quite the same way as naming them in a first language3 — the word registers cognitively, but doesn’t always reach the body with the same depth. In my interviews, people often find their most accurate words in a language they’re not living in anymore, and their bodies are slower to follow.

Most people living abroad long-term get very good at this type of self-translation without ever deciding to.

It becomes automatic the way any survival skill does — useful long after the survival part is over.

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The unseen experience of multilingual life

If you live across languages, this three‑answer habit doesn’t just live in your social scripts. It lives in your nervous system.4

Bilingual speakers I’ve spoken to informally often say that swearing, praying, lying, and saying “I love you” feel different in their first language than in their second. Research backs up this pattern: emotional phrases tend to land with more immediate intensity in language one, while the second language often feels slightly buffered — more cognitive, less automatic in the body.5

In practice, that can look like:

• Finding the most precise words for your feelings in a language you’re not living in anymore, and often stumbling to find it in the language you use more frequently today;

• Speaking about something painful in your second language and noticing it feels strangely manageable, then feeling the full weight only later when you switch back to your first;

• Knowing the specific vocabulary for a hobby, profession, or skill in one of your non-native languages, but not knowing how to translate it into your native tongue;

• Realizing you’ve never said certain things — grief, anger, tenderness — in one of your languages at all, because that version of you never learned how.

One of my research participants who’s lived abroad over a decade put it this way: “The in-between never really ends. Not just in geography, but in emotional fluency. There’s one language where your feelings arrive raw and fast, and another language or two where they arrive slightly delayed, shaped by who you had to be to use it.”

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It’s not just you — it’s the room

There’s another layer to this three‑answer habit in your non-native language that’s often harder to recognize.

It doesn’t just come from personality, cultural norms, social cues, or familiarity with grammar. It comes from whose story is considered “readable” in the room you’re in.

Those of us whose names, faces, or stories don’t fit neatly into one narrative know this navigation between adaptation and accommodation intimately. It’s not “overthinking” — it’s a learned survival skill, reinforced over years of self-translation to ensure your safety.

Political theorist Ibekwe, writing at Worlds Collide, explores how institutions don’t just organize our international movements; they quietly shape our feelings. He calls attention to what institutions cut — the parts of our experience that never make it into forms, reports, or official narratives, but live on in our bodies as exhaustion, fear, or muted grief. Ibekwe’s body of work on the emotional infrastructure of migration governance is one of the clearest articulations I’ve found. It names out loud what so many of us have felt privately: that the in‑between we live in is shaped as much by institutions as by culture or personality.

Migration scholars have also started talking about “emotional infrastructure” — the way institutions quietly shape not just who moves, but how people are made to feel. They’ve found that fear and exhaustion aren’t accidents of the system; they’re built into the routines, forms, and interactions that govern mobility between borders.6

Sometimes that hierarchy is explicit: a visa office, a border control officer, an HR meeting where your future depends on being “reasonable”. Sometimes it’s softer: the dinner party where you read the social rules faster than others; the workplace where your story would unsettle the narrative of meritocracy if you told it too directly.

Either way, pre‑writing acceptable answers in your life abroad becomes one of the ways you maintain a sense of safety for your nervous system. You’re managing emotions and you’re managing risk.

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Staying present without losing yourself

For Edgewalkers, staying present with this means holding two truths at once:

1. Your multilingual emotional life is real because research shows that different languages land differently in your body; and

2. The rooms you’re answering into have histories, hierarchies, and unspoken rules that shape what feels “sayable” in each one.

That can be a lot to carry on your own. Especially when you’re the only one in your social circle that is living through this.

So rather than trying to stop code‑switching or force “full authenticity” everywhere, how you decide to show up can be smaller, subtler, and more deliberate:

• Name the context. Before you answer, you can ask yourself: “What room am I in? Who holds power here? What outcome am I protecting?” The goal isn’t to change the answer yet. It’s to see the field you’re playing on.

• Find one low-risk room. One conversation where your visa, job, or belonging aren’t at stake. In that room, experiment with a slightly less edited answer — a version that takes one small step closer to what’s true for you.

• Let the split be evidence of effort, not failure. If your answer changes between languages or contexts, that doesn’t mean you’re being inauthentic. It usually means you’re reading power and safety accurately.

True presence in your long-term life abroad isn’t just about “pushing through it”. It’s surfacing what you’ve been unconsciously doing for years — treating it as a skill you’ve built under pressure, not a shortcoming you have to hide.

And if this essay named something uncomfortably accurate, you don’t have to make sense of it alone:

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

Subscribe now

I left the stage with an audience member giving me a hug and a quiet sentence in my ear:

“You finally named what I’ve been carrying out loud. Thank you.”

Here’s what happened in between.

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The research corpus

If you’ve been following Edgewalkers Collective from the beginning, you’ll know that I’ve been conducting research conversations into the long-term life abroad experience — alongside my CPCAB counselling training.

Since kicking off these interviews, I’ve now held 35 conversations, hosted 1 in-person workshop in Madrid, and heard stories from people whose experiences span 49 countries. But by the fifth interview, I could already identify a clear pattern:

Many of the people I spoke to started to name this hum and this feeling of in-between-ness — what I call “chronic liminality” — around year five when settling into their chosen home.

As a bit of a lark, I applied to speak at an intercultural congress in Valencia to share more about the patterns that were emerging — with a room of people who think, talk, and write about this for a living.

I was thrilled when I received the email that it had been accepted.

The talk I delivered

The session I gave was called, “The Low‑Grade Hum of Life Abroad: Migratory Grief & Chronic Liminality for Long‑Term Expats.”

The room was full of intercultural trainers, psychologists, educators, and practitioners — people used to holding the frameworks, not being handed someone else’s.

I opened with the material I’ve been building since the start of this year, and how each of your stories helped shape my research. Not the first year landing, but year ten, twenty, or forty. The “no longer new, still not home” folks who’ve done all the visible integration steps — housing, work, friends, language(s) — and still describe feeling “slightly offshore” in their own lives. I shared the stories of:

• The “trailing spouses” who had to get creative about how to build lives and families when moving abroad often meant leaving their own careers behind;

• The multi-decade expats who’ve spent more of their lives in their adopted country than their passport country, and how they build their own belonging infrastructures to mitigate loneliness;

• The returners who, after many years abroad, struggled with an often overlooked version of grief that their social systems didn’t have vocabulary for;

• The single professionals who, on paper, looked like they were fully functioning in their lives and careers abroad — only for the prolonged nervous system strain to catch up to them in the form of hospitalization or burnout.

On the slides, I shared concepts and clinical research that most people in the room had met before. The U‑curve or W‑curve of cultural adjustment most of us have seen before — the honeymoon, culture shock, recovery, adjustment, and on return, a second dip before things settle. I named Achotegui’s seven griefs1 — of family, language, culture, land, social status, group belonging, and migration‑linked risk — as the partial, recurrent, and multiple layers of migratory grief that underscore long-term life abroad. It’s a clinically recognized grief that stays partially open because what’s lost still exists for you somewhere else.

I also shared what both of those concepts miss:

• The U-curve or W-curve of cultural adjustment both assume that integration is prize at the end of a linear journey. For the people I’ve spoken with, it’s less a curve and more an O: circling the same themes for years, never fully resolved, and easily mistaken for a personal failure to integrate.

• The two decades of clinical research on migratory grief focuses primarily on labor migrants and refugees — whose grief has been shaped by significant trauma and loss through forced migration. For the people I’ve spoken with, choosing their home abroad over their passport country showed similar patterns of grief, loss, and nervous system strain.

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The questions that surprised me

I expected questions about the frameworks or the research methodology. Instead, what I got were thoughtful expansions:

• One person shared they often wished their multicultural identity story was more linear and easier to share with others — and that the talk led to their realization of the privilege it was to be able to experience the world through their different global lenses.

• Another asked about the intersectionality of the research I was conducting, and whether it was considering marginalized identities in addition to countries of origin. I highlighted that while the low-grade hum seemed to be consistent in every population I had interviewed so far, the most marked difference was for Black Americans — whose nervous systems consistently showed less strain outside of their countries of origin. (This is on my list to be shared in a future essay…)

• Someone else asked the question I get most, in different forms, from readers here too: “Why is it still hard after all these years?” I didn’t have a tidy answer. I had a reframe instead — what if the better question is: which parts of this life still require active effort, even though everything looks settled on paper?

