Nobody tells you about this part before you move abroad…
They tell you about the adventure. The reinvention. The broadened perspective and the passport stamps and the version of yourself that emerges when you’re no longer surrounded by people who knew you before. They tell you about the hard parts too, sometimes — the loneliness, the paperwork, the cultural friction — because those have a shape that’s easy to describe.
What they don’t tell you is that alongside the gratitude, there’s grief.
Not the grief of losing someone. Not the acute, recognizable kind that comes with an event and a timeline and other people around you who understand what happened. The other kind. The quieter kind. The kind that doesn’t have a funeral and doesn’t have a name and doesn’t announce itself until you’re in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday and something catches — a song, a smell, a particular quality of afternoon light — and for a moment you feel the weight of everything you’ve left behind.
Here is what I’ve come to understand about this kind of grief: it accumulates rather than arrives.
It isn’t one loss. It’s hundreds of small ones, spread across years, none of them large enough on their own to justify the word grief. The version of yourself that only existed in one city. The friendships that didn’t survive the distance — not because anyone was unkind, but because proximity had been doing most of the work and neither of you knew it. The family moments you were present for only through a screen, slightly out of sync with the time zone. The mundane continuity of life in one place that you traded for something else, and which quietly disappeared while you were busy adjusting to wherever you’d arrived.
Nobody holds a service for any of this. There’s no moment when the people around you pause and say: this is a loss, and you’re allowed to grieve it.
Most of the time, the people around you are busy celebrating. You made a brave choice. You built a life somewhere new. Look at everything you’ve gained. And they’re not wrong — the gains are real. That’s part of what makes this grief so difficult to hold: it sits right next to genuine gratitude, and the two don’t cancel each other out.
You can love the life you’ve built and still mourn the life you didn’t.
What the research calls this type of grief
In the clinical literature, this has a name: migratory grief.