I've recently discovered your page and it's going to be quite helpful as I plan towards spending time (moving?) abroad. This piece puts a perspective on my ongoing grappling with how I don't feel like I fit in in the state (a New England state) I grew up in after living 35 years in an international city in the US. The frustrated looks here, eyes glazing over, if I go near the topic of how much of this state is wanting culturally. I know I've grown as a person with that adult life elsewhere and worldwide travel, but I'm still ME. It's ok to want to experience the broader world. Anyway, no problems solved here, but it's nice to know "it's a thing" experienced by many.
Welcome, Valerie! It is _totally_ a thing; I've met dozens if not hundreds of people who have had similar experiences to yours. And FYI, I've lived in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and have lots of friends from Vermont and Maine, so I know many such stories from New England. (Thinking about it, why the heck don't I have friends from Connecticut? Maybe nobody does? 😂) In any case, I wish you luck in your continued explorations and hope you will find a place where you will feel centered. Though that said, you might want to read this recent piece:
Thanks! I've read the essay and it is helpful. You have put into words many of the thoughts I've had bouncing around in my head. After significant personal changes. I've been waiting to wake up with an epiphany about next life steps. I've come to the conclusion that all I need is a community who thinks like me and has done the things I suspect will suit me best. The how-to is my next step!
The difficult thing about epiphanies is that they don't come when you want them to. It sounds like maybe you're finding resources that can help you to figure out what you want without waiting for that epiphany!
Gregory, thanks for your column and thanks to all the respondents as well. I’ve been seriously considering a move and have traveled extensively so it seems like a viable option but have lived my entire life in the US. The insight you have provided has been a good opportunity to further the search as the political situation worsens here. Thank you !
Thank you Joe (Joseph?), and welcome to Living Elsewhere! I hope you will find lots of food for thought here. There are already quite a few texts in the archive that relate to living abroad—something that, sadly, more and more Americans are being forced to consider.
Knowing that I'm no longer trapped in America has given me the capacity to enjoy time spent in hometown kitchens listening to stories of Adirondack vacations. Thanks for helping me realize this with your writing.
Beautifully articulated. I realized that what is foreign and fascinating for me abroad, is home and banal to everyone there. So, the one thing I hope travel has taught me, is to be comfortable to have a conversation with people on how they have changed while I was away: from home or from abroad.
Thank you, Kartik! You have a good point: focusing on recent change is possibly easier than focusing on timeless differences. And people love talking about change.
Excellent piece Gregory! I do not live abroad, but for the past 5 years or so my wife and I have been bike touring pretty consistently all over the world. Check out my substack ;). Every time we come back, I get jolted and feel many of the same emotions you have described. We must re-integrate and it seems to take more and more time to feel comfortable the longer we stay away. the current “situation” makes it doubly hard in terms of foreign travel. We certainly feel a responsibility to fight back against what is happening; on the other hand, bike travel is a real draw, and it is possible to connect with people at a level that is not really possible any other way. And spend money in other countries as opposed to our rapacious USA. In any event, I do enjoy your posts as they are adjacent in a meaningful way to my own. I look forward to reading Part 2.
Thanks, Glen! It’s interesting to hear that you experience some of the same things, even though you still live in the US. I will check out your Substack. Happy cycling!
I am catching up on my reading today and this hit home (pun intended). I am new to living abroad and have been transitioning for 3 months between Napa, CA and Zagreb, from mid-October to mid-January. I finally made the final move January 17, the day I vacated my apartment and flew to Zagreb. (My residency was finally approved on February 28.) I returned to Napa last week for some medical appointments and to host a unexpected Croatian wine tasting. For the first time – without a U.S. residential address – I felt like it was no longer home. I was a visitor, an outsider. That feeling was confirmed when friends came to my tasting, then left to go elsewhere together, and didn't invite me to join them later. I realized in that moment that was no longer part of "the group" – life went on without me.
Elizabeth, congratulations on your move, but that is a sad story. I'm sorry you had that experience. Though that said, I love the idea of an "unexpected Croatian wine tasting". I wish those were more common! I can just picture my doorbell ringing one evening...
It has been interesting that I've been so successful at hosting Croatian wine tastings (with follow-up sales) in Napa Valley, but I believe people are interested in trying varieties they've never had before.
This resonated so much with me. I was out of the US for 5 years, living in Italy and Turkey. I came back before I was ready, but my partner felt he needed to return. I came back to all these references to Seinfeld and Friends, shows I have never seen. People took me downtown to proudly show off the new football stadium. No one knew much--or cared much--about the Kurds or Berlusconi or Vaclav Havel. People complained about the line to renew their drivers license at the grocery store.
Later, when my child was seriously sick and I was spending time in the land of hospitals, I was glad to be in a place where I knew the language and where there was reliable technology. At least I had that. But I will always have double vision. Seeing the world from this side where I am, and from the other side where I was. I do my best to carry both with me.
When I got back from Japan after spending my first year outside of Canada, everyone kept asking me, How was Japan? To which I had to have a very standard set of responses or I would go crazy. I found myself feeling at points like I was bragging because it was all I had to talk about.