After I wrapped up, most of the room started prepping for the next speaker’s talk — I heard the shuffle of laptops, notebooks, chairs scraping the floor.

She held on a beat longer than a polite conference hug usually lasts — long enough that I felt in my body what the last thirty minutes had only been describing in language.

On Substack, this hum is something I write about. In that room, for her, it became something she could finally put down, even briefly, because someone else was holding it too.

That’s the moment I keep returning to.

Grief & gratitude can co-exist in life abroad

At the conference, I shared one underlying pattern that came up in the research for long-term expats: their grief often comes “pre-apologized”.

What does that mean?

It means their grief shows up already justified, already minimized, already apologizing for its own existence before anyone’s asked it to explain itself. I heard versions of it throughout the research: I chose this, so I don’t get to grieve it. Other people have it worse. I know I’m lucky. The grief arrives with a disclaimer attached, as if permission to feel it has to be earned first.

That pattern — pre‑apologized grief — is a close cousin to what I want to name next, because I think it’s part of the same family, just wearing different clothing…

There’s another common pattern I’ve noticed, particularly for long-term expats of a specific generation, several of whom have written to me, both privately and publicly. Who’ve recognized the low‑grade hum immediately — but called it something else. One reader wrote, “I always considered it to be a positive thing, a sign of living life just a bit more intensely.”

I sat with that line longer than I expected to.

The hum can feel like intensity. Some days it probably is. But I’ve heard this reframe often enough now — vitality, the price of an interesting life, proof of having chosen well — that it’s started to feel like its own pattern.

It tends to show up in people who moved abroad decades ago, often by choice, into circumstances that were, by most measures, an upgrade. Which makes sense. If the move worked, if gratitude is the correct response, naming the grief underneath it can feel like betraying the choice.

But gratitude and grief were never in competition.

You can love the life you built and still carry an unfinished thread back to the one you didn’t. Call it intensity if that word feels safer. Sometimes the hum feels most alive precisely because something underneath it hasn’t been let all the way down yet.

Either name is yours to keep. You just don’t have to pick one to be believed.

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Why this research exists & what’s next

Edgewalkers Collective is here to build the vocabulary that lets people recognize what they’re carrying without having to justify it first, apologize for it, or perform gratitude as a condition of being believed.

Every story in this research — yours included, if you’ve ever written in to tell me I’d named something you hadn’t found words for, or pushed back because I hadn’t — is part of how that vocabulary keeps getting built. Even the pushback matters. Especially the pushback, honestly. It tells me where the pattern still has edges I haven’t fully mapped.

When have you felt the low‑grade hum in your life abroad? The version that lives in small moments… the pause before you answer where are you from, the room where your old status didn’t translate, the tiredness that never quite matches your calendar.

Tell me about your in‑between in the comments. (I read every one — and I suspect the rest of us will recognize ourselves in your story.)

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

“By any measure, I’ve figured it out. I just don’t understand why it still feels hard.”

On paper, life works for you abroad. The housing is sorted. The work is real. There are friends, a language you can mostly move through, a calendar that looks, to anyone watching, like a life that has integrated. And yet something in the system never fully stands down. The engine idles even when the car is parked.

What I want to name directly is that “something.” It isn’t just a mood, and it isn’t something you can fix with mindset or an “attitude of gratitude”. It’s about what long‑term expatriation does to the nervous system over time — slowly, structurally, and mostly out of view.

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The structural hum

In the six months of research I’ve been conducting with long‑term expats, migrants and returners — people kept reaching for a version of the same description: a low‑grade hum.

A near-silent, ongoing background effort to keep functioning across cultures, languages, and roles that don’t quite fit by default — without feeling fully relaxed in one version of home or another.

It shows up in the smallest places:

• At the supermarket, your brain doing an extra calculation — the word, the etiquette, the rhythm of the queue;

• In bureaucracy, the bracing you do before opening an envelope or an online portal in a language that was never your first;

• In a WhatsApp thread, switching registers and tongues mid‑sentence, holding three (or more) cultural codes at once so no one feels misread.

Each of these is tiny. None of them would register as “a problem” on their own. But the body registers them. In nervous system terms, this is continuous, low‑level activation rather than discrete spikes — a system that is always doing a little bit more than the room requires.

That’s the part that’s easy to miss:

Over the years, that extra effort becomes the ambient sound of your days. You stop noticing the hum because it has become the baseline.

The narrowed window of tolerance

There’s a concept from my ongoing counselling training that helps explain why this accumulates instead of dissolving: the window of tolerance.

The “window” is the range where your system can take life in without either flooding (going into fight/flight) or shutting down (numbing, checking out). Inside it, you can think and feel at the same time. Outside it, the thinking part of the brain goes quiet and the body takes over.

Clinical work on chronic stress shows that long periods of being “on guard” or under threat can narrow that window over time. Research on migration, cultural bereavement, and identity loss indicates a similar pattern: people who have moved under strain or lived with ongoing uncertainty often show higher allostatic load — the cumulative “wear and tear” of stress on the body — years after the move.1

Here’s what I’ve noticed about long‑term expat life: years of needing to stay a little bit alert — new systems, new codes, being visibly “other” — can subtly narrow that window. Anything that depletes resilience over time, including low-level hypervigilance and being perpetually on guard, shrinks the space you have to absorb the ordinary friction of a day.

You start to notice it in the disproportions:

• A schedule change that lands in your body like a crisis.

• A small admin demand that spikes your system as if something is genuinely wrong.

• An email that, objectively, is nothing — and yet leaves you wired for hours.

A few weeks ago, this hum showed up on a routine phone call to my local health center. I’d been referred by my GP and wanted to double-check that I’d bring everything I needed to the appointment I’d booked online. Before I’d even dialed, I could feel myself mentally rehearsing the Spanish, double‑checking my ID number, bracing for the possibility they’d correct me, or that I’d broken some invisible rule. The call itself lasted under three minutes and the person on the other end was kind. My body, meanwhile, behaved as if something significant was at stake the whole time.

It’s tempting to read that as I’m being dramatic, or I’m just wired this way. It isn’t. It’s a body that has learned to stay ready, and hasn’t yet been told clearly that it’s safe enough to rest.

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The cost of always reading the room

Here’s the pattern I see most in long‑term, high‑functioning movers — and in myself: you read the room before you even know what you think.

It becomes automatic. Scanning faces, tones, unspoken cultural rules. Adjusting your register before you’ve registered your own response. It’s an extraordinary skill, and it’s exactly the skill that builds a life abroad — it’s how you become fluent in people.

But under chronic load, that constant reading is work. The nervous system has to carry it. And it has a cost:

• It gets harder to know what you feel or want before you’ve calibrated to everyone else;

• You can end up feeling a few seconds behind yourself — present, but always processing;

• Even rest becomes something you manage rather than something you sink into.

In my research calls, people described this as being “slightly offshore” in their own lives, or “a fraction of myself” — never fully off duty, even in spaces that had become familiar.

There’s a quiet irony in this:

The same skill that helped you build a life abroad is the one that makes it hard to stop managing long enough to actually receive support.

Migratory grief and the body

Underneath the hum and the narrowed window, there’s a third layer — and it’s the one that gives the rest a shape.

In the clinical literature, the effect of long‑term life abroad has a name: migratory grief. Spanish psychiatrist Joseba Achotegui describes it as a partial, recurrent, multiple grief — not one loss, but a cluster of them that stay active over time. Research summaries list at least seven domains migration can cut into: family, language, culture, land, social status, group belonging, and a basic sense of safety.2

Importantly, the more extreme “Ulysses Syndrome” Achotegui describes is not framed as a disorder, but as a human response to stress that exceeds what a nervous system can reasonably be asked to hold. It should be noted that his primary research population is migrants and refugees who’ve gone through harrowing experiences, and are — understandably — dealing with layers of trauma on top of their grief.

A recent systematic review of migratory grief found that these layered losses are consistently associated with higher psychological distress over time, which is exactly what many people are describing as the low‑grade hum in their bodies.3

Most long‑term expats are not at that extreme. But they often live on the same continuum.

You can often feel where these losses live in the body:

• The loss of status — a subtle shrinking in rooms where your social and/or economic capital doesn’t translate as the “forever foreigner”;

• The loss of language — tension in the jaw, the half‑second of rehearsing a sentence before you say it;

• The loss of place — how your sleep shifts, how your sense of place flickers, how some parts of you only make sense “there” and feel slightly homeless “here.”

