What Running Taught Me About Belonging
On finding steadiness as a long-term expat when connection feels uncertain.
It was early in the pandemic.
Almost overnight, the city I’d built a life in felt different.
People avoided me on buses.
Stepped away in supermarkets.
Looked past me — or through me — in places I used to move through with ease.
Or worse…
I had residency.
Friends.
A business.
A relationship.
And still, something fundamental shifted.
When I tried to name it, there was nowhere for it to land.
My Spanish community couldn’t see it:
“That doesn’t happen here.”
“It must be a misunderstanding.”
My English-speaking circles dismissed it just as quickly:
“You’re overthinking it.”
“That’s in your head.”
No one could hold both truths:
That I was building a life here.
And that parts of it no longer felt safe.
For a while, my world narrowed.
Work paused.
Social contact thinned.
The only steady conversations I had were with my therapist and my husband.
So I started running.
Not for fitness.
Not for health.
I ran because it let me move through space without explanation.
If I kept moving, I didn’t have to interpret anyone else — or myself.
No eye contact.
No translation.
No deciding which version of me to lead with.
Running became my neutral zone.
Just focus on my breathing.
One foot in front of the other.
I didn’t realize it then, but I was learning something important.
Belonging doesn’t always begin with other people.
Sometimes it begins with your body moving through the world and realizing it’s still yours.
Most expat narratives frame belonging as community.
Find your people.
Build your network.
Join the group.
But sometimes communities fracture.
Sometimes they don’t know how to hold what you’re living.
When that happens, other forms of belonging matter.
The rhythm of your own breath.
The reliability of your own feet.
The quiet predictability of a path you walk again and again.
I kept running after the world reopened.
Later, when my work burned me out and the values I’d built a career around began to feel unstable, I ran then too.
Eventually, I signed up for the Málaga marathon in December 2023.
Not to prove anything.
Not to optimize.
My goals were simple:
To notice dogs and trees on my runs.
And to finish race day without injury.
And you know what?
I did both.
Running didn’t solve anything.
But it reminded me that I could belong to myself first —
even when belonging elsewhere felt uncertain.
It taught me that nothing is permanent.
Not connection.
Not rupture.
And that sometimes, the only way forward
is through steady, ordinary movement.
As I prepare to begin counselling training this month, this lesson stays with me...
Relational belonging matters.
Witness matters.
But so does having a place where you don’t have to be understood to exist.
If you’re reading this:
Your edge may need company.
And it may need solitude.
It may need language.
And it may need wordlessness.
Wherever you find that untranslatable space —
running, walking, writing, making —
protect it.
It’s not lesser belonging.
It’s part of how you stay intact.
Let’s walk the edges together.
Onward,
Kay ✨
If you’d like to go further
What does your way of returning to yourself look like while living abroad?
Tell me about it in the comments. (I read every one — and I suspect the rest of us will recognize ourselves in your story.)
And if this feels 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.