When the Most Helpful Thing You Can Do While Abroad is Stay
On learning to sit with uncertainty — our own and each other's — without rushing.
There’s an exercise we return to often in my counselling training.
One person speaks. One person listens.
And the only rule is this: no fixing.
No advice.
No “have you tried…”.
No story from your own life to make it more relatable.
On paper, it sounds simple.
In my body, it isn’t.
I’ve lived abroad since 2010. So every time I do this exercise, I can feel the part of me that has spent years smoothing meetings, translating across cultures, patching over awkward silences start to fidget. I notice how quickly my mind generates questions, frameworks, possibilities. All the ways I could make this easier, clearer, more comfortable.
And then I notice the rule again: stay.
The rule of “no fixing”
In my own training notes, I keep circling the same thought: my job in that chair isn’t to make anything feel better; it’s to stay close enough that what’s there doesn’t have to be carried alone. That distinction matters.
Stay with what they’ve said. Stay with what you see. Stay with what you feel.
Not because action is inherently bad… but because in this moment, action would be a way of stepping away from their uncertainty, rather than toward it.
When you’re good at managing, not being witnessed
Here’s what I’m learning from speaking to long-term expats and international folks…
Many people living abroad are very good at managing uncertainty — at least from the outside.
You learned to navigate a new system, a new language, a new set of unspoken rules. You became the person who handles things. The one who figures it out. The one who adapts.
But there’s another kind of uncertainty that doesn’t yield to problem‑solving in the same way.
The kind that sits underneath questions like:
Is this still my life?
Where is home now?
What happens to this version of me if I leave?
In training, when I’m sitting with someone who is circling questions like these, I can feel how quickly I want to offer them a map.
Particularly for those of us who’ve navigated the “not quite local, not quite home” stage of life abroad.
I can also feel how often there simply isn’t a map that would be honest.
Not yet.
The low‑grade hum of long-term life abroad doesn’t arrive with a clear question attached. Sometimes it’s just there. Present. Persistent. Not quite urgent enough to be called a crisis, but steady enough that ignoring it starts to cost something.
The more time I spend in that training chair, the more I realize how rare it is to be allowed to stay in not‑knowing with someone else in the room.
Making room for the fog of uncertainty
Most of us abroad learned to move toward certainty as fast as we could — new job, new country, new plan. It makes sense. For a long time, it worked.
But there is a different kind of work that happens in the in‑between, when nothing has been decided yet and your life doesn’t quite fit the old story or the new one.
It isn’t dramatic. It’s not Instagrammable.
From the outside, you might look completely fine.
What I’m practicing now — in training, and slowly in my orientation work with globally mobile folks — is making a little more room for that part.
Not to analyze it from a distance, and not to rush it to a conclusion, but to let it be exactly what it is: a real, legitimate stage of a life lived between places.
If you find yourself there in your life abroad lately carrying questions you can’t answer yet, you’re not broken for not having a map.
Many long-term expats and globally mobile people I’ve spoken with describe this as a phase they were never warned about: life basically works, and something still feels quietly off.
Sometimes the most honest thing we can do is name the fog, sit down for a while, and let someone keep us company until the edges of the path start to appear.
This month’s audio guide sits right inside that “no fixing” exercise. It’s for the quieter moment where the questions about your life abroad are loud and no honest answer has arrived yet.
Staying With The Fog is a short guided practice for long-term expats and globally mobile folks who are:
Used to managing uncertainty alone and not asking for help
Very good at solving problems, less practiced at being witnessed in the not‑knowing
Somewhere in the long middle — past adjustment, not yet at a clear crossroads
It won’t offer advice or next steps. It won’t try to make you feel better. It will stay with you, for twelve minutes, while you notice what’s actually there before you move.
And in honor of my upcoming talk at an intercultural conference in Valencia next week:
…alongside today’s audio, paid subscribers also receive a 5-page Field Notes pattern report: How long-term expats and returners actually experience life abroad.
It pulls together themes from six months of conversations with globally mobile people — the structural hum, the unseen return, the trailing partner’s timeline, and the nervous system lag — and offers language for what often sits underneath “I’m fine,” both in your own story and in the therapy room.
It’s not a manual or a set of solutions, just a map you can use to see your experience, or your clients’ experiences, a little more clearly.
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. 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.
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