The mind can file these under handled. The body keeps a different ledger.

So this reassurance matters:

If you’re tired in ways that don’t match your calendar, migratory grief and a narrowed window of tolerance are a better explanation than I must not be trying hard enough.

Why this isn’t “just” burnout or anxiety

Let me be careful here, because the overlap is real. Some people do meet criteria for burnout, or for anxiety, and those names are useful and worth taking seriously when they come from a licensed medical professional. What follows here is a way of understanding context, not a diagnosis.

But for many long‑term expats and returners, what shows up in the room isn’t a single diagnosable episode. It’s structural:

• It isn’t tied to one job you could leave or one acute stressor you could resolve;

• It is distributed — across years, across places, across the many versions of yourself you’ve had to assemble and reassemble in each new context;

• It sits at the intersection of nervous system load and cumulative, under-recognized loss.

That distinction matters because of what it implies.

This isn’t a personal failing to correct. It’s a context to understand.

You’re not broken for feeling this way in a life that looks fine. You’re living in a body that has been working overtime across contexts for longer than it should have.

Naming as a form of relief

So let’s return to the line we started with:

“By any measure, I’ve figured it out. I just don’t understand why it still feels hard.”

The gentlest honest answer I have is this:

Because your body has been doing more than anyone — including you — has accounted for.

There isn’t a neat fix in this essay, and I don’t think you need to diagnose yourself. The first intervention is smaller and kinder than that.

It’s naming.

Recognizing the hum. Noticing the narrowed window. Letting migratory grief be a real thing your body is carrying, rather than a character flaw. Naming gives you somewhere to stand that isn’t I’m the problem.

So this is where I’ll leave you — with presence, not prescription:

If you’d like to go further

When have you felt the low-grade hum in your life abroad? The version that lives in small moments… the pause before you answer where are you from, the room where your old status didn’t translate, the tiredness that never quite matches your calendar.

Tell me about your in-between in the comments. (I read every one — and I suspect the rest of us will recognize ourselves in your story.)

And if this essay feels uncomfortably accurate, an Expat Orientation Conversation is a place to let someone else hold the map while you notice what your body has been doing on your behalf:

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

Subscribe now

Sometimes weeks before — a low-grade restlessness that doesn’t have a clear cause. An awareness of something unresolved, sitting just below the ordinary surface of your day.

After many years away, you’ve decided to return to where your roots are. You’ve sold the furniture. You’ve said your goodbyes.

You’re not there yet. But some part of you already is.

And though it vaguely feels like any other return “home” — the mental checklists of what’s in your carry-on, the conversation rehearsals with friends and family members, the pre-flight jitters — you’re also aware… it’s a one-way trip this time.

Most of the writing about returning “home” focuses on the arrival. The moment of landing, the first few days, the slow realization that something doesn’t fit the way you expected.

But the weight arrives earlier than that.

It’s already there when you’re booking the ticket. When you’re deciding what to pack — which version of yourself to bring. When someone asks are you excited to go home? and you pause just a fraction too long before answering.

…that pause is carrying something.

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The body knows before the mind catches up

I’ve been paying attention to this in a lot of conversations over the past few months… particularly as I’ve spoken to more “returners”. And what I keep noticing is that the pre-return period — the weeks before landing — is often when the disorientation is sharpest, not after.

Not because something bad is coming. But because the body already knows what the mind hasn’t fully processed yet.

After ten, fifteen, twenty years away… return stops being a simple reversal. There is no Ctrl-Z shortcut that undoes all the evolution you’ve experienced, just because your feet are back on familiar soil.

The weight no one sees at the departure gate

The thing that makes this hard to name is that it looks like anticipation. It looks like nerves, or excitement, or the normal discomfort of travel.

And there’s often a silent pressure to keep it looking that way.

I chose this life.
I should be glad to go back.
I don’t get to make this into a bigger deal than it is.

But the body doesn’t negotiate with that kind of reasoning.
It just holds what it’s holding.

What I’ve found — in my own returns and in listening to others navigate theirs — is that the weight before landing rarely gets named out loud. There’s no obvious moment to set it down. No ritual for the in-between. No one waiting at arrivals with language for what you’re actually carrying.

So it travels with you. Through customs. Into the first conversation. Past the initial round of you look great, it’s so good to have you back.

What seems to help — even slightly — is the naming itself.

Not resolving it. Not explaining it to anyone who wouldn’t understand. Simply acknowledging, privately, that this is a real weight, and you are carrying it, and it makes sense that you are.

After enough years, return isn’t the end of something. It just opens into something else. Something that doesn’t have a name yet either.

Letting the weight sit with you

No one at the departure gate who says this weight you’re carrying is normal. No language for the thing that’s already started before the flight. Only the ordinary machinery of leaving — the lists, the logistics, the last walk through a space that’s no longer quite yours — while something underneath runs a different calculation entirely.

What I keep noticing, in my own experience and in conversations with people navigating this, is that naming it — even quietly, even just to yourself — changes something.

Not the weight itself. Just your relationship to it.

I am carrying something real.
It makes sense that I am.
I don’t have to arrive before I’m allowed to feel it.

If you’ve returned somewhere — truly returned, after years rather than months — and found that the disorientation began before you even landed, that experience has a shape.

It isn’t a sign that you’ve made the wrong decision.

It might just mean that you lived long enough, and fully enough, somewhere else for the going to have become part of who you are.

That’s not a problem to solve. It’s something to live with, carefully, without rushing toward conclusions that haven’t arrived yet.

And if this essay named something uncomfortably accurate, you don’t have to make sense of it alone:

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

Subscribe now

A few weeks ago, Vivian of The Expat Diaries invited me to write a letter to my younger expat self for her series. What started as a quiet reflection turned into a longer conversation — about the in-between, about identity, about the thing that hums underneath a life lived abroad that nobody quite has words for.

So we decided to record it on June 12th, 2026.

As someone who’s been conducting research interviews with long-term expats, returners, and globally mobile folks — it was fun to have the tables turned for this conversation.

What No One Tells You About Long-Term Expat Life

Topics we covered:

• The low-grade hum — the chronic nervous system load that long-term expats carry without realizing it’s unusual

• Why migratory grief is different from the grief we feel entitled to claim

• The finding that surprised me most from 35 interviews across 49 countries: only one person used the word loneliness… but everyone described it

• Why our grief comes pre-apologized — and what that costs us over time

• The three-year inflection point, returners as an underserved population, and what Third Culture Kids carry that we’re only beginning to name

Timestamps:

0:01 — Introductions: how Kay & Vivian met on Substack
2:02 — Kay’s life abroad story: Madrid, 17 years, Filipina-American
6:40 — "Gratitude and grief, holding hands within the same hour"
8:37 — Where the inspiration for Kay’s research came from
14:15 — What the low-grade hum actually is & how it shows up in long-term expat life
18:36 — How the low-grade hum shows up in your first months of life abroad
20:13 — Migratory grief: what it means & what the clinical research says
26:56 — "Long-term expat grief comes pre-apologized"
30:34 — When the long-term migrant body keeps the score & its consequences
46:55 — The most surprising finding in my 35 research conversations
52:01 — "I'm still trying to find my people" or loneliness in disguise while living abroad
1:04:07 — The research hypothesis Kay had that was proved wrong
1:27:06 — How migratory grief shows up for Third Culture Kids
1:28:58 — The one research pattern that was true across gender, age, geography
1:39:03 — Returners as an underserved, unrecognized population
1:41:52 — The launch of Edgewalkers Collective’s first quarterly research report

Clips

The low-grade hum of long-term expat life:

Grief is built into the experience of leaving your passport country:

For long-term expats, our grief comes pre-apologized:

Why identity and belonging aren’t static for globally mobile folks:

How you can participate in Edgewalkers Collective’s ongoing research:

What’s next?

If this conversation gave you that exhale — that oh, so it’s not just me — the full research is available on Edgewalkers Collective.

It’s behind the paid tier, but there’s a 7-day free trial and you’ll get instant access the moment you sign up: the complete pattern report, field notes, and everything we were drawing from in this conversation.

Want to share your story?

This research corpus is ongoing and will be updated quarterly. If you’d like to be a part of it, the research participation form is here.

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Thanks for watching this collaboration with Edgewalkers Collective & The Expat Diaries. If this resonated with you, consider restacking this and sharing it with others.

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One person speaks. One person listens.
And the only rule is this: no fixing.
No advice.
No “have you tried…”.
No story from your own life to make it more relatable.

