After exactly one hour of speaking it, I felt a full-body exhaustion, and that number became my benchmark for what has now been over 16 years living in Spain. Even if my fluency has increased and the time has extended, one hour is still the benchmark I keep arriving at whenever I plan a day that requires me to speak in a language I didn’t grow up speaking.

Without realizing it, that hour was about more than translating. My body was tense, bracing slightly. I was concentrating far harder than I ever do in English, my native language, because the words were only part of the work. I was also watching the other person’s body language and listening for their tone, trying to catch what they meant underneath what they said, and parsing through more natural jerga or slang. Translating words directly is not the same as translating meaning, and I was doing both at once.

Later my Spanish improved, and I started doing adult things without anyone translating or coming along with me: a doctor’s appointment, the post office, a bureaucratic form. For those, I brought a notebook. On the metro or the bus, I’d write down the key phrases I would need, so they would come out naturally instead of being invented on the spot.

The notebook gave me a feeling of security, and a sense that I would be understood. If my accent slipped or a word tripped, the risk to me being perceived as “less than” or “different” became lower. I had limited time with the doctor or the person behind the desk, and I knew I needed to get my point across efficiently and credibly.

Afterward I could breathe easier. It reminds me of when I would get ready before a recital to sing or play piano, or before a sports competition at school: the tension, the performance, then the calm and the sigh of relief.

That’s probably where I noticed the low-grade hum most specifically, long before it became the focus of my research.

Where the low-grade hum appears

In my conversations with long-term expats and migrants, I've learned that this hum lives in small places. At the supermarket there is an extra calculation running under the transaction: the right word, and the rhythm of the queue. Before opening an envelope or an online portal in a language that was never your first, there is a slight bracing sensation: a tension between the eyebrows, a slow creep of your shoulders toward your ears, a familiar flutter of nerves in your stomach.

Each of these is tiny, and none of them would register as a problem on its own. Over the years it becomes the ambient sound of your days abroad, and you stop noticing it because it has become the baseline.

Recently, I wanted to confirm my online appointment for the Spanish DELE exam, and called the school hotline to double-check what to bring with me on the day of the test. Before I dialed, I was rehearsing the Spanish questions I’d need to ask, keeping my email confirmation in front of me as I spoke on the phone, already noticing a tightness between my shoulders at the possibility the operator would correct me or that I’d broken some invisible rule. The call lasted under three minutes. The person on the other end was kind and had a sense of humor. If I did make a mistake, she answered good-naturedly and didn’t draw any attention to it. But my body behaved the whole time as if something significant was at stake.

Under the language there is the reading of the room: tone, posture, what the other person or the room seems to expect. I’ve written about cultural code-switching and about the small edits people living abroad make to their story before they hand it over to others. Those are things I still do. The hum is what runs underneath while I do them.

What the research shows

A version of the same sentence keeps coming up in my conversations: by any measure, I’ve figured it out, and I don’t understand why it still feels hard. The housing is sorted and the work is real. The hum doesn’t track any of that.

The people I’ve spoken to reach for different words:

• One described being a few beats out of step in conversations with locals, composing a reply after the conversation had already moved on.

• Another described feeling slightly offshore in their own life.

• Another, about a decade into life in their second language, still braces slightly in technical conversations that need more complex vocabulary than they’d usually use.

• Another described the hum as a “personal frequency” and said that once they stopped fighting it, it became grounding instead of an alarm.

There is related research on cumulative strain. Allostatic load describes the wear that builds when the body is under sustained challenge.1 It wasn’t developed with migrants or expats in mind, and it’s the closest clinical research I’ve come across to describe the hum.

My research is still ongoing, and this low-grade hum is one of the patterns that keeps returning.

Why it deserves a name

I’m a counsellor-in-training, not a clinician. This essay describes an experience so that it has a word, and it isn’t a diagnosis. If it’s affecting your health, a licensed professional is the right person to talk to.

