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.