On paper, it sounds simple.
In my body, it isn’t.

I’ve lived abroad since 2010. So every time I do this exercise, I can feel the part of me that has spent years smoothing meetings, translating across cultures, patching over awkward silences start to fidget. I notice how quickly my mind generates questions, frameworks, possibilities. All the ways I could make this easier, clearer, more comfortable.

And then I notice the rule again: stay.

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The rule of “no fixing”

In my own training notes, I keep circling the same thought: my job in that chair isn’t to make anything feel better; it’s to stay close enough that what’s there doesn’t have to be carried alone. That distinction matters.

Stay with what they’ve said. Stay with what you see. Stay with what you feel.

Not because action is inherently bad… but because in this moment, action would be a way of stepping away from their uncertainty, rather than toward it.

When you’re good at managing, not being witnessed

Here’s what I’m learning from speaking to long-term expats and international folks…

Many people living abroad are very good at managing uncertainty — at least from the outside.

You learned to navigate a new system, a new language, a new set of unspoken rules. You became the person who handles things. The one who figures it out. The one who adapts.

But there’s another kind of uncertainty that doesn’t yield to problem‑solving in the same way.

The kind that sits underneath questions like:

Is this still my life?
Where is home now?
What happens to this version of me if I leave?

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In training, when I’m sitting with someone who is circling questions like these, I can feel how quickly I want to offer them a map.

Particularly for those of us who’ve navigated the “not quite local, not quite home” stage of life abroad.

I can also feel how often there simply isn’t a map that would be honest.
Not yet.

The low‑grade hum of long-term life abroad doesn’t arrive with a clear question attached. Sometimes it’s just there. Present. Persistent. Not quite urgent enough to be called a crisis, but steady enough that ignoring it starts to cost something.

The more time I spend in that training chair, the more I realize how rare it is to be allowed to stay in not‑knowing with someone else in the room.

Making room for the fog of uncertainty

Most of us abroad learned to move toward certainty as fast as we could — new job, new country, new plan. It makes sense. For a long time, it worked.

But there is a different kind of work that happens in the in‑between, when nothing has been decided yet and your life doesn’t quite fit the old story or the new one.

It isn’t dramatic. It’s not Instagrammable.
From the outside, you might look completely fine.

What I’m practicing now — in training, and slowly in my orientation work with globally mobile folks — is making a little more room for that part.

Not to analyze it from a distance, and not to rush it to a conclusion, but to let it be exactly what it is: a real, legitimate stage of a life lived between places.

If you find yourself there in your life abroad lately carrying questions you can’t answer yet, you’re not broken for not having a map.

Many long-term expats and globally mobile people I’ve spoken with describe this as a phase they were never warned about: life basically works, and something still feels quietly off.

Sometimes the most honest thing we can do is name the fog, sit down for a while, and let someone keep us company until the edges of the path start to appear.

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This month’s audio guide sits right inside that “no fixing” exercise. It’s for the quieter moment where the questions about your life abroad are loud and no honest answer has arrived yet.

Staying With The Fog is a short guided practice for long-term expats and globally mobile folks who are:

• Used to managing uncertainty alone and not asking for help

• Very good at solving problems, less practiced at being witnessed in the not‑knowing

• Somewhere in the long middle — past adjustment, not yet at a clear crossroads

It won’t offer advice or next steps. It won’t try to make you feel better. It will stay with you, for twelve minutes, while you notice what’s actually there before you move.

And in honor of my upcoming talk at an intercultural conference in Valencia next week:

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

Read more

You know exactly where the fresh produce is. You know the shape and width of the aisles, as you wander up and down. The fluorescent lights overhead buzz at a familiar frequency. Everything is frozen in time, exactly the way you remember it.

Yet for all its familiarity… you’re not-quite-settled.

You’re moving through the space correctly, but you feel slightly out of step. As if you were observing yourself moving up and down the aisles of your memory while living the experience in the present. As if you were watching yourself performing a routine you used to do without thinking.

The place recognizes you. You don’t quite recognize yourself within it.

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When the place is the same, but you aren’t

This is what return disorientation feels like. Achingly familiar to those of us who’ve lived abroad, or outside of our “home” context, for many years.

It’s not the disorientation that most people write about. It’s not the kind where everything around you has changed and you’re struggling to keep up, navigating a cultural rulebook you’re unfamiliar with — you know how to navigate that. This is the other kind: the disorientation where everything stayed the same, and you didn’t.

The old rulebook, and the new one

You’ve been away long enough that adaptation became invisible. You stopped noticing it was happening because it had already finished. It became your baseline.

And now you’re back. The place you remember is exactly as advertised.

The difficulty, if you can call it that, is that you aren’t.

Part of what makes the supermarket aisle so disorienting is that, on paper, it should be “easy” for you to navigate.

You still know how things work here. You know the social shortcuts at checkout. You know what counts as “polite”, how long “small talk” supposed to last, which topics are “appropriate” and which ones are “off limits”. Because the old rulebook is still in your body. It was embedded in your original hardware before you moved away.

But somewhere between the time you left and the time you returned, another rulebook was added.

Years abroad taught you a different way of moving through the world. Different pauses in conversation. Different ideas of enough. Different assumptions about work, care, time, rest, safety, connection. You learned these codes from scratch, through (often painful) trial and error, until they stopped feeling foreign and started feeling like you. That adaptation finished a while ago. There wasn’t a “level unlocked” screen to mark the occasion, but you got there.

So when you return, the disorientation isn’t because you don’t know how to behave. It’s that everyone assumes you’re still operating with an earlier version of yourself, while you’re trying to reconcile who you were with who you are now.

Your family and friends greet the person who left. The one who hadn’t yet learned how to navigate another healthcare system, advocate for themselves at immigration, or play by another set of unspoken norms and nuances. The one whose thresholds and tolerances were keyed to this place.

The people you know respond to that version of you as if it’s still here. And you catch yourself playing along, because for a while, it’s easier to perform familiarity than to explain how much has shifted.

Since the start of this year, I’ve been speaking to long-term expats and global citizens as part of my research into migratory grief. One of the people I spoke to recently put it like this:

“A return is traumatic in its own way, like starting from scratch in a place you no longer belong. Because you’re not the same person who left.”

The invisible rulebook of the life you left behind hasn’t changed.

But you have.

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Grief for the version of you that never came back

So what do you do with that?

On the outside, nothing dramatic changes. You’ll still make the same trip home from the supermarket. You’ll still sleep in the room you once left behind, or in a guest room that holds the echos of it. You’ll still show up to dinners, laugh at jokes at the right time, play your role. On the inside, there’s a slow but steadily growing awareness that the version of you that this place remembers doesn’t quite exist anymore.

There’s a grief there that most returners can’t name.

Not just for the country or place you left behind, but for the intersection that no longer exists: that place, that you, at that particular time of your life. You can come back to the geography. You can’t come back to that combination. You can only carry it.

For a lot of long-term expats, the return is where migratory grief shows up in a way that catches them off guard. It’s not only about missing your “there” from “here”. It’s also the ache of realizing the version of self that used to fit seamlessly into the hometown rulebook has changed in ways that your “there” never got to witness. The grief travels in both directions.

If you’ve returned somewhere after years away and found yourself in a supermarket aisle, or at a family table, feeling slightly out of step in a place that should feel automatic, I want you to know this experience has a shape.

It isn’t proof that you chose wrong, or that you’ve broken something you can’t fix. It may simply mean you went far enough, and long enough, for the going to become part of who you are.

Living with who you are now

The work now isn’t to force yourself back into the earlier version of you this place remembers.

It’s to live carefully with the person you’ve become, even when the setting around you is still catching up.

And if this essay named something uncomfortably accurate, you don’t have to make sense of it alone:

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

Subscribe now

“Everything was the same. I wasn’t.”

I’ve heard some version of this in enough conversations with globally mobile folks now that I’ve stopped treating it as an anomaly.

Someone returns — after a long time, a significant amount of time, the kind of time that reshapes how you move through the world — and the place receives them warmly, exactly as expected. Family, familiar streets, the particular light they’d carried in memory for years. All of it there.

And still, something doesn’t quite settle.

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When everything is the same, but you aren’t

The person I’m thinking of is a pattern who’s come up in my research conversations since the start of the year. This is a person who had been away for nearly two decades. Not visiting from abroad — actually living there, building a life, becoming someone shaped by a different climate, a different social register, a different way of being known. By the time they returned, the adaptation had become invisible. They’d stopped noticing it happening because it had long since finished — it was simply who they were now.

