The Interior Country You Build After Years Abroad
A birthday reflection on long-term life abroad — and a gift for my fellow Edgewalkers.
Starting my seventeenth year of life abroad, and the most stable place I live in isn’t a city or a country. It’s an interior country I carry with me that my body recognizes before my mind does.
It didn’t arrive in a single move or milestone. This country has assembled slowly, almost imperceptibly, in the spaces between my homes and languages — in the streets I left behind, the rooms I learned to read, and the quiet hum of my nervous system adapting again and again.
When I look back now, what surprises me most is not how much I’ve lost, but how much has taken root inside. There are corners of Madrid, Los Angeles, and a dozen other in‑between places that live in me at the same time. My passport still names one country. My body carries several, no matter where I go.
Over the last seven months of research conversations, I’ve heard versions of this from so many of you. A long‑term expat “who realized that parts of their soul were left in different countries that could never be fully reassembled”. Someone who described it as “belonging to myself across all cultures at once”. Another who said that after enough years abroad, “the only place that consistently feels like home is an inner landscape no one else can see.”
Today’s essay is a small birthday reflection on that interior country — mine and yours. Not to fix it, or to weigh it against the griefs that built it, but to notice that it exists at all… and to offer you a gentle way to visit it for a few minutes.
The interior country as a research pattern
When I step back from the individual stories, this interior country shows up less as a metaphor and more as a repeating structure.
Over time, long‑term expats, immigrants, TCKs, and returners I’ve spoken to have described something similar: a sense that their life no longer lives in any one place, but in an inner landscape stitched together from several.
It’s the feeling of carrying multiple cities in your body at once. The way a certain kind of light, or pavement, or afternoon silence in one country can suddenly pull up a version of you from another. People talk about streets they still walk in their minds long after they’ve moved on. Languages they drop into when they need to feel like themselves again. Kitchens, cafés, and commutes that no longer exist in their daily life, but still feel oddly present — like rooms in an internal house they can visit whenever they need to.
What links all of these is not nostalgia for a single “home,” but a kind of layered familiarity. The interior country is where those layers live side by side. It’s the place in you that knows how to reconcile the fact that your memories, attachments, and identities now span more than one map.
How my interior country travels with me
“Home” was never a single place for me — even before I moved to Spain, I was already a first-generation daughter of immigrants. People often assigned me a story before I opened my mouth. So moving to Madrid in 2010 added another layer around identity that I’ve been writing about, researching, and navigating ever since.
What I’ve learned is there isn’t one map for this interior country. That’s taken longer to sit comfortably with than it should have. For years I thought the goal was resolution — that eventually the American directness, the Filipino instinct to soften, the Spanish version of me that was shaped in my 20s and 30s, would settle into one coherent person. They haven’t. What’s changed isn’t the number of parts. It’s what they do with each other.
So what does my interior country look like?
It shows up in the way I see a crosswalk sign blinking to change from green to red, and the initial urge to run to beat it, immediately followed by the reminder that I’m really in no rush.
It shows up in the way my husband and I have created a specific version of Spanglish that’s been shaped by our particular mix of obscure pop culture references, musical parodies in both English and Spanish, inside jokes formed by travel mishaps, and tribulations and triumphs over ten years of marriage.
It shows up in the way the breeze rippling through eucalyptus can instantly transport me from Madrid to New England, Morocco, Singapore, India, and my solo trek walking the Camino de Santiago.
It shows up in the way I seamlessly switch between “I/yo” and “our/nuestro” and “you all/vosotros/ustedes” when speaking about Los Angeles, California, the US, the Philippines, Madrid, and Spain.
I carry all of these parts with me. Some days that’s lonely. Most days, it’s just… life. You’re always acutely aware of the loss involved, but at a loss for words for how to share it with people around you who don’t see the complexity you’re carrying.
It took naming the grief of life abroad out loud — without trying to tidy it up with an Instagram filter — that helped me find others like you who’ve raised your hands in recognition.
How this Substack has evolved
My initial essays on Edgewalkers Collective came from journal entries, showing I was trying to reckon with living with these multiple lenses at once.
