Many people living abroad long-term have all imagined a version of this: the friend who knew you “before” and then visits you “after,” in a different country — walking with you through your current neighborhood while also being able to picture the home you left.
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
The reality of long‑term life abroad is quieter and more fragmented.
As the years and moves stack up, different friendships tend to become custodians of different chapters. A childhood friend may know your family stories and formative context but have little sense of what your everyday life looks like now. A host‑country friend may understand your current routines in detail, but know almost nothing about who you were before you arrived. Someone from a third country may hold one specific era — a grad program, a first job abroad, a crisis, a loss — and mostly see you through that lens.
There’s a name for part of what’s happening here. Psychologist Toni Antonucci and Robert Kahn’s convoy model of social relations describes how people move through life surrounded not by one fixed circle of support, but by a shifting convoy of relationships — some close, some more peripheral, some tied to a particular chapter or place — that changes in composition as life circumstances change. No single person in that convoy is expected to hold every role.1 In other words, having several partial mirrors instead of one full one isn’t a gap in your friendships. It may just be what a convoy looks like when the moves keep coming.
Internally, you may experience yourself as one continuous person, living in what I’ve called an interior country: a private inner landscape that isn’t defined by any single culture or location. Externally, your friendships can feel more like partial mirrors — each reflecting a version of you tied to a place and time, without anyone holding the whole map.
This isn’t a sign your friendships have failed. Nor is it a sign that you’ve made the wrong choice to leave behind somewhere familiar. Often, it’s just how social life reorganizes itself when your story has had to cross borders more than once.
Becoming your own bridge
Over time, many long‑term expats become their own archivists — the only ones who remember how all their selves, in all their countries, add up.
You become the person who knows how your childhood self, your first-move self, your current-country self, and the selves in between relate to each other. You’re the one who carries the full arc when no single friend has walked all of it alongside you.
That role can feel both like a privilege and, sometimes, lonely.
A privilege, because you learn to move between contexts and versions of yourself with ease. You know which parts of your story belong in which rooms. You know how to translate when you need to, and when it’s kinder to yourself not to. Also lonely, because explaining your backstory again can feel tiring — and the temptation to stay surface‑level, or to withdraw a little, can grow with each new chapter.
This sits near some later-stage research patterns I keep circling back to in my long-term life abroad research: the friendship quota, the low-grade hum of chronic liminality, the pull to step back after too many goodbyes. Here, though, I'm staying with something narrower — the work of being the bridge between versions of yourself when your friendships are scattered across places.
The rare gift: friends who grow with you across borders
Sometimes, there are people who don’t share every geography, language, or generational references with you — but are willing to keep updating who you are as you move.
They might have met you in one city and stayed in your life as you shifted to another. They might not know your childhood streets or every stop in between, but they’re willing to listen when you describe your interior country and the pieces they’ve never seen. They don’t fix you in the version they first met. They let the story change, and they stay curious about the new chapters.
This is the mark of the friendships worth keeping across borders: they don’t have to follow every postal or country code you’ve lived in — but they do let you keep evolving together in the chapters you share.
If you don’t have “one person who crosses all borders,” you’re not failing at friendship.
You’re living a life that almost guarantees your relationships will be partial — tied to places and phases.
The task becomes noticing who offers you that kind of evolving witness, and quietly honoring the work you do to hold your own full story when no one else can.
On friendships that transcend borders
None of this resolves into an answer, and it isn’t supposed to.
You don’t need to find the one friend who crosses every border, and you don’t need to apologize for wanting one. Both things can be true: the wish is real, and the way your friendships actually work — scattered, partial, tied to specific chapters — is not a flaw in how you’ve lived.
What you can do is notice who, among the people you have, lets you keep changing. Not the friend who remembers the most of your past, but the one who stays curious about who you're becoming now. That's a different kind of fluency than being fully known — and for many long-term expats, it turns out to be the more sustainable one.
And if this essay named something uncomfortably accurate, you don’t have to make sense of it alone:
I hold a small number of Expat Orientation Conversations each month — 60‑minute, one‑to‑one, non‑clinical sessions for sense‑making and orientation, not therapy or coaching.
Together we look at how long‑term life abroad may be shaping your inner experience, find language for what has been hard to name, and gently sort what’s contextual from what’s personal before you decide what, if anything, you want to do next.
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.
Antonucci, Toni C et al. “The convoy model: explaining social relations from a multidisciplinary perspective.” The Gerontologist vol. 54,1 (2014): 82-92. DOI:10.1093/geront/gnt118
Kay, I really enjoyed reading this. I feel like you described something that's hard to put into words. I'm grateful to have had a handful of friends (one or two from each chapter) who have stayed a part of my life, even if it's through distance. Other friends have dropped off over the years, but never because we stopped being friends, we just evolved and grew apart.
I do have one friend that has seen and existed in many chapters of my life. I call her my soulmate friend. We met in China on travels and exchanged social media. Later, she ended up moving to NYC just after I did for an internship. We spent six months becoming close friends and both witnessed a growing phase of our lives. A year, after I moved to London, she ended up doing a study abroad master's program also in London for four months of my time there. Since then, we have crossed paths in other cities, and more recently, she has moved back to New York and I was able to see her twice again in the US before leaving. Having her is truly a blessing!
I really resonate with this. Living abroad can leave your life divided among people who each know a different version of you, and sometimes you just want one person who understands how all those versions belong to the same life.