A few months ago, on the podcast Transplants by Laura Peruchi, I used an analogy for long-term life abroad that apparently stuck. Laura later turned it into a Substack post of her own, which is a lovely thing to see happen to something you said out loud once.
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?
Liminal describes a threshold state — the doorway between one room and the next, neither fully inside either one. Most of the time, when people talk about being “in-between,” they mean something temporary: you’re liminal while you wait for an appointment, while you adjust to new surroundings, while the plane is in the air. The threshold is a place you pass through. It has a side where you, eventually, land.
Chronic liminality is what happens when that threshold stops being temporary and becomes the address. Not because you failed to move through it but because neither room is holding still long enough to arrive in. It’s the experience of standing in a doorway between two rooms that are both still rearranging their furniture. You’ve built a life in the doorway itself, because it’s the only part of the floor plan that’s actually held still long enough to stand on.
That’s the distinction worth holding onto: ordinary liminality resolves because at least one side stays put long enough to become the destination. Chronic liminality doesn’t resolve — because neither side is holding still. The condition isn’t a delay before arrival. It’s what arrival looks like when there’s no longer a fixed point for it to land on.
I presented on this topic at an intercultural conference in Valencia this year, drawing from 35 conversations, a workshop, and thematic analysis across a community of 450 people in 49 countries. Across all of the research conversations I’ve had so far, people described something strikingly similar: "always on," "never quite landing," "parts of my soul in different places."
If this is naming something you’ve felt but couldn’t put words to, you’re not alone.
The assumption hiding inside "adapting"
We talk about cultural adjustment like it has an end state. You arrive, you struggle, you adapt, you’re done — the adapter comes off because you no longer need it. That logic depends on one thing staying still: the outlet back home, waiting for you exactly as you left it, so that eventually you could plug back into it if you wanted to.
But nothing waits. The place you left kept moving without you. The people in it changed on their own timeline. So did you, on yours, just in a different direction. By the time you go back, there’s no original outlet left to return the adapter to. Neither one held still long enough to be the fixed point “adaptation” requires.
Here’s what that return trip actually breaks: the whole idea that adapting is a one-time event.
And it isn’t only conceptual. Many people in my research corpus describe a bodily version of this: measuring your here against a baseline set somewhere else, long after you've settled in. A place you once called home can feel louder, faster, more intense than you remember. Not necessarily because it changed. Sometimes because you did.
A map for locating where you are
If you want language for where you might be on this, here’s a small map I use often: three stages of a cycle you move through again and again as your life changes.
Moving In — you’ve just arrived. The place is external: logistics, language, survival. The self you brought with you is still mostly intact.
Fitting In — the practical stuff is handled. Now you’re learning the codes, quietly reshaping yourself to be received by a place that wasn’t built with you in mind.
Living With(in) — the place is inside you now as much as you are inside it. Not resolved. Inhabited. This is where chronic liminality actually lives: not a stage you graduate from, but the stage most of us stay in without ever being told it exists. You’re navigating your identity both from your previous home and within the place you now call home, while the place itself continues to shape you.
Many people I’ve spoken with get told that third stage is real. We’re taught integration in our lives abroad is the finish line. It isn’t. It’s just a different kind of beginning.
Traditional models of cultural adjustment describe this as a curve — honeymoon, culture shock, adjustment, integration as the finish line. But across the research conversations I've had, it looks less like a curve and more like an “O”: circling the same themes for years, never fully resolved, and easily mistaken for a personal failure to integrate.
Navigating the liminality of life abroad
This isn’t the reinvention narrative — the one where you move abroad and emerge as a bolder, more “authentic” version of yourself by year two, fully formed. That story assumes a single before-and-after.
It’s also not a personal failing. If the outlet you’re measuring yourself against no longer exists, then not feeling “arrived” isn’t a sign you tried too little or adapted too slowly.
You’re not failing to reach a fixed point. The fixed point moved.
Which means the question — how do I finally feel arrived? — isn't quite the right one to be asking.
If Living With(in) is a stage you return to rather than finish, then a single insight, even a good one, isn't really enough. An essay can name the doorway. It can't keep you company in it. That's what the paid audio library is for: a short, regular practice you can come back to, for noticing where you are today, mid-shift, without having to decide which version of you is the real one.
This month’s audio, Sitting Inside the In-Between, is a guided practice for long-term expats and globally mobile folks who:
Notice themselves somewhere between an old version of who they were and whoever comes next, without a clear sense of which one is “real”;
Want a moment to hold both — that the life they’ve built is real, and that they’re still becoming who they are inside it — without needing to resolve either;
Are looking for language for the in-between that isn’t a diagnosis or a fix, just company.
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), 17 years in Spain, and training in counselling skills (CPCAB, UK, Level 2). 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.