Someone at the table asks why you moved abroad, and the answer is out before you’ve decided to give it.
Mine goes like this: I first came to Madrid in 2007 for a study abroad semester, and fell in love with Spain. I came back in 2010 and fell in love with a Spaniard. I’ve been here ever since.
I know how to deliver it like the grooves of a well-worn vinyl record. I know where to pause for laughter, when to hand the arc to my partner, when to add more detail and when to add less.
But every time I share it, 2010 is further away. So much has happened in the lives I’ve lived since that asking why I stayed is the more interesting story.
The reason that did the work
In the early years of moving abroad, the reason I came did a great deal of work. It gave me a role, and it gave other people a story they could repeat. Nobody had to ask what I was doing here, because the answer had a plot you could trace.
Many of us carry some version of a “reason-we-moved-abroad” story. We followed a partner. We were on assignment. We came for a degree and stayed. We came back because we couldn’t shake the feeling that this place was home. We moved somewhere new, sight unseen. We left something behind.
A good reason for moving abroad holds a life together while everything else is new. It explains the paperwork, the accent, the distance from family. It explains you — and makes you more legible to others in the room.
Then the reason ages. The semester ends. The assignment finishes, or the relationship changes shape, or the job that justified the move becomes a different job. You are still here, and the reason has stopped covering the ground it used to.
Nobody announces the reason’s expiration date. It shows up as a small hesitation when the question comes, a version of the answer you no longer quite believe.
You keep telling it anyway, because it works, and because the true answer is longer and has no ending yet.
When the origin story becomes the footnote
Across my research conversations with people living abroad long-term, the migrants and expats who describe this most precisely are rarely in difficulty. Their lives abroad are established. They have friends, routines, wry observations about their cultures of origin and their adopted countries. They can still tell you why they came, fluently and without effort. But the longer they’ve been abroad, the more out-of-date that story might be. You may have moved to study; stayed for an adventure; and are now raising children.
The systems built around moving people explain some of why this goes unnoticed. Mobility programs, visa processes and relocation packages track events and dates: arrival, assignment end, renewal or return. They have no field for the point at which an arrival stops being someone’s origin story, and becomes a footnote in their story instead.
Identity reconfiguration was one of the themes that kept surfacing in my research conversations. It rarely arrived as a crisis. It sounded more like uncertainty about who they were now, compared with who they had been before the move.
One person who has lived abroad longer than in their passport country put it this way: “The hum is real, the grief is real, and neither resolves with time — they become features of life.”
How long-term life abroad shifts self-perception
The shift itself should not be surprising.
I think of it as operating systems: more than one, from the different places we’ve called home, and a lot of toggling between them.
The research has other words for it:
Place and people come first. One longitudinal study followed 527 university students who spent a semester or a year abroad alongside 607 who stayed home. The students who went abroad became more open and more agreeable and less neurotic, beyond what their starting personalities predicted, and the new international relationships they built accounted for much of the change. The study measured personality traits in young adults over one academic year.1 It says nothing about belonging or grief. It does suggest that a move can change a person, and that the people around them are part of how.
Language does its own work. In a survey of 106 adult multilinguals, people reported feeling less logical, less serious, less emotional and more fake in the languages they learned later in life.2 The authors say they are not measuring personality change. They also note that the people who felt different usually described a change of context: environment, culture, the people they were speaking to. Researchers call the wider pattern cultural frame-switching: people who hold more than one cultural meaning system move between them in response to cues from their situation.3
When the arrival ends, the narrative tends to focus on how we keep adapting to the place. But we often forget how much the new home we claim also begins to shift, uncover or reinforce our identity over time.
One place for every version of your story
Why I came to Madrid has a beginning, a middle and a laugh. Why I stayed doesn’t have a script yet — and it’s a story I’m adding pages to every day.
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 choose between the different versions of your story over time. Sometimes it takes longer to find.
An Expat Orientation Conversation is one version of a room where you can sit with whatever you’re carrying — without having to explain it all first. 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.
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 story you’re writing abroad.
Let’s keep walking the edges together.
Onward,
Kay✨
Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?
I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), based in Spain since 2010, 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.
Zimmermann & Neyer (2013), "Do We Become a Different Person When Hitting the Road? Personality Development of Sojourners," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1037/a0033019.
Dewaele & Nakano (2013), "Multilinguals' perceptions of feeling different when switching languages," Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 34(2), 107–120. DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2012.712133.
Hong, Morris, Chiu & Benet-Martínez (2000), "Multicultural minds," American Psychologist. Summarized in this chapter.
Such interesting insights. I love the idea of the story we tell ourselves/others and how when we take time to pause with distance and new experiences, that story have may have evolved to something completely different. I also love that quote from one of your interviews.