What I can say is that every time I share the term in my research interviews, nearly every participant’s face, regardless of location or lived experience, immediately lights up with recognition. Followed by something along the lines of, “Oh, that’s what it is!” or a sigh of relief that what they were experiencing wasn’t all in their head. Another interview participant shared that their health scare was the wake-up call that led them to name the low-grade hum they’d been experiencing. Two people in a workshop I ran earlier this year also responded to the term by tracing their physical health challenges back to their own versions of the hum (forms, landlords, cultural context, and uncertainty while navigating life abroad).

These days, for me, the hum is quieter in some places and louder in others. I notice it most when I’m walking away from an interaction in my second language where the stakes were higher, and I feel my shoulders drop slightly.

I still keep track of the hour.

One place to name the hum out loud

What I've come to value, in my own life and in my work, is having at least one place where you don't have to explain what you’re experiencing, where you find someone who can put words to feelings you didn’t even know were yours to carry. Sometimes those spaces take longer to find.

An Expat Orientation Conversation is one version of a room where you can sit with whatever you’re carrying — without having to explain it all first. It’s a 60-minute, one-to-one, non-clinical conversation for sense-making in long-term life abroad. It takes your experience and context into account from the start. It isn’t therapy, treatment or advice, just a confidential space to explore what you might not have realized was humming away beneath the surface.

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), based in Spain since 2010, and a counsellor‑in‑training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross‑cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. I was good at it. I was also quietly burning out from being the bridge. 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 want access to the guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my long-term life abroad research I send to paid subscribers, you’re welcome to upgrade your subscription at any time.

When language creates friction, you learn the phrase.

When a job ends or a relationship shifts, you make a plan, usually before anyone has thought to ask how you are.

Somewhere in the first years abroad, fixing stops being something you do and becomes something you are. It’s how you got the apartment, the permit, the second or third language, the work. It’s how you stayed.

I know this reflex well. For a long time, mine looked like a quiet pride that nothing slipped, and a private rule that any feeling worth having could be turned into a task. So much of life abroad is about demonstrating competence. To immigration officials. To employers. To the people around you tracking whether you’ve “integrated” successfully. You get very good at showing that you’re managing. So good that you forget how to stop managing long enough to let anyone see you off duty.

Then a different kind of question arrives, one that won’t cooperate:

What do you do when nothing is visibly broken, but something in the life you’ve built no longer makes complete sense?

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Mine goes like this: I first came to Madrid in 2007 for a study abroad semester, and fell in love with Spain. I came back in 2010 and fell in love with a Spaniard. I’ve been here ever since.

I know how to deliver it like the grooves of a well-worn vinyl record. I know where to pause for laughter, when to hand the arc to my partner, when to add more detail and when to add less.

But every time I share it, 2010 is further away. So much has happened in the lives I’ve lived since that asking why I stayed is the more interesting story.

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The first Spanish swear word I learned properly was joder. Nobody taught it to me on purpose. I picked it up the way you pick up anything used everywhere: from roommates, from my partner, from people out and about. It was in kitchens and on the street, in frustration and in delight, sometimes in the same sentence.

Then I started working in an office, and I found out joder had siblings: jolín, jolines, jope. Softer, more workplace-friendly versions, the ones you could say in front of a colleague without anyone looking up. I had a more traditional boss and a manager who swore freely, and within the same building I learned which room called for jope and which could take the grittier version.

I didn’t think of any of this as identity work. It was just getting on with life.

Looking back, I was trying on versions of myself through a language I still sometimes trip up in. Different rooms, different people, in a city that let me explore all of them without apology.

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Growing up as a daughter of immigrants in the US, it was usually followed by “Where are you really from?” Now, as an immigrant/expat myself in Madrid, Spain, since 2010, my answer depends on how much energy I have, what language I’m speaking, and what room I’m in. “The US.” “California.” “Los Angeles.” If I want to get ahead of the second question, because I don’t want to play another round of proving I belong, I say, “I’m from the US, with parents from the Philippines.”

When I travel with my Spanish husband and someone asks where we’re from, we both say “Madrid.”

It’s the same word, and both of us mean it. For him, it’s the whole answer. For me, it’s the shortest true thing I can offer that ends the conversation kindly. Neither of us is lying. Only one of us is translating.

