Last month, I was in conversation with Vivian of The Expat Diaries here on Substack, as part of a live panel discussing life abroad in Spain. (Note: I’m by no means a moving to Spain expert, but you’re welcome to watch the replay if you want to hear my long-term life abroad stories.)
Afterward, Vivian shared a Note outlining her version of the life abroad starter pack. I cheekily responded with a sequel: what the Five-Years-In starter pack includes.
As I keep reading and connecting with your long-term life abroad stories through Edgewalkers Collective, I’ve noticed that most of us already know the starter pack for arrival. The visas. The language academies. The house-hunting. Plenty of Substackers cover that brilliantly. What’s explored far less is what happens once you’ve hit the five-year mark.
Nobody hands you this list when you relocate. There’s no orientation packet for it, no laminated card at the embassy. It accumulates quietly instead, somewhere around year three or four — evidence of adaptation that shows up sideways, in small moments, rather than announcing itself as a milestone.
Here’s what tends to be on it.
The joke that stops needing explanation
There's a peculiar kind of silence that follows a joke that doesn't quite land in a second language — the half-beat where you can see someone doing the math, arriving somewhere close but not quite there.
Early on, that silence used to bother you enough to explain the joke; and then explain the explanation.
Somewhere around year three or four, you stop chasing the laugh.
Some jokes just won't land anymore, and that's fine now.
It's the same code-switching fatigue we named a few weeks back, just further along: a type of permission to stop performing full comprehension and tolerate partial connection instead.
The bar that’s for “tourists”
You develop a highly specific opinion about which places are “tourist traps”.
(Never mind that just five years ago, you were considered a tourist yourself.)
You'll defend your regular spot — bad lighting, an owner who knows your order, a vibe you just have to experience — like it's a hill worth dying on, while writing off the place two streets over as so obviously for tourists… despite having eaten there yourself in year one.
It's a small, almost comic marker of something bigger: somewhere in year three or four of your life abroad — “visitor” stopped being a category you wanted to belong to, even in the low-stakes theater of where you get a coffee or which park you run in.
Home, as a math problem
You notice around year five that “home” has quietly become a question with two or more right answers.
Someone asks, casually, “so where's home for you now?” and there's a half-second delay before you answer — not because you don't know, but because you know too well, and the honest answer needs a sentence, not a place name.
Because you’re running through a mental calculation. Of how well you know the person who asked. Of whether it’s a friend of a local, or a friend from your home country. Of whether you should give the elevator-pitch answer or the full backstory of the multi-point map of home.
This is the interior country showing up in plain daylight, the one we've named here before: the moment multiple places all technically qualify as home, and none of them fully do.
Slightly behind in two conversations
You catch yourself texting your best friend, "wait, is THIS what the kids are saying these days?!" and meaning it.
It usually starts as a joke — a screenshot, a slang term, a TikTok or Reel, a "please explain this to me like I'm ninety."
Underneath the joke is something quieter: your reference points have started drifting from the ones you grew up with, in both directions at once. Nobody prepares you for this specific flavor of being slightly behind in two cultural conversations instead of fully caught up in one.
Different lists, same story
Tell me about your Five-Years-In Starter Pack in the comments. (I read every one — and I suspect the rest of us will recognize ourselves in your story.)
Because if you compare notes with another person living abroad long-term, you’ll probably find your five-year lists don’t fully match. Someone else’s version might include learning to cook with ingredients that didn’t exist in their kitchen growing up, or finally understanding a joke without subtitles, or realizing they no longer flinch at a certain kind of silence.
None of these lists cancel each other out. They’re not competing for the “true” version of what five years abroad looks like. They’re just different entry points into the same accumulation — proof that adaptation doesn’t follow one script, even for people who technically live in the same country, in the same decade, doing something similar with their lives.
This is close to something I keep circling back to about life here in Spain: you learn to live in the land of “sí, y” instead of “no, pero.” Not everything has to be sorted into right and wrong, belongs and doesn’t belong, adapted enough or not adapted enough.
You can love the place you live, and still find it maddening. You can miss home, and not want to go back. You can have a completely different starter pack than the person next to you, and you’re both still telling the truth of what life abroad looks like now.
None of this means you've arrived, and none of it is proof that you belong here, or that you don't belong somewhere else. It's just the small, unglamorous evidence of a life that has continued long enough to change its shape around you.
The strange part is that, from the inside, it can still feel like you're between places — even once the list is this long.
If this essay feels more familiar than it should, Expat Orientation Conversations are a one-time, non-clinical space to put language to what’s accumulated, without needing to turn it into a larger project than it is.
You can read more or book here:
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.