The return was chosen. Welcomed. The right decision by most measures. And yet they kept finding themselves in the middle of ordinary moments — a family dinner, a walk through a neighborhood they’d grown up in, a conversation with someone they’d known their whole life — with the unmistakable feeling of being slightly out of step.

Not unwelcome. Not unhappy. More like not quite calibrated even though they’ve returned.

What they’d expected was recognition. What arrived was something more complicated: a place that remembered them as the person they used to be, and a version of themselves that no longer quite fit that memory.

Why coming “home” can feel strange

Here is what makes this particular experience so hard to name.

When you move abroad, the disorientation is legible. You’re the newcomer. The strangeness has an address. People understand you’re navigating something, even when they don’t know how to help. The liminality is visible — it’s written into the logistics, the language, the first months of learning where to buy milk.

Return disorientation doesn’t have that legibility. From the outside it just looks like you’re “back”.

Nearly two decades will do that. So will seven years. So, sometimes, will two.

The self that learned to belong somewhere else — that learned the particular grooves of a different community, a different climate, a different way of moving through daily life — exists somewhere that isn’t here.

And the self that returns is shaped by all of it, carrying all of it, trying to inhabit a place that was built around an older version of who they were.

That isn’t a failure of homecoming. It’s what returning actually involves when the time abroad was long enough to matter.

The map that changed while you were gone

We carry an internal map of home, and when we spend years actually living somewhere else, that map gets updated — quietly, incrementally, through accumulated experience — until we stop noticing it changing because the change never announces itself.

The map that comes back with us isn't the same one we left with. And the place that receives us is still operating on the old version.

The impulse here is to move toward resolution, to find the reframe that makes the disorientation purposeful.

The return experience often does yield something eventually — people do find their way back into belonging, in new and more complicated forms — but the meaning doesn't erase the strangeness, and the strangeness deserves to be named without being resolved into something more comfortable.

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If you’ve returned somewhere — truly returned, after years rather than months — and found that the homecoming felt different from what you’d expected, that experience has a shape.

It isn’t a sign that you went back to the wrong place, or that something was lost while you were away.

It might just mean that you went far enough, and long enough, for the going to become part of who you are.

That’s not a problem to solve. It’s something to live with, carefully, without rushing toward conclusions that haven’t arrived yet.

And if this essay named something uncomfortably accurate, you don’t have to make sense of it alone:

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

Subscribe now

They tell you about the adventure. The reinvention. The broadened perspective and the passport stamps and the version of yourself that emerges when you’re no longer surrounded by people who knew you before. They tell you about the hard parts too, sometimes — the loneliness, the paperwork, the cultural friction — because those have a shape that’s easy to describe.

What they don’t tell you is that alongside the gratitude, there’s grief.

Not the grief of losing someone. Not the acute, recognizable kind that comes with an event and a timeline and other people around you who understand what happened. The other kind. The quieter kind. The kind that doesn’t have a funeral and doesn’t have a name and doesn’t announce itself until you’re in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday and something catches — a song, a smell, a particular quality of afternoon light — and for a moment you feel the weight of everything you’ve left behind.

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Here is what I’ve come to understand about this kind of grief: it accumulates rather than arrives.

It isn’t one loss. It’s hundreds of small ones, spread across years, none of them large enough on their own to justify the word grief. The version of yourself that only existed in one city. The friendships that didn’t survive the distance — not because anyone was unkind, but because proximity had been doing most of the work and neither of you knew it. The family moments you were present for only through a screen, slightly out of sync with the time zone. The mundane continuity of life in one place that you traded for something else, and which quietly disappeared while you were busy adjusting to wherever you’d arrived.

Nobody holds a service for any of this. There’s no moment when the people around you pause and say: this is a loss, and you’re allowed to grieve it.

Most of the time, the people around you are busy celebrating. You made a brave choice. You built a life somewhere new. Look at everything you’ve gained. And they’re not wrong — the gains are real. That’s part of what makes this grief so difficult to hold: it sits right next to genuine gratitude, and the two don’t cancel each other out.

You can love the life you’ve built and still mourn the life you didn’t.

What the research calls this type of grief

In the clinical literature, this has a name: migratory grief.

Spanish psychiatrist Joseba Achotegui describes it as a partial, recurrent, multiple grief — not one loss, but a cluster of them that stay active over time. He talks about at least seven areas that migration can cut into: family, language, culture, land, social status, group belonging, and even a sense of physical safety.1

When someone dies, there’s a clear before and after; in migration, the people and places you love still exist, but at a distance you can’t close on an ordinary day. That’s part of why this grief is “partial” and “recurrent” — it flares each time you brush up against what you no longer have regular access to.2

At its most extreme, when those losses are layered on top of forced separation, danger, and a hostile environment, Achotegui links migratory grief to what he calls the “Ulysses Syndrome”: the stress of migration exceeding what a human nervous system can reasonably be asked to hold. It’s important that he frames this not as a mental disorder, but as a human response to very real, ongoing stressors.

More recent research has started to catch up to what many migrants and long‑term expats have felt in their bodies for years. A 2024 systematic review found consistent links between migratory grief and higher levels of psychological distress and depression symptoms in migrants and refugees. Clinicians writing about “migratory depression” describe how unresolved grief for homeland, status, and social identity can linger for 10–15 years after departure.3

Migration itself isn’t an illness. But the kind of grief it brings — especially when it stays unnamed and unsupported — has consequences.

How migratory grief shows up in real life

In the conversations I’ve been having with long‑term expats and returnees for my pre‑licensure counselling practice, nobody opens a call by saying, “I think I’m experiencing migratory grief.”

They say things like: the hum, the low‑grade ache, a fraction of myself, trying to stay afloat, grief measured daily… without calling it grief. They talk about feeling like a backpacker in their own hometown, or like their friendship quota is maxed out across too many time zones.

Across nearly 30 conversations, the pattern is consistent enough to not treat it like a one-off. People I’ve spoken to describe:

• Non‑belonging that feels sharpest on trips home, not abroad.

• Loneliness that almost no one names as loneliness.

• Grief for a country that has changed so much it no longer feels returnable — or isn’t safe to return to at all.

Only later, when I share the clinical term next to their lived experience — migratory grief — does something click. The word doesn’t fix anything. But it gives the feeling edges. Something in them breathes a bit easier, simply knowing what they’re living has a name.

The phases that don’t look like phases

I’ve noticed this grief shows up differently depending on where someone is in their time abroad.

In the early years, migratory grief is easy to mistake for adjustment. Something hurts, but it’s hard to separate from the general difficulty of being new somewhere. You assume it will pass once you settle in. Sometimes it does. Sometimes what felt like adjustment was actually loss, and it was just patient enough to wait.

In the middle years — the ones where you’re no longer new but not quite at home either — the grief tends to go quiet. You’ve built enough of a life that the losses recede into the background. They’re still there. They just stop demanding attention. The low-grade hum of them becomes the ambient sound of your days.

And then something shifts. A parent ages. A friend at home has a child you’ve never met. You realize that a decade has passed and the people you love most exist primarily in photographs and time zones. The grief surfaces again, older now, with more accumulated weight behind it.

The grief that doesn’t get witnessed

Grief, when it’s recognized, does something important: it lets other people witness it.

When we lose someone, the rituals around loss — the gathering, the acknowledgment, the time set aside — serve a function beyond ceremony. They tell us that what we’re carrying is real, and that we don’t have to carry it alone.

Migratory grief doesn’t come with those rituals. Which means it often doesn’t get witnessed at all. You learn to carry it quietly, because there’s no obvious moment to set it down. Because explaining it feels like complaining about a choice you made. Because the people who might understand are scattered across the same time zones that created the loss in the first place.

In my conversations, people rarely ask for solutions first. What they’re hungry for, almost every time, is recognition. Someone to say: this thing you’re carrying has a shape; you’re not imagining it; you’re not failing at expat life; your nervous system is responding to real, layered losses.

The research backs this up. Clinicians warn that if migratory grief is never acknowledged, people may end up being treated as if they’re simply depressed or “not adapting well”, rather than as humans responding to ongoing, structural losses.

Naming the grief doesn’t pathologize it; in many ways, it protects against the quiet self‑blame that grows when you think you’re the problem.