You're so right about this feeling of being out of the loop — I haven't been able to sing along to top-40 radio in about 17 years 😅. I wonder though what it's like for people from countries that have less impact on pop culture though — I've noticed a lot of emigrants tend to work even harder to remain a part of their culture from abroad, particularly those from smaller, less powerful countries.
And finally, I have to say, you missed out with the curly fries. They're soooooo much better!!! 😋
This is funny - I too had a similar experience with curly fries and there is enough type of fries that baffled me, but I forget what they were called. Similar with words and expressions - I'm not sure if it's American thing or just me getting older (probably a combination of the two).
What really hits close to home - badoom cha! - is when I'm back visiting my parents and, as you said, no one is really too interested in my stories, not that I'm forthcoming with telling them. They sort of see wherever I've been as a blur, like all the experiences blend together.
On occasion, someone might profess an interest and I'll share something fairly innocuous and they'll say, 'wow, you should write a book!' And I'm thinking, 'yeah, you haven't travelled, nor have you read much.' There's nothing terribly fascinating about most of our stories to people not interested in travel or curious about the world beyond their own cosy confines. But to us, who've lived it, it makes us who we are. And it's impossible to relate to those who haven't experienced it.
I've never lived outside the US, and rarely traveled abroad. Still, when I was in my late teens I went to Germany, visiting a friend who'd been an exchange student at my school for a while (switching partway through because the school was overly conservative; when she started there she was warned to avoid one person: me). I felt like I'd finally found my place. I fit in as I hadn't in years, not since I was a small child at a public school with people from all over, from all sorts of backgrounds and economic levels. It was actually the first integrated in my city though as a child I didn't realize that (and two were in my class, Marty King, Dr. King's son, and Donzaleigh Abernathy, daughter of Rev. Abernathy). I went from that school with German, French, Asian, poor, middle class, wealthy, different races, to a radically homogeneous one. In Germany, though the people I met looked similar, their minds were juicy. Then the Baader-Meinhof Gang murdered that industrialist. Every three to five blocks a table was set up, a policeman sitting at it to check identity cards or passports, another with a machine gun standing beside him. I heard emotional outbursts, anger, hate spewing. I saw friends of my friend verbally attacked; we would leave before it escalated further. People wanted retribution, revenge, violence. We tended toward rationality, humane ideas. (How do you prove murder is wrong by killing someone?) I came to understand that my home is composed of those who share my outlook, and that we are a minority in too many places, particularly now. It does sound like you're one of my people. Thank you for sharing.
This post certainly struck a nerve! I was in the US twice last year (eastern seaboard in August, Chicago in September) and felt all of those things again.
I’ve been living outside the US, my birth country, for… 33 years now? I’m not sure at what point I realized that my view of anything in the US was that of an outsider and not an insider anymore. It was a kind of relief to admit, to myself at least, that I didn’t get it anymore— and that was ok.
Caroline, I'm glad that you recognize some of what I described here. Was it traumatic for you to admit that you had become an outsider? Do you still see yourself as American to a significant degree, or do you feel like a foreigner there?
Traumatic is a big word, Gregory. The realization that I was an outsider as far as the US is concerned has been more or less a constant of choosing to live elsewhere, as probably you and many other readers know. At some point I stopped thinking about it very much.
Sometime after I moved to Switzerland and stayed there, got married to a German, and realized my American-ness was also an advantage on the job market, I made peace with my US identity. I saw the pre-plowed paths that people were given here and was thankful that my road had been allowed to meander. I grew up in a safe and prosperous time and place, and was encouraged (primarily by my family, but the US society allowed for it) to be curious about the world around me. I realized I was grateful for this background, and that it was a part of me forever, no matter where I was.
This eased my decision to renounce US citizenship once I had received my Swiss passport. And again, I’d not thought much further about my identity on paper since life continued in its merry way with no big difference (except in terms of bureaucracy and paperwork, since my banking and financial relationships became much, much simpler).
The recent "rush for the exit" in the US– or at least, the increased chatter about it– has made me reflect on my paper identity: no, I am not an American. Do I feel like I belong there? Nope, haven't felt that way for a long time and now even less so. When my fellow Europeans look at me, do they see an American? Some do, perhaps, because we don't share the same childhood cultural memories. Or because I speak flawless English. Or because I behave in a different, less conformist way, than those around me (especially evident in Switzerland!).
This sentence—'Your life abroad is of zero interest to the people back home'—resonates deeply with my experience. When you leave, you gradually fade from people's lives, and over time, the bond you once had becomes so fragile that one day, it simply breaks.
Milan Kundera’s wonderful novel Ignorance explores this theme through the lens of not knowing—ignorar—both in the sense of being unaware of what happened in one’s homeland and of becoming a stranger to those who stayed behind. The return is a silent reminder that time has moved on, often in different directions.
This one struck a nerve, Gregory. I was born in Newfoundland and spent my childhood in England and France. We landed in California when I was ten, but I have NEVER felt like an American, despite living in the U.S. for decades, and every time I land in Europe, my sense of home, like a muscle memory, echoes down to my bones