The version that fits the room

Most of us who’ve lived abroad a long time know this move so well we no longer notice making it. Someone asks a simple question and, before we answer, we’ve already sorted the whole story. We decide which parts will make sense to this person, which will need a footnote, and which aren’t worth the effort today. Then we hand over the version that fits.

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I likened the in-between part of living between cultures to plugs and adapters:

You arrive somewhere new, and everything has a plug that used to fit. Then you move abroad, and nothing fits anymore. You need an adapter for everything — not just outlets, but conversations, social rules, the unspoken logic of a place that was never built with you in mind. Nothing plugs in naturally.

Eventually, something shifts. You stop needing so many adapters. You build routines. You make friends. You build a life. You feel, more or less, at home.

Then one day, you go back.

And the outlets aren’t the same anymore.

Not because anyone did anything wrong. People changed. You changed. The conversations and the rhythms feel different than the ones you left.

That paradox is what I call chronic liminality: you can’t simply plug back into your old “here,” and sometimes you have to learn to carry both your “here” and your “there” as you move between countries and cultures.

What is chronic liminality?

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Afterward, Vivian shared a Note outlining her version of the life abroad starter pack. I cheekily responded with a sequel: what the Five-Years-In starter pack includes.

As I keep reading and connecting with your long-term life abroad stories through Edgewalkers Collective, I’ve noticed that most of us already know the starter pack for arrival. The visas. The language academies. The house-hunting. Plenty of Substackers cover that brilliantly. What’s explored far less is what happens once you’ve hit the five-year mark.

Nobody hands you this list when you relocate. There’s no orientation packet for it, no laminated card at the embassy. It accumulates quietly instead, somewhere around year three or four — evidence of adaptation that shows up sideways, in small moments, rather than announcing itself as a milestone.

Here’s what tends to be on it.

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It’s not necessarily a crisis. Sometimes it’s a passing mention — a small fall, a slower voice on a call, a detail in a photo, or a voice note that lands harder than it should. And then there’s a private arithmetic that starts running in the background: how many flights away, how many hours until the next one, how much of a parent’s actual daily life has become difficult to picture with any accuracy.

Nothing has to have happened yet for something to have already shifted.

The math nobody prepares you for

Long-term life abroad comes with a kind of belonging math most people only think about horizontally — the friends you’ve kept or lost, the communities you’ve built or haven’t. There’s a whole other axis to it that gets less airtime: belonging isn’t only sideways, to the people around you now. It’s also vertical — the line that runs backward to the people who raised you, and who are aging in a country you no longer live in year-round.

There isn’t a clean answer, and part of what makes this research pattern so heavy is that it doesn’t behave like other kinds of migratory grief; it doesn’t resolve with time abroad. If anything, this type of grief tends to compound — every year settled somewhere else is a year further from being able to picture, in any concrete way, what an aging parent’s daily life actually looks like now, for those who are still in contact and still weighing what that means.

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Hagedorn writes about living in Germany for almost a decade while privately questioning whether she still wanted to be there. Her life — like that of many long-term expats or globally mobile folks I speak to — looked good from the outside: a job, an apartment, friends, a language she had learned, and a country she had worked hard to understand. Still, she kept postponing the possibility of leaving.

The line that stayed with me was not only the title. It was the question underneath it: ““I can’t go back home just because I feel lonely, can I?”

Hagedorn eventually left Germany and returned to Chile. Her essay is about giving yourself permission to leave when the life you built abroad no longer feels like the life you want.

For today, I want to stay with a slightly different question:

What happens when your life abroad is not unbearable — but no longer feels like something you are consciously choosing?

When leaving feels too drastic, staying feels increasingly automatic, and every reason to question the arrangement gets translated into evidence that you should try harder?

The life that looks finished

On paper, your life abroad can look finished. You’ve unlocked all the levels of integration like it was a video game that gave you prizes at every stage.

The job took years to build. The apartment finally feels like yours. You can handle the bureaucracy without needing to translate every form. You know which pharmacy is open late, which friend will answer after midnight, and which version of your name people use in each room.

