I know which word belongs in which room.
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.
The expectation I carried
When I moved to Madrid in 2010, I think I expected the unsettled feeling to fade. I never said it out loud, but I’d absorbed the shape of it from the curves many of us are handed early, in cautionary tales about culture shock: the U-curve, or the W-curve. A honeymoon, a dip, then gradual adjustment and integration, and in the W, a second dip and recovery on return. In that story, adjustment is time-limited.
Eventually, I learned the evidence behind cultural adjustment theory is more contested than the textbooks let on. It’s closer to a teaching story than a settled law.
It’s still the story I took in. I treated the discomfort as a symptom of being new, and I assumed newness wears off.
For years, I had imagined belonging as recognition: the right words, the right paperwork, the right answer to where I was from.
Madrid taught me something less definitive and more durable… belonging could be reciprocal. It could mean becoming part of the ordinary web that holds other people’s lives together, and trusting that they would help hold mine. A neighbor trusted me to watch their kid while they ran an errand. A smile of recognition began to cross the face of our local fishmonger.
None of it happened in the clean sequence I would have preferred or, admittedly, had been conditioned to expect. Healing folded into work, work into identity, grief beside gratitude. Madrid was both the place that made room for me and the place that showed me how conditional that room could be.
And still, a question arrived that I hadn’t prepared for.
The question was no longer how to live in Spain. It was how to live with the person these years had made me.
The first has practical answers, or at least practical attempts. The second asks for your attention.
Floating a little above ground
In my research conversations with people who’ve lived abroad long-term, one image keeps surfacing: floating a little above the ground, not quite touching down. One participant, decades into life in their adopted country, described their own stance as "floating on top." On paper, and to others, their lives… work.
I think of what sits underneath as three kinds of work. I sketched them briefly in my chronic liminality essay, as stages of a cycle. These days, I hold the shape more loosely:
Moving In is the paperwork and the routes you learn until you stop checking your phone;
Fitting In is learning which word goes in which room;
Living With(in) is the quieter work of turning toward the inner life these years abroad have created: what has changed, what has been lost, what no longer fits in the place you came from or the place you live now, and which of the versions you tried on are still with you.
In practice, they overlap. You can joke with your neighbors in fluent Spanish and still spend a morning back at the start of the paperwork because a residency card has expired. You can be Fitting In at work and Living With(in) at home. Some people are already Living With(in) before they’ve finished moving in, especially those who grew up between cultures and arrived carrying the question with them.
None of these is further along than the others. Living With(in) is a different kind of attention. For me, it arrived underneath the rest. I had moved in. I had become good at fitting in: the language, the rhythms, the expectations, the right word for the right room. That adaptation was real, and it took years. What it didn’t do was answer the question that came with it.
If your life abroad looks established from the outside and you’ve been wondering why competence hasn’t turned into belonging, it may be that you’ve been asking a Fitting In question about a Living With(in) experience. The skills that got you this far are still yours. They just weren’t built to answer this part.
Next month, I'll be exploring this framework with a group of women living abroad, hosted by New(ish) in Madrid. Not because anyone needs another adjustment checklist, but because some parts of Living With(in) only come into view when there's language for them, and company.
What the years abroad add
Every year adds something nobody else witnessed in full, including the versions of yourself you tried on in rooms they'll never see.
A life can be full and still leave you a little above the ground.
I still know which word goes in which room. What I’m still learning is how to live with everything else these years have changed.
One room for the question you’re carrying
The questions Madrid asked me eventually changed my work, too. I moved from advising organizations on inclusion to sitting alongside people who, like me, had built lives across borders and could no longer explain those lives in one sentence. I began training as a counsellor, drawn back to a question Madrid had put in front of me: what helps someone feel safe enough to breathe, to be, to hear themselves clearly?
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 choose between the versions you've tried on. Sometimes it takes longer to find.
Someone I sat with put it this way:
“Having the space and time to express how I felt, without feeling uncomfortable or judged, was really liberating. You have this space to truly express your feelings and challenges with someone who understands them deeply — and the questions Kay asked helped me go deeper than I could on my own.”
— A, long-term expat
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 identity and context into account from the start. It isn’t therapy, treatment or advice, and there’s no correct answer you’re expected to reach by the end.
If you’re not sure whether a full Expat Orientation Conversation is the right next step, you can book a 25-minute exploration call and get a sense of whether this space fits the question you’re carrying.
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 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.