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Why naming it still matters

Naming this experience doesn’t make the distance disappear. It doesn’t fix visa systems or time zones or geopolitical realities. It also doesn’t magically move you to the “final stage” of anything.

But I’ve found that having a word for it changes something — even slightly.

The grief doesn’t become less real. It becomes less confusing. You’re not falling apart over something small. You’re carrying something that is genuinely heavy, that has been heavy for a long time, and that most of the structures around you were never built to hold.

That’s not a character flaw or a reflection on your ability to “integrate”. It’s the specific weight of having lived across worlds.

Grief that travels with you

I’ll say one more thing, and it’s this: migratory grief doesn’t only travel in one direction.

Most people assume the grief flows outward — away from home, toward the life you left behind. And it does. But it also travels with you in other ways, including back. The person who eventually returns somewhere — after years, after a whole other life — often finds that the grief is waiting for them there too, wearing a different face.

That’s a longer conversation, and it’s coming. But for now: if you’ve felt something that resembles what I’ve been describing here, I want you to know it has a name.

And it’s a reasonable response to a life lived the way you’ve been living it.

If this essay named something uncomfortably accurate, you don’t have to make sense of it alone:

And if this essay named something uncomfortably accurate, you don’t have to make sense of it alone:

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

Subscribe now

We were talking about the phase past adjustment, past integration — when your life abroad works and something still feels slightly off. Someone asked how they would describe it.

The response? It’s like an arranged marriage, they said.

They meant: you chose it once. You packed your things, arrived, built something real. The choice was real.

But at some point — and I don’t know exactly when this happens, only that it does — your new place becomes a context rather than a decision.

You stop choosing it and start inhabiting it. The way you inhabit a role you’ve had long enough that you’ve stopped remembering you could leave.

Chosen once. Not continuously.

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When the honeymoon phase of life abroad fades

I’ve called Madrid home since 2010.

I can navigate this city with my eyes closed. I know which local haunt to take someone to for their first jerez — where they still hand-write each order in chalk on a centuries-old bar. I know which immigration office to queue at, depending on which paper or appointment I need. I know which version of myself emerges speaking Spanish with people I love versus speaking Spanish in a room where I’m the only foreigner.

Sixteen years of that kind of knowing.

And occasionally — not in a broken way, not in a way that disrupts the day — the awareness that knowing a place and having chosen it are different things.

Authenticity, attachment, and the hum

There’s a tension I keep noticing — in my own life and in conversations with long-term expats — between two things that look similar from the outside but feel very different from the inside.

Authenticity. And attachment.

Authenticity is the version of you that exists before the adaptation. The one with opinions about how things should work, preferences that don’t translate, a way of being in a room that doesn’t always match the room’s expectations.

Attachment is what you do to stay in your new home. The softening, the adjusting, the reading of cues. The slow calibration toward legibility.

Neither is wrong. Both are necessary. But over years, they start to pull in different directions.

And the question that eventually surfaces — quietly, usually in the middle of something ordinary — is which one have I been choosing?

Most content for people living abroad treats belonging as the reward for sufficient commitment. Stay long enough. Integrate hard enough. The hum will stop.

That’s not what I’ve found. Not in my own life. Not across the nearly thirty conversations I’ve had with long-term expats and globally mobile folks in the last few months.

The hum doesn’t stop. It gets quieter. Which is different from being gone.

The gap between functional and chosen

What the arranged marriage metaphor names — and why I keep returning to it — is that the arrangement can be genuinely good and still leave something unresolved.

Arranged marriages can contain real love. Real life. Real commitment.

They’re just not the same as choosing again, every day, with full information.

Wait — is this still what I want?

Not a final decision. More like a draft.

A question that surfaces in the middle of something ordinary and then recedes, because the answer isn’t available yet, or because the day requires you to move on.

Most of us weren’t given language for this.

We were given language for the beginning — visas, culture shock, the thrill of arrival. We were given language for crisis — homesickness, burnout, the decision to leave.

Nobody gave us language for the long middle.

For what it feels like to have built something real somewhere that didn’t originally choose you back. To have commitment without belonging, or belonging without the feeling of having fully chosen it.

That gap — between functional and chosen, between committed and at home — is quiet. It doesn’t announce itself.

It deserves language before it deserves a verdict.

Sitting with the arrangement

This month’s audio guide is for that moment.

The quiet moment — when you realize you’re living something you chose once but haven’t chosen recently, and you’re not sure yet what to do with that awareness.

Living With the Arrangement is a guided practice for sitting with what’s actually true, without rushing toward what you think you’re supposed to do about it.

It’s for long-term expats and globally mobile folks who are:

• Functional, fluent, and still carrying something slightly unresolved

• Somewhere in the long middle — past adjustment, not yet at a crossroads

• Ready to get honest, even just with themselves, about the gap between committed and at home

It won’t tell you to stay or to leave. It won’t ask you to recommit or to grieve.

It will just sit with you in the arrangement, for less than ten minutes, and ask a few questions worth carrying.

This month's audio is for paid subscribers — a guided practice for sitting with the arrangement, without rushing toward resolution.

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

Read more

Helper.
Helpee.
Observer.

I knew the helper role would be uncomfortable — being watched while you practice, while your skills still forming — and then receiving feedback from your peers and tutor.

What I didn’t expect was how challenging the helpee seat would be.

Because as a long-term expat like my clients, the low-grade hum of my “braced” nervous system can show up in the room with me.

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The first time I was assigned the role of helpee, I chose something manageable. Something I’d already processed. Something I had language for.

Within a few minutes, my peer asked a question that went somewhere else entirely.

And I noticed — before I’d consciously decided anything — the impulse to reassure them. To signal that I was fine, that I had this handled, that they didn’t need to worry.

I’m okay.
I know what this is.
I’ve got this.

They hadn’t asked me to manage their response. I just did it anyway.

I’d closed the door I opened.

Later, watching myself in the helper role, I noticed the other version of the same thing.

Navigating the session imperfectly — which is expected, which is the point — and running a quiet commentary alongside it the entire time.

That could have been better.
You missed something there.
More of this, less of that.

Because this is my brain’s default mode in my adopted country.

What my counselling training is teaching me slowly — through counsellor triads where I sit in the roles of helper, helpee, and observer — is that for some of us, bracing is the default.

It’s not conscious. It’s not dramatic. It’s simply a low-level readiness to manage whatever comes. To stay ahead of difficulty before it arrives. To demonstrate, continuously, that we are competent and, therefore, safe.

The bracing isn’t a response to a specific threat. For people living abroad, it’s become our normal state.

And I see this same bracing in my work with long-term expats every day — no matter where they’re based or where they’ve chosen to call home.

What I’m learning in training is about the window of tolerance. It’s the zone where you can receive experience without flooding or shutting down — and this window narrows when the body has spent years in environments where it needed to stay alert.

Your system stops distinguishing between genuine threat and ordinary difficulty. Both register the same way: stay ready.

Year 5 of life abroad, you’d call that adjustment.

Year 15 of life abroad, you might not call it anything at all. It’s just how things are.

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What I keep noticing, in myself and in conversations with long-term expats, is that the bracing and the competence are hard to separate.

You get very good at navigating. At reading rooms. At arriving somewhere new and figuring out quickly what’s required of you to function, to fit, to belong enough.

The same skill that helped you build a life abroad is the thing that makes it hard to stop managing long enough to receive anything.

Help. Witness. A question that goes somewhere unexpected.

You can’t receive when you’re bracing for impact.

The post-session debrief I’m learning to give myself — sitting for a few minutes, noticing what came up, not rushing to process or label or fix it — is its own version of the practice.

It’s one version of not-bracing I’m learning to manage.

If this resonated with you, notice where you might be carrying it. Your jaw. Your shoulders. Your belly. Somewhere else entirely.

Sometimes just naming it is enough.

And if this essay named something uncomfortably accurate, you don’t have to make sense of it alone:

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

Subscribe now

By the second meeting you’re talking about therapy, divorce, things you haven’t said to people you’ve known for decades.

That’s real.

You don’t have to explain why where are you from is a complicated question. You don’t have to justify the staying.

The context that’s usually missing is suddenly present with the person in front of you.

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Expat communities run on transience. People leave. Contracts end. Relationships change. The person who was your whole social infrastructure in year three is in another country by year five, navigating their own version of starting over.

You build something real. Then the scaffolding shifts.

That kind of ending — the one where distance makes the choice for you — carries its own grief. But it’s a grief with logic. They left. You stayed. Geography did what geography does.

