The first time I really noticed it was in an airport line in LAX.
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.
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:
Your nervous system has created its own map of where it’s been allowed to relax — and that map doesn’t always align with your passport.
It’s about what your body has learned to expect over time. Through streets walked, through interactions with people, through events that shaped who you’ve become over time. That’s less about comfort or preference, and more about what experience has taught you.
If your formative years were spent tracking subtle threat — racialized comments, neighborhood dynamics, the feeling of being eyed or othered in familiar spaces — your system had to stay a little more alert just to move through an ordinary day.
Work like migration researcher Christine Job’s Flourish in the Foreign archive and her Substack, Love Letters from Elsewhere, documents Black American women who describe voluntary migration as a pathway to wellness — with living abroad offering less strain outside the United States than within it.
My interviews mirror Job’s body of work. Whereas the low‑grade hum of life abroad showed up consistently for everyone I’ve spoken to — that is, an increase in nervous system load due to living outside your passport country — Black Americans specifically saw a decrease in nervous system load when moving abroad. It’s still an emerging pattern in my research, but they shared that the increase in psychological safety of being outside their home environment led to positive health shifts: improved blood pressure, weight, and quality of sleep.
Maybe you’ve come from an environment where your body was policed before you opened your mouth. Maybe you’ve been socially shamed into keeping your head down more than speaking up. Which means finding a home abroad became more than just an Instagram-worthy adventure — it became a safe haven. If that’s the case, it’s understandable that your nervous system doesn’t turn off because you visit “home” for two weeks. It stays mobilized. It keeps scanning. Because that’s the normal your body remembers.
Meanwhile, the host country where you now live — the one that technically should feel more foreign — may be the place where your body has actually been given room to stand down. You learned the unwritten rules. The constant background evaluation of “am I safe here?” softened. Your nervous system started reading more cues as “good enough,” not because it’s a perfect place, but because something about how you’re read there changed.
In psychology, Polyvagal Theory describes three broad states:
a social engagement state when we feel safe enough to connect;
a mobilized fight-or-flight state when we detect danger; and
a shutdown state when it’s all too much.
Many globally mobile folks I’ve spoken to describe something like this: their bodies spend more time in a calm-enough, socially engaged state in their host country, and more time in that slightly revved, mobilized state in the place that’s supposed to be “home” on paper.
That’s not overreaction. It’s data. If your body relaxes in one place and tightens in another, it’s reporting something real to you about each environment.
Relief and grief, side by side
Several things are true here, and they don’t cancel each other out.
It’s a real relief to find a place abroad where your body gets to stand down. That relief is worth naming. You’ve built a life somewhere where your nervous system can soften, lean into “safe enough” mode, instead of teetering nervously at the edge of fight-or-flight.
It’s also worth sitting with the fact that “home” — the place that holds your history, your family, your first language — is the place that your body still reads as less safe. That armoring up you feel in line at your home airport? That comes with its own type of grief. It can carry an anger that you have no obvious outlet for, or a sadness that the place that gave you your passport only embraced you conditionally. It can also lead to a silent negotiation with what the word “home” means when your body keeps voting against it every time you land.
There’s another layer here, too. Being able to leave, or to choose a different country at all, isn’t someone everyone can access.
That doesn’t erase what your body is telling you. It just means two realities sit next to one another: the privilege of having global mobility, and the reality that some options carry less nervous-system strain for you than others.
Who tends to live this pattern
This isn’t the story for every long-term expat or globally mobile person. But in my research, it does tend to cluster:
It shows up often in racialized long-term expats and immigrants whose bodies were already working harder “at home” than those of their peers. For them, moving abroad sometimes means their nervous system experiences a partial relief in day-to-day life — fewer direct threats, fewer constant reminders of being out of place — even if the new country comes with its own challenges.
It shows up in people who grew up as the children of immigrants before becoming expats or immigrants themselves. There are at least two “before” contexts in play instead of one. The nervous system has more than one archive it’s referencing every time they go back — their parents’ story, their own childhood, and whatever came after leaving.
It also shows up in globally mobile folks who’ve simply had enough years abroad, and enough trips back, to see that this isn’t a one-off reaction. The pattern repeats. The shoulders climb in the same airport line. The jaw sets on the same street. The exhale arrives reliably in the same adopted-city walk, trip after trip.
This pattern sits alongside the other things I’ve been trying to map here: migratory grief, the low-grade hum of chronic liminality, the work of cultural code-switching across languages and norms. It’s one more way long-term life abroad — whether you call yourself an expat, immigrant, global citizen, or something else — gets written into a body.
What to carry forward
A few thoughts to hold onto — not as solutions, just as orientation:
Your body is allowed to have a map that disagrees with your passport.
The relief you feel in the place where your nervous system can finally soften and the grief you feel about “home” not earning that title anymore can both be true at the same time.
Naming this doesn’t require having an answer yet for what to do about it. It’s enough, for now, to see it clearly: long-term life abroad changed more than your address. It changed your sense of where you can afford to be less on guard.
If your body relaxes abroad and tightens the moment you land “back home,” you’re not imagining it.
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.
I feel way more at home now in Kampala than I do in the US!! Uganda has been home for 8 years now, and I get reverse culture shock when I’m back in the States.
As a person of color in America, we are perceived to be immigrants while in East Africa I’m perceived to be an expat. This has a lot to do with the understanding of race and power, which I’ve been thinking more about and I’m reflecting on why I’m more comfortable in a place where I am perceived as “white”.
"Many globally mobile folks I’ve spoken to describe something like this: their bodies spend more time in a calm-enough, socially engaged state in their host country, and more time in that slightly revved, mobilized state in the place that’s supposed to be “home” on paper."
I felt this so much during my last trip back to Texas. Automatic shift into a higher state of situational awareness as soon as I left the airport in Dallas, didn't ease up until I landed in Lisbon.