You’ve learned the language well enough to argue in it, not just order coffee. You’ve built routines that would be difficult to reconstruct somewhere else. You have proof that you adapted.

Sometimes that proof of adaptation becomes part of the problem.

The people around you see the life you built and assume the question has been settled. You have a home. You have community. You have history. You have become the person who knows how to live there.

But a life can be established without feeling chosen.

You can be grateful for what a country gave you and still be unsure whether you want to keep giving your life to it.

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You’re asked for dates, job titles, cities you’ve lived in. You’re asked whether you’re “settled,” how the kids are doing, whether you plan to stay. On paper, the story looks straightforward. In your nervous system, friendships, and sense of home, the picture is more complicated.

From January to July 2026, I sat down with 40 long‑term expats, immigrants, migrants, adult TCKs, and returners, to ask about that inner picture instead. The conversations were not coaching or counselling sessions; they were structured field interviews for the research corpus I’ve been building since the start of this year. Out of those stories, 41 patterns emerged. This essay pulls four of the clearest ones to the surface.

If you recognize yourself in more than one of these, you’re very much who Edgewalkers Collective exists for.

1. The nervous system lag

One research participant moved from a country where everyday life included chronic racial threat to a quieter European town so they and their children could feel safer in their bodies. By the time we spoke, their external safety had improved — new country, new routines, less visible danger. And yet their body hadn’t caught up with the move, over five years into life abroad. They described one scene in particular: driving a rental car and feeling their whole system brace for police lights that never came. Their mind knew they were somewhere else. Their nervous system still lived in the old conditions.

Across these 40 conversations, versions of this story kept appearing. Some people had moved for survival, others for opportunity, but the lag was similar: life on paper gets better, while the nervous system baseline is still moving away from their previous operating system. It shows up as hypervigilance in low‑risk situations, difficulty trusting how “safe” the new place really is, and a sense of being half‑inhabited in the role or country they technically occupy.

In another interview, a parent who relocated after losing a custody battle in order to be closer to their child offered a different lens. They spoke about the difference between approaching a new environment with curiosity and treating it as a source of ongoing stress.

When we talk about resilience abroad, we rarely talk about which nervous system we’re asking to adapt. The interviews repeatedly surfaced this pattern often running behind the life abroad timeline: the visa, the job contract, and the story of “integration” that other people see.

2. The return can destabilize more than the move

Going abroad often has a narrative: you got a job, you followed a relationship, you needed out, you wanted a break. Returning — or almost‑returning — is much harder to explain.

One long‑term expat spent a decade living in Northern Europe. Their sharpest non‑belonging doesn’t show up there; it hits on trips back to their passport country. They described it as “starting from scratch in a place you no longer belong,” and noticing they are not the same person who left, even when everyone else treats them as if they were.

Another participant found herself back in a previous European base after a chapter in a country they hadn’t fully chosen to leave. Their story sits in the grey zone between “expat” and “forced return”: technically voluntary, emotionally loaded, with little shared language for that in‑between.

Across interviews, people who had returned — whether permanently or for a season — described a kind of identity whiplash. They found themselves in streets they knew by heart, surrounded by people who assumed nothing had changed, while their interior lives had rearranged themselves entirely in the years away. On paper, the relocation looked complete. Inside, their belonging and definition of self were suddenly up for renegotiation.

Some of the people I interviewed adopted the phrase “reverse culture shock” once it was offered. Many had framed the struggle as a personal failure to “readjust” until that language arrived.

This research pattern is simple and, often, under‑named: the move home can be more disorienting than the move away, especially when your sense of who you are has grown elsewhere.

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3. The friendship quota and the pull to withdraw

In one of my first research interviews, one participant talked about a “friendship deficit” — the cumulative cost of building intense friendships that then fracture or disperse as contracts end, people move, and lives diverge. In a separate interview, another long‑term expat gave me the clearest language yet for what happens next:

They described a cycle: meet someone, build a deep connection, lose them to geography or rupture, repeat. After enough rounds, they began withdrawing from friendships pre‑emptively. Not because they didn’t want connection, but because their nervous system was tired of being rewritten around departures.