There’s another kind of ending that’s harder to name.

The friendships that fracture not because someone moved, but because something shifted that distance can’t explain.

You grew. They grew. The versions of you that became close aren’t the versions you’re becoming now.

Or — and this one lands differently — the friendship couldn’t hold the full complexity of who you are.

During the pandemic, something broke open for a lot of us living abroad.

For some people, it was the first time their bodies were read as threat. For others, it was a reminder that they’d always been read that way — and that the people around them, the ones who’d never had to navigate that, didn’t know how to hold it.

I lost expat friendships during that time. Not to distance. To the gap between what I was carrying and what they could see. And at some point, you realize: you’ve been managing that gap for them. Translating your experience into something more comfortable. Performing a version of yourself that doesn’t ask them to sit with too much. That’s exhausting in a way geographic distance isn’t.

If you’re someone whose body gets read a certain way abroad — whose belonging is questioned in ways that don’t happen to others, whose safety calculations are different, whose hypervigilance never fully stands down — you know this gap intimately.

Sometimes the people you’re closest to can’t see it. They care about you. They mean well. But the framework they have for understanding the world doesn’t have room for what you’re living.

And that is a different kind of loss altogether.

When an expat friendship ends through distance, you know what you’re grieving. The person, the proximity, the version of your life they were part of.

When it ends another way — through the slow realization that the friendship can’t hold your full reality — you’re grieving something more complicated.

Not just the person. The belief that you could be fully known in your new “here” by someone who knew your context “there”.

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There’s also the version of this that happens when you’re the one who stays.

You watch people build their lives here and then dismantle them. You learn, eventually, to hold people with a kind of open hand. Present when they’re here. Not banking on continuity.

The skill you built to protect yourself from loss is also the thing that keeps connection from fully landing. Who knew, right?

5, 10, 15 years abroad: you’ve probably loved some people fiercely and lost them in more than one way.

To distance.
To growth.
To the limits of what the friendship could hold.

They’re alive. Occasionally active on Instagram. The grief doesn’t care about either of those things.

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This phase of expat life doesn’t talk about that enough.

The transience, yes. That gets airtime.

But the other losses — the ones where you’re still in the same city, or where the friendship just couldn’t stretch to hold who you’re becoming, or where the gap between your lived experience and theirs became too wide to cross — those deserve language too.

And if this essay named something uncomfortably accurate, you don’t have to make sense of it alone:

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

Subscribe now

Then someone mentions the city. Or a song comes on. Or the light changes in a specific way in late October — and suddenly your “there” arrives here.

It’s not quite a memory. It’s more like… a soft presence.

The leaving is what gets talked about for long-term expats. The arrival, the adjustment, the slow work of belonging somewhere new.

But the way a place you left continues to occupy you — that gets less airtime.

Not every home is a place you’ve just passed through.

There are the streets that shaped something. Where you became a version of yourself you’re still partly carrying. Where something solidified. Quietly. Seeping into your bones and into your way of moving through the world.

Those places don’t release you cleanly.

In fact, sometimes, they never let you go.

There’s no loss to name. You chose to leave. That place — your “there” — still exists. You could return — and some people do, and find that returning is its own kind of grief, which is a different story altogether.

Because when you return…

The version of the place you lived in doesn’t quite exist anymore. The version of you who lived “there” doesn’t quite exist anymore. The intersection of both — that place, that you, at that time — that’s gone.

You can’t go back to it. You can only carry it.

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5, 10, 15 years later: your “there” is still within you.

In a threshold for cold that doesn’t match your current climate. In a way of moving through a neighborhood. In some residual sense of what silence is supposed to sound like.

It’s why answering where are you from feels like a longer story than it should be.

The places that have shaped you, stay. Though you no longer inhabit them, they become part of you in your new “here”.

That’s not a problem to fix. It’s what it is to have lived more than one life.

If you’re reading this and recognizing a truth you’ve carried — as you move through your “here” and “there” everywhere all at once — you’re not imagining it.

And if this essay named something uncomfortably accurate, you don’t have to make sense of it alone:

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

Subscribe now

Not the discomfort of struggling visibly. The discomfort of letting someone see that you’re carrying something — even when you’re managing it fine.

I’ve noticed this pattern in conversations with long-term expats who are, by any measure, doing well.

They’ve built lives abroad. They’re fluent. They’ve figured it out.

And when I suggest that sometimes what helps isn’t more strategy, but just someone sitting with them in what they’re navigating — there’s resistance.

Not refusal. Resistance.

I think I know what’s happening, because I’ve lived it, too.

When you’re someone who’s spent years being the capable one — the one who adapts, the one who doesn’t fall apart — being witnessed can feel more vulnerable than the difficulty itself.

Because it requires you to stop performing competence for a minute.

To let someone see the version of you that’s tired. Still figuring it out. Carrying things you thought you’d already processed.

And for high achievers, that visibility can feel more exposing than helpful.

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When you aren’t performing, you have to stop curating your experience. Stop explaining it in a way that makes you look like you’re handling it. Stop rushing to the part where you’ve learned something from it.

You have to let someone see you in the mess.

Without the resolution.
Without the reframe.
Without the proof that you’re still the capable person you’ve always been.

For people who’ve spent years abroad — especially people who’ve had to prove they belong, over and over — that’s a big ask.

But over time, there’s the slow accumulation of carrying things alone that you were never meant to carry alone. The exhaustion of always being the one who translates — not just language, but yourself.

The quiet isolation of being surrounded by people who care about you, but don’t quite see the version of you that’s still navigating this.

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I think this is part of why capable expats wait so long before reaching out.

It’s not that they don’t know they’re struggling. It’s that they’re not sure they’re allowed to struggle when, objectively, they’re doing fine. They have a life in their new “here.”

So what right do they have to feel... off?

But being high-functioning doesn’t mean you’re not carrying something.

It just means you’ve gotten very good at carrying it quietly.

At some point, that quiet carrying starts to cost more than you realize.

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You don’t have to be falling apart to let someone sit with you in what you’re carrying. And being witnessed doesn’t mean you’re weak.

Sometimes it just means you’re finally letting yourself stop performing long enough to be human.

This month’s guided audio, Receiving Understanding: A Practice for Staying With Being Seen, is for the moment after someone has genuinely seen you — and you feel the instinct to deflect. To minimize. To move back into competence mode.

The practice helps you stay with being seen — just for a few minutes — before you rush back into managing.

If you’re someone who’s used to being the capable one, this might feel uncomfortable at first. That’s part of the process. It’s a way for you to stay with being understood, just for a few minutes, before you rush back into managing.

You’re welcome here regardless.

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

Read more

We’ve been doing role-play exercises. Helper, helpee, observer. Rotating through each position, practicing what it means to hold space for someone.

The most surprising thing?

Turns out… I’m still a novice when it comes to “just listening.”

Who knew, right?

Years of professional conversations. Cross-cultural navigation. Reading rooms. Tracking what’s being said underneath what’s being said.

It’s not about tracking well enough to respond strategically. It’s about being present without an agenda. Without planning your next move. Without trying to fix what the person is sitting with.

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I’ve spent years in conversations — professional, personal, across cultures. I’ve built a career on reading rooms, tracking racial, linguistic and power dynamics, understanding what’s being said underneath what’s being said.

But active listening in a counselling context is different.

It’s not about tracking well enough to respond strategically. It’s about being present without an agenda. Without jumping ahead to what you’ll say next. Without trying to fix what the person is sitting with.

And that’s harder than I expected.

My tutor has a phrase for what happens when you perform the role instead of inhabiting it:

“Cosplaying counselling.”

You’re nodding. Making affirming sounds. Maybe even mirroring their posture.

But underneath? You’re not actually with them.

You’re managing your own discomfort with their pain by rushing to resolve it.

When someone shares something difficult, the instinct is immediate:

How do I help them feel better? What perspective can I offer? What reframe might ease this?

While it’s well-intentioned, it’s also a way of avoiding the hard part: sitting with them in the discomfort without trying to make it go away.

The people I’ve been speaking with — 5, 10, 15 years abroad — are high achievers. Intelligent. Capable. The kind of people who figured out how to build a life in another country and made it work. They’re not looking for someone to tell them what to do. They’ve already done the hard part.

What I keep hearing underneath the competence is: I just need someone to sit with me in this for a minute. Without trying to fix it. Without telling me I’m doing it wrong.

Here’s what matters about this, especially for people who’ve spent years adapting:

When you’re someone who’s navigated visa bureaucracy, language barriers, cultural codes, the constant low-grade work of making yourself understood — you get very good at managing your own difficulty. For some of us, that work includes what happens before we've said a word.

You stop expecting anyone to just sit with you in it. You expect advice, solutions, the next step.

What you don’t always expect — and what might actually be more useful — is someone staying present without an agenda.

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One of the other things we’re learning: counselling isn’t about explaining things to people.

It’s about facilitating understanding — their understanding, not yours.

And that understanding doesn’t always come through visible demonstrations of empathy or perfectly timed reflections.

Sometimes it comes from silence. From not filling the space. From trusting that the person in front of you has their own process, and your job is to accompany them through it — not to narrate it for them.

I think a lot of high-achieving expats and globally mobile folks carry this pattern too.

Not just in how they relate to others, but in how they relate to themselves. The instinct to fix. To optimize. To turn discomfort into a problem with a solution.

Sometimes that works.

But other times, what’s needed isn’t a better strategy. It’s permission to stop strategizing for a minute. To let someone witness what you’re carrying without immediately having to do something about it.

The helper role is teaching me something I didn’t expect to learn:

Being present is active work.

It’s the ongoing practice of noticing when you’ve left the room mentally — when you’ve jumped ahead to what you’ll say next, or started planning how to make this better — and bringing yourself back.

Again and again.

It’s not passive. And it’s harder than it looks.

The instinct to fix isn’t wrong. It comes from care.

But there’s a difference between easing pain and witnessing it.

I’m learning that in these small-group role-plays. But the lesson applies to a lot of conversations outside the training room. Especially with people who’ve spent years being the capable one. The one who figures it out. The one who doesn’t need help.

Maybe what they need isn’t help.

Maybe what they need is someone who can sit with them in the difficulty without making it about solutions.

It’s that simple.
It’s that hard.

And if this essay named something uncomfortably accurate, you don’t have to make sense of it alone:

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

Subscribe now

Explaining something you thought would take twenty minutes — the full context, the backstory, the reasons it’s complicated.

And the other person just — gets it.

You don’t have to translate. You don’t have to manage how it lands.

They’re already there with you.
And something in your body exhales.

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Here’s the thing about living between cultures:

Most conversations require translation. Language. Context. Tone. Humor. The unspoken rules about what can be said and how.

You’re constantly calibrating: How much do I explain? How direct can I be? Will this land the way I mean it?

It’s not dramatic. It’s not visible. It’s just work. And after enough years, that work becomes so automatic you forget what it feels like not to do it.

One of the things I’m learning in counselling training is the difference between being heard and being helped.

Being heard means someone tracks with you — your experience, your timeline, your contradictions — without rushing to resolve them.

Being helped sometimes skips that step. Jumps straight to solutions. To reframes that might be useful later but feel premature right now.

When you live between cultures, where so much already requires explanation, that distinction matters more than you’d think.

Most people, when you share something difficult, want to help. They offer perspective. Reframes. Solutions. Sometimes that’s useful.

But other times, what you need isn’t advice. It’s someone sitting with you in the actual complexity without trying to make it make sense.

A woman I spoke with recently — ten years in Madrid, Spanish partner, full life here — said this when I asked what would actually help:

“Sometimes I just don’t want you to fix it. I just want you to see my struggles.”

She wasn’t asking for solutions. She was naming something most people don’t say out loud: that being witnessed is its own form of support.

Another person put it differently:

“I’ve chosen this life for myself, but sometimes I just want to feel like my experience is being acknowledged.”

When you’re a highly competent long-term expat or immigrant, you’re usually the one solving things for you and everyone else.

So what you don’t need is solving. You just want the acknowledgment of being seen without explaining yourself.

When you feel genuinely understood, something becomes available that wasn’t before: clarity.

Not the type of clarity that arrives because someone told you what to do. But because you finally had enough quiet — internal and external — to hear yourself think.

Understanding doesn’t solve. But it orients.

Which, if you’ve been navigating life abroad for a decade (or longer), turns out to be exactly what’s needed.

This is part of what I hold space for in Expat Orientation Conversations — not advice, not solutions, just the experience of being understood before anything else happens.

Because here’s what I keep noticing as I speak to globally mobile folks:

It’s the gap between someone saying “I can imagine how hard that must be” and someone saying “Yes. I know exactly what you mean.”

The first is kind. The second is relief.

You don’t need to be understood by everyone.
But you do need to be understood by someone.

Especially when standard life abroad narratives don’t always capture what you’re actually experiencing. When you’re outwardly functional but inwardly still figuring it all out.

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And if this essay named something uncomfortably accurate, you don’t have to make sense of it alone:

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

Subscribe now

Someone shares a story, makes a reference, and the whole table lights up with recognition. Inside jokes layer on top of shared context. The rhythm accelerates. Everyone’s building on everyone else.

…and you’re three steps behind.

Not because you don’t understand the language. You do. You’ve been here long enough that fluency isn’t the issue anymore.

But you missed the original reference. The TV show everyone watched in the 90s. The political moment that became shorthand. The neighborhood that used to be something else before you arrived.

You’re on line 5 of the WhatsApp thread while everyone else has moved to line 12.

By the time you think of something brilliant to say — something genuinely funny, something that would land perfectly — the moment has passed. And even if you said it now, it wouldn’t translate. Not because your Spanish isn’t good enough. Because the cultural scaffolding it needs doesn’t exist here.

The conversation moves on.

And you’re left holding a version of yourself nobody in this room has access to.

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Most expat content talks about missing people. Missing places. Missing holidays or food or familiar routines.

But there’s something quieter that doesn’t get named as often: the loss of being known in context.

The relationships you build abroad are real. Deeper, even. Some of the most important people in your life might live in your new “here”.

And still — the people in your life abroad know the version of you that arrived. Not the one that was shaped by fifteen summers at your grandmother’s house. Or the friend group that saw you through your twenties. Or the music that soundtracked your adolescence in a language you don’t speak here.

They know you. But they don’t know your before.

I’ve been thinking about this differently since starting my counselling training this year.

We’ve begun doing counselling triads — helper, helpee, observer. The observer role has been particularly revealing. You sit outside the conversation and notice what’s happening between two people trying to understand each other. What gets said. What gets missed. Where the gaps are.

And one thing I keep noticing: the helper often assumes they understand more context than they actually do. They fill in blanks with their own reference points. And sometimes that works. But other times, there’s a quiet moment where the helpee realizes — you’re not quite following me. You’re close, but you’re not there.

That micro-moment of misalignment? I’ve felt that in so many conversations abroad. Not because people aren’t trying. Because they don’t have the scaffolding for the story I’m telling. The “before” is missing.

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It’s not that people don’t care. It’s not that they wouldn’t listen if you explained.

It’s that explanation isn’t the same as witness.

Back “there”, people remember. Not just the facts — the texture. The version of you that existed before this language, this city, this life.

And here’s where it gets more complex: sometimes the version of you that exists here feels more authentic than the one that existed there.

You’ve become someone in this place. Found parts of yourself that didn’t have room before. Sides of your personality that only exist in your adopted language, or in this particular rhythm of life, or in the specific freedom of being unknown.

But that doesn’t erase the fact that whole chapters of your life exist only in your own memory now. The music that mattered. The references that shaped your sense of humor. The cultural moments that made you who you were before you became who you are now.

Both can be true. The becoming and the loss.

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I don’t think this is something to fix.

You can’t recreate context. You can’t give people access to a version of you they never met. You can’t import the first twenty-five years of your life into a conversation happening in real time, in a different language, in a country that wasn’t part of your formation.

But you can notice it.

And maybe — stop feeling strange about the particular loneliness of being known incompletely. Even by people who love you.

Because here’s what I’m learning, both in my training and in conversations I’ve been having with people 5, 10, 15 years into life abroad:

The ache isn’t always about the people you left. It’s about the you you left. The version of yourself that existed in full context — where your references landed, where your humor made sense, where you didn’t have to translate yourself before you could be understood.

That person still exists. You carry them. But nobody here witnessed them. And that loss deserves space.

Not dramatic space. Not crisis-level grief.

Just — acknowledgment.

That living somewhere long enough to become fluent also means living somewhere long enough to realize fluency isn’t the same as being fully known.

And that gap? It’s real. Even when everything else is working.

If this essay named something uncomfortably accurate, you don’t have to make sense of it alone:

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

Subscribe now