🌎 The Thing You’re Not Supposed to Say About Life Abroad

This week, I’ve been working hard to dig up one of those “I regret moving abroad and moved back home” articles, but wouldn’t you know it? Just when I need one, I can’t find a great one – or one that isn’t at least a year old.

Anyway, with that in mind, I did manage to find an article about redefining what to expect when you move abroad. I think that’s valuable all by itself.

As much as living overseas is a dream come true for me, it does come with a specific set of challenges, some of which are more manageable than others.

A recent Forbes article, “Digital Nomads Share Biggest Regrets And What They Wish They Knew Before Moving Abroad,” dug into some of these challenges and what they want others to know about this lifestyle.

“My family and I have lived as digital nomads twice now. My honest regret is that no one tells you the “after” part: once you’ve lived with that level of freedom, it’s incredibly hard to go back to normal life,” said Erin Carey, founder and director of Roam Generation. “We even sold our boat and bought a house, thinking we were done. We tried to settle, tried to tell ourselves we were content, tried to be grateful for the life we had, but in the end, we bought the same boat back the minute we saw it was for sale. That’s the paradox I wish I’d known. Nomad life doesn’t last forever, but the longing it leaves is permanent.”

The above quote from the article is a bit of a gut punch to me.

In our 20 years of marriage, Will and I have owned four houses, and I’ve never felt settled in any single one. The closest I felt, I suppose, was the home we still own in the Nashville suburbs.

I thought that house was it – the one our kids would live in until they both graduated from high school. We’d finish raising them in a community with amenities: a pool, dog park, playground, basketball court, and more.

It’s what I thought I wanted – until I didn’t.

I distinctly remember looking around at all we’d accumulated – house, cars, “stuff” – and thinking, “This is it? This is what we’ve worked so hard for?”

I wanted more, and I didn’t yet know what it looked like, but what we had wasn’t it.

At heart, I’ve always been a nomad who couldn’t settle. In retrospect, perhaps buying real estate four times over wasn’t the best choice. 😅

The second point in the article that stuck out to me was this:

“It was mentally draining to constantly have to juggle visa runs, renewals, and changing entry rules,” explained Jeremy Greenburg, Chief Information Officer at SlickTrip. “I definitely underestimated just how much time I would spend solely on maintaining legal status in a country I was staying in.”

Never, ever – and I mean ever – underestimate the power of bureaucracy in a foreign country.

I just spent almost an hour wrestling with a Spanish government website trying to figure out how to change a password. (If you enjoy this kind of chaos, I’ve got plenty more in the Madrid section of my site.)

Perhaps the quote from this article that struck me the hardest is this one.

“I find that being a digital nomad is so incredibly romanticized that people often forget the things you are giving up,” said Dóra Jónsdóttir, digital marketing director at a tour company in Iceland. “No one tells you how incredibly lonely it can be. After a while you start to miss belonging to a community, the relaxed feeling of catching up with old friends that simply know you inside out, and simply the comfort of familiarity be it a place, language, or the culture.”

To sustain the lifestyle, Jónsdóttir said that you really need to redefine what ‘home’ means to you. “I’ve been lucky enough to have my partner in crime along with me for the last 5 years of work and travel life, along with our two pups. That’s been my community and my ‘home’ no matter where we are.”

After living in Spain for more than a year, I’ve begun to realize that, as humans, we all crave community.

On Halloween, the family of one of my daughter’s classmates held a party to celebrate the holiday, and the mom and dad went all out. From decorations to food to music, the party could’ve been anywhere in the United States. But it was suburban Valencia, Spain, and I had a great time.

The parents, a couple from Texas and Mexico, have been in Spain for a little over two years. It’s evident that, like other friends I’ve had in my life, they’re entertainers. They’re the couple that will host parties, barbecues, hangouts … They love an excuse to welcome people into their home.

That night, Will and I sat down with another group of adults who all spoke English – some native speakers, some not – and had drinks, gorged ourselves silly on the phenomenal spread of food, and listened to old-school country music that one of the guests played on a guitar.

It made me think.

I’m an introvert – someone who doesn’t need a ton of personal interaction. But a couple of weeks ago, I went to brunch with a friend, and I realized how much I’d missed that one-on-one time. And then the Halloween party happened,

It’s like a lightbulb went off over my head.

It felt really good to chit-chat in English. It also felt really good to hang out with other adults outside of my husband. I hadn’t realized how much I needed those occasional “recharges” of my introvert social battery.

As we contemplate buying a home here in Valencia within the next year or two, these two scenarios have prompted me to pause and reconsider what I want from our next home purchase.

Right now, our family has a truly incredible view of the city and the surrounding mountains. Will and I both adore this view. Inevitably, one of us walks out onto the terrace every morning, sighs deeply, and says, “I’m never going to get over this view.”

That’s a hard thing to let go of.

And yet my intuition is telling me that maybe where I need to live right now is where the other immigrants are.

I’ve truly enjoyed living in a very Spanish neighborhood. It offers numerous opportunities to practice the language and interact with my Spanish neighbors. But I think what I’m missing is the ability to interact with other English speakers in addition to Spanish speakers.

It’s taboo to admit it. It stings to admit it. And yet neither of those things makes it less true.

Maybe “home” is the people who make you feel like you belong.

If this resonated, read The Calendar Doesn’t Pass the Vibe Check next or tap the ❤️ to help others find poco a poco.