What started as a way to better understand and connect with other long-term expats, immigrants, and global citizens 5+ years abroad on Substack has slowly become a research corpus that, as of today:
Includes nearly 40 conversations, 1 in-person workshop, 49 countries of lived experience — and continues to be updated every week with your stories;
Underpins the 30 essays published here on Edgewalkers Collective;
Has been presented to a room of intercultural educators, practitioners, and researchers at an international conference in Valencia, Spain.
That’s been, objectively, amazing.
But if I’m being honest, I’m still reckoning with how to map and navigate my interior country. It’s something I suspect that I’ll always be navigating, adding new layers each year.
The truth is it’s never been a tug-of-war version for me between these different experiences, countries, and cultures that have shaped me. It’s closer to what an orchestra of instruments can create when they’re all in tune with one another — each one doing its own distinct job, at the same time, in service of the same thing.
This is the part I don’t write about as often as I share here on Substack: seventeen years of switching between registers, languages, and lenses didn’t just leave a residue of fatigue. It also built something more like a discipline — the capacity to hold more than one true thing in view at once, on purpose, and use that as a tool rather than survive it as a strain.
It’s something I realized has shaped my interior country as much as it’s shaped those of you who’ve reshared an essay, left a comment, or spoken to me in my research interviews.
For each one of those interactions — the ways they’ve shaped both the research and reinforced my sense of belonging to a truly remarkable community — I’m deeply grateful.
My birthday gift to Edgewalkers
If you recognize some version of this interior country in yourself, you’re probably already tending it without calling it that. It can show up in:
Routes you return to. The walk that exists in more than one city you’ve called home. The bench, the café, the stretch of pavement that doesn’t look like much, where something in you settles a notch before you’ve consciously arrived.
Languages you reach for. The one that shows up when you’re tired, or delighted, or telling the truth without editing first. Noticing which moments pull which language forward is one way of listening to what your interior country already knows.
Objects you keep close. A mug, a recipe, a piece of clothing that’s moved with you more than once. Not sentimental in the abstract — anchoring, in the specific.
Noticing what your body already returns to is usually enough to make that inner place feel a little more real, and a little less lonely.
If you need help tapping into it, this month’s guided audio that usually lives behind the paywall is free for everyone.
Sitting Inside Your Interior Country, is a short guided pause — a way to visit your own interior country and notice what’s already there. Consider it a small thank‑you for being here, wherever “here” happens to be for you today.
Audio reflection: “Sitting Inside Your Interior Country” (~7 min)
If you’d like to go further
What did the above audio bring up for you?
Tell me about your in-between in the comments. (I read every one — and I suspect the rest of us will recognize ourselves in your story.)
And if this interior country feels a little crowded or hard to find your footing in right now, you don't have to map 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. 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.
I am an ATCK living in my 15th country who’s brought up 4 TCKs of her own. I completely agree with you. I’ve always said home is not one particularly place but something you carry within you. Shame we never meet in madrid! We left our home there June last year to move to Italy. I’m now choosing to stay in one place for the first time ever in my life. Very different feeling for me. I explore the complexities of identity, belonging and life across borders in my memoir “Beneath A Borrowed Sky - One woman’s search for the true meaning of home” which I think you’ll find an interesting read.
Thank you for such a thoughtful essay. It gave me a lot to think about.
I was born and raised in Japan to Japanese parents, and I grew up with what would be considered a traditional Japanese upbringing. Although I've now lived abroad much longer than I ever lived in Japan, I've always felt that Japan is my home and that I'm Japanese. Perhaps that's partly because my parents were quite strict about the values they raised me with.
Reading your essay made me realize that people who have spent many years abroad don't all experience it in the same way. My own sense of identity has always stayed firmly rooted in Japan, but your idea of an "interior country" really stayed with me.
I also have Japanese American relatives in the United States who hold on strongly to their Japanese roots, even generations later. In some ways, that has probably influenced how I think about identity as well.
Your essay helped me see that there are many different ways people make sense of a life lived across cultures. Thank you for sharing your perspective.