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Living abroad taught me how lonely freedom can feel
After calling 12 countries home, I've learned the brochure version of this life is real. So is the loneliness of never being fully known in any one place.
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She arrived in Malta on a Thursday, and by Friday, we were stretched out on one of the island's pale limestone beaches, watching the water shift from turquoise to deep blue at the horizon.
My best friend of 24 years was visiting from San Francisco, where she has lived since we graduated from college. She was impressed by the beauty surrounding me in my new Mediterranean home, but at some point, she looked at me and said, "You're missing your people here."
Over the years, I've lived and worked across Myanmar, China, Angola, the British Virgin Islands, Malta, and a handful of other countries. The brochure version of this life is peppered with quaint local markets, passport stamps, and the pride of being someone who chose differently. That version is real, but there's something else, something that lives just under the surface of all that freedom that isn't as exhilarating.
Before you can get to any of it, there are the logistics. Finding housing, opening a local bank account, sourcing health insurance, figuring out the phone plan, the grocery situation, and where anything is.
Every single move, you rebuild from zero – and you do all of it while appearing, to new colleagues and new landlords and a new country, completely fine.
Here's the truth: every time you move, you start the story from the beginning.
New people, new introductions, new summarized versions of yourself that fit over drinks. You give people the highlights. What gets left behind is context, the people who know your history, who remember who you were before all this, who don't need you to explain the reference because they were there. When you move every few years, no one holds that for you. Huge pieces of you are just missing.