Pattern 40 in the research corpus names this as cyclical friendship grief and protective withdrawal: a self‑protective move that reduces exposure to future loss while paradoxically deepening isolation. The sequence is straightforward — loss, self‑protection, under‑investment, loneliness.

A reader who commented on one of my essays here on Edgewalkers Collective rather than joining a research call added a complementary sentence:

“I’m okay having multiple communities in different places who don’t understand parts of me. I would just like that one person who crosses all the borders and enters all the contexts with me.”

Together, these stories outline an invisible quota. Many long‑term expats and TCKs reach a point where they simply do not have capacity for another high‑intensity friendship that might evaporate on the next assignment. They begin managing closeness the way others manage workload — quietly, and over time.

This research pattern indicates that the friendship systems of long‑term globally mobile lives carry a kind of chronic complexity that most “find your tribe abroad” narratives skip entirely.

4. The interior country and the rituals that hold you

One research participant spoke openly about loneliness: parts of their soul left in different places that can never be fully reassembled. In that same conversation, they offered the most generative reframe of having an always-on nervous system abroad — what is often referred to at Edgewalkers Collective as the “low-grade hum”. Tuned into consciously, this nervous system buzzing in the background can become grounding rather than grating, a sign of a full life lived between worlds.

Another research conversation, after living abroad in their adopted country for 40 years, self-identified as an “earthling”. For them, nationality is a bureaucratic fact rather than a felt identity. This interview participant spoke of “floating on top” — a third mode beyond full-on assimilation and expat enclave, where selective deep immersion becomes the only sustainable way to inhabit an adopted country over decades.

Both participants have built rituals as anchors: one through contemplative practices and carefully structured community, the other through an ongoing grief‑processing space that started around the loss of a partner and stayed.

This became the basis of Pattern 41 in this research corpus: rituals as crisis‑born anchors — practices that begin in emergency and remain as scaffolding for identity continuity and nervous‑system regulation. In other words: when the outer map doesn’t offer a stable sense of home or identity, people build interior countries and repeatable rituals to carry themselves. Those places are as real as any dot on a globe, even if they never appear in a relocation file.

Who this map is for — and where the fuller version lives

The four patterns above are part of a larger research corpus built from 40 conversations with long-term expats, immigrants, migrants, adult TCKs, and returners. They are not a complete explanation of life abroad. They are points of orientation: language for experiences that can be difficult to name while you’re still inside them.

This research corpus is ongoing. Its purpose is not to produce a final theory of life abroad, but to keep making the in-between more visible — the grief, the gratitude, the vigilance, the rituals, and everything that does not fit neatly into a relocation story.

For those of us living in the not-quite-local, not-quite-home stage, language cannot resolve every contradiction. But it can make the experience less solitary.

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), based in Spain since 2010, 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.

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In a comment here on Substack, a reader put words to this wish more clearly than I’d seen before.

They said they were okay having multiple communities in different places who didn’t understand certain parts of them. What they longed for was “that one person who crosses all the borders and enters all the contexts with me” — someone who could walk into any chapter of their life and recognize them there.

For many globally mobile people, this sounds like a dream: not having to translate yourself, your history, or your in‑between‑ness, because one person has been there for all of it.

It’s enticing precisely because the reality for those between cultures and countries is much harder.

How friendships actually work across moves

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There might be the sound of bells chiming somewhere behind you, the particular slant of late-afternoon light off the buildings — and for half a second, you're not here.

You're standing in a crisp autumn, cold air, wood smoke, a version of you from a different decade entirely, admiring the way the light hits the kaleidoscope of falling leaves.

Or you're back on a hike somewhere else, on a trail, mid-stride, feeling the rhythm of a walk you finished years ago.

It isn't a memory you decided to have. It's more like… your body changed the channel without asking you first — and by the time your mind catches up, you're already back in your “here”, slightly disoriented, still walking.

Your body still knows where the light switch is in an apartment you gave up the keys to a decade ago.

Your body still finds the rhythm of a walk in a country you haven’t set foot in for decades.

