The question I’ve spent most of my waking days answering is, “Where are you from?”
Growing up as a daughter of immigrants in the US, it was usually followed by “Where are you really from?” Now, as an immigrant/expat myself in Madrid, Spain, since 2010, my answer depends on how much energy I have, what language I’m speaking, and what room I’m in. “The US.” “California.” “Los Angeles.” If I want to get ahead of the second question, because I don’t want to play another round of proving I belong, I say, “I’m from the US, with parents from the Philippines.”
When I travel with my Spanish husband and someone asks where we’re from, we both say “Madrid.”
It’s the same word, and both of us mean it. For him, it’s the whole answer. For me, it’s the shortest true thing I can offer that ends the conversation kindly. Neither of us is lying. Only one of us is translating.
The version that fits the room
Most of us who’ve lived abroad a long time know this move so well we no longer notice making it. Someone asks a simple question and, before we answer, we’ve already sorted the whole story. We decide which parts will make sense to this person, which will need a footnote, and which aren’t worth the effort today. Then we hand over the version that fits.
When I look back over my own years of doing this, what stands out isn’t the language. It’s who the editing was for. I’ve done a lot of translating, softening and explaining for the people around me, so they wouldn’t have to sit with the gap between moving abroad and actually belonging.
Moving is easy to understand from the outside. It has a date, a city, a reason people can repeat to each other. Belonging is slower and messier, and it doesn’t always come. The distance between the two is real, and over time I got very good at keeping other people from having to look at it.
I made the story easier to receive than it was to live. And somewhere in all those small, considerate edits, I became what I can only call the lone archivist of my story.
The story keeps getting longer while the version we share stays roughly the same size— an entire interior country reduced to something that can fit inside a conversation.
A skill — and a weight
It’s worth saying clearly that this is not a flaw.
Self-translation is a real cross-cultural skill. Reading what a room can hold, choosing which true thing to lead with, making a complicated life graspable for someone who’s never lived one: these take years to learn, and most people never have to. Often the shorter version is a kindness. Sometimes it’s a kindness to yourself, on a day when you don’t have the whole story in you.
But a skill used constantly is also a load carried constantly, and those are two different experiences. Being able to translate yourself well is a communication skill. Never getting a room where you don’t have to is something else. It isn’t really about whether you can explain. It’s about how rarely anyone meets you without the explanation.
Each short version costs almost nothing on its own. “Madrid” costs nothing. What adds up is the total: years of conversations where the abridged edition quietly became the official record. The people who love you aren’t careless. They’re holding exactly what you gave them, which is the version you prepared so they wouldn’t have to stumble.
What long-term life abroad adds
In the first years abroad, the gap feels temporary. You explain a lot because everything is new, and you expect the explaining to ease once people understand.
What happens instead, for many of us, is that the story keeps getting longer while the version we share stays roughly the same size. Every year adds chapters nobody else witnessed in full: the bureaucracy, the second or third language becoming the everyday one, the visits “home” where you’re greeted as the person who left. The distance between what you’ve lived and what you can say in one sentence keeps growing, and the habit of closing it for others grows with it.
None of this means the adaptation was wrong, or that you’ve lost yourself in it. You can be good at living across cultures, proud of the life you’ve built, and still tired in a particular way that’s hard to name — because you’re the only one who has ever had to hold the whole thing.
I don’t think the answer is to stop translating. Some rooms deserve the short version. Some people are only ever going to be “Madrid” people, and that’s fine.
The question is whether there is anywhere you don’t have to translate at all.
One room without the footnotes
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 make the experience understandable before it can be heard. A place where enough of the context is understood that you can start in the middle.
Sometimes that place is a friendship, a partnership, a community, or a trusted therapist. Sometimes it takes longer to find.
Recently, I sat with someone who put it this way:
“Speaking with someone who is like you… an expat, who has been/understands the situation and is holding space for you is different than talking to a friend that doesn’t really get it.”
— S, long-term expat
That difference is what an Expat Orientation Conversation is for.
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.
You don't have to explain your story first. We look at it together, as it is, including the parts that have never fit into a short answer.
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), 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. 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.