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The body as an archive of places you’ve lived

Your body doesn't just remember what happened in a place. It remembers the place itself — the geometry of it, the pace it asked of you, the version of you that learned to move through it.

This is different from nostalgia, and different from homesickness. Nostalgia is something you feel about a place, on purpose, usually with some distance. This is closer to reflex. It shows up uninvited, on a Tuesday that has nothing to do with anywhere else.

One person I spoke with in my research had lived long-term across two very different countries, years apart, and described something I hadn’t heard named so precisely before: parts of their soul left in different places, in a way that can never be fully reassembled. Not a metaphor they reached for lightly but more of a description of what it actually feels like to have built real life in more than one country: pieces of yourself distributed across geographies that don’t get to be in the same room together.

Another person I spoke with, who’d lived in several different countries over the years before eventually settling somewhere new, described something related from the other direction. On visits back to the place they’d grown up, it read as sensorially “louder, more intense” than it used to — not because the place itself had changed, but because their nervous system had recalibrated to a different rhythm elsewhere, and now measured the old country against the new baseline. Their body wasn’t confused about which country they were standing in. It was just running the comparison in the background.

There's a real, well-documented basis for a body that holds places this precisely.

For people who've moved once — a single before, a single after — this might surface occasionally, gently.

For people who've moved multiple times, over years or decades, it can mean carrying several of these bodies at once.

The one that still knows a particular staircase. The one that still finds the pace of a specific street. The one that flinches, softly, or softens, just as involuntarily, at a sound from a city you can barely picture anymore.

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Neither loss nor ownership

There's something genuinely rich about this.

You are not a person who lived in one place. You are a person whose body carries the layout of several. That's not nothing — it's a kind of fluency most people never get to have, even if no one ever taught it to you on purpose and even if you never asked for it.

And there's also something disorienting, maybe even a little grief-inducing, about a body that keeps referencing places you can't return to, or that don't exist anymore in the form your body remembers.

The city you’re picturing may have changed. The apartment may have new tenants who’ve repainted over the version your hand still reaches for. Your body isn’t wrong to remember it — it’s just remembering something that, in the present tense, is partly gone.

It's not a sign you haven't "moved on." It's what happens to a nervous system that's been asked to build fluency in more than one place, more than once.

Where this tends to appear

This hasn’t earned its own number in my long‑term life abroad pattern tracker yet. It shows up often enough across the research that it likely will, but for now it sits alongside a related, already‑named pattern: what I’ve been calling the Interior Country, the private inner landscape some long‑term expats build that isn’t defined by any single culture. This is its more literal cousin — not just an inner landscape, but an actual archive your body keeps of literal places you’ve lived in and experienced.

Here’s where it’s showing up in my research so far:

• It tends to concentrate in people who've made more than one real move — not a vacation, not a semester abroad, but the kind of stay long enough that your body had to actually learn the place rather than just visit it.

• It shows up in returners, whose body still carries the floor plan of somewhere they've since left.

• It shows up in people managing more than one home base at once, where the body is quietly holding two or three sets of directions simultaneously.

This is still another emerging pattern in my research, but it belongs on the same map as the low-grade hum and migratory grief that I write about on Edgewalkers Collective.

This is yet one more way long-term life abroad gets written into our body — not just in how safe it feels, but in what it still, involuntarily, remembers how to do.

Sitting with the places your body still holds

Your body holding onto a place doesn't mean you're stuck in it. It means you built real fluency there, and fluency doesn't disappear just because the address did.

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

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), in Spain since 2010, 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.

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So on August 14th, 2026, we sat down (virtually) to talk about it.

What if You Moved to Spain?

Kay Fabella (Edgewalkers Collective) has called Madrid home since 2010, after falling for the city on a study-abroad semester in 2007 — and later for a Spaniard.

Asia Dawn (The Next Chapter) landed in Barcelona this past March after a decade of building lives across Latin America and Italy.

In this Expat Diaries Live conversation, Vivian takes you behind the scenes of what it actually takes to move to Spain and stay: the visa bureaucracy nobody prepares you for, the moment “for a little while” quietly became permanent, and what ordinary life looks like years (or months) into the adjustment. If you’re considering a move to Spain — or you’re already here and still figuring it out — this one’s for you.

Topics we covered:

• Why Madrid (a two-country coin flip in undergrad) and why Barcelona (chasing “near the water” after a year of scouting Italy and Spain)

• The sliding-door moment: how a study-abroad choice in 2007 quietly became a 17-year life

• Spanish bureaucracy, demystified: the NIE, the TIE, and why “dot your i’s, cross your t’s, and be patient” is the only real advice

• What’s different about moving to Spain solo vs. moving with a child and co-parenting across countries

• The moment “trying it out” became “building a life” in Spain

Timestamps:

00:00 — Welcome + intros: Kay (Madrid, since 2010) and Asia Dawn (Barcelona, since March 2025)

04:00 — The Beginning: choosing Barcelona to be near water; Kay’s “sliding door” study-abroad choice between Madrid and Buenos Aires

08:40 — The Move: first encounters with Spanish bureaucracy — visas, NIE/TIE, and “dot your i’s, cross your t’s, be patient”

15:00 — The Reality Check: falling for a Spaniard without being fluent, machine-gun Madrid Spanish vs. textbook Spanish, and juggling Catalan

27:00 — Ordinary Life: no-car living, Spain’s public transit, and daily commutes with kids

43:00 — Unexpected Joys: vermouth culture, tortilla de patatas debates, and grocery-store food discoveries

51:00 — Becoming Someone New: sobremesa, spontaneity vs. American scheduling, and why Spain feels family-friendly

58:00 — Housing Reality: the Barcelona housing crisis, apartment-hunting horror stories (including a literal crucifix in a rental), and rent vs. buy culture

1:02:00 — Looking Back: “What have I done?” moments and honest reflections on the sacrifices of building a life abroad

Clips

The sliding door moment of how I ended up in Madrid:

Learning to love (and fight) in a multilingual relationship:

The “final boss” moment of making it in Spain

When it stopped being a holiday and just became… life:

The real cost of choosing to build a life elsewhere:

An honest reflection on almost two decades living in Spain:

If you want to go further

Sometimes it helps to have your 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. I was good at it. I was also quietly burning out from being the bridge. 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 want to access to the guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my long-term life abroad research I send to paid subscribers, you‘re welcome to upgrade your subscription at any time.

I’d landed “back home” after years of long-term life abroad in Spain. I was shuffling forward with everyone else, passport in hand, in a terminal I could’ve walked through with my eyes closed. No one had even spoken to me yet.

But my shoulders had already inched toward my ears. My jaw had set. My eyes were scanning in that way they do without asking permission: clocking uniforms, watching hands, tracking how quickly the person behind me was moving.

I told myself it was jet lag. I told myself I was just exhausted. I told myself a lot of things, because “my body doesn’t trust this place” isn’t something most people expect to hear about the country on your passport.

Fast forward a few weeks. I’m back in the country where I’ve actually built a life: Spain. I’m walking somewhere ordinary — to do a grocery run, to catch the metro to Madrid’s city center, nowhere that would make anyone’s TikTok video on top places to visit. Somewhere along that walk, without deciding to, my breathing changes. My pace slows. I’m still aware of my surroundings, but it’s the everyday kind of awareness, not the kind that’s bracing for impact.

One person I interviewed in my long-term life abroad research who’d moved from North America to Western Europe, put it this way: she feels safer walking outside in her adopted country than she ever did in the place she grew up — not safer in an abstract, statistical sense, but safer in her body, on a random Tuesday.

If you’ve lived this, you already know it doesn’t make sense on paper, or to anyone in your “here” or “there”. The place you’re “from” is supposed to be the safe one. The place you chose is supposed to be the unknown. And yet your nervous system has drawn the opposite map.

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The wrong-way-round safety map

There’s a specific shape to this experience that long-term expats, immigrants, third culture kids, and global citizens only name reluctantly:

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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.

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.

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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.

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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: more than sixteen 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), in Spain since 2010, 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.

“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.

The unseen experience of multilingual life

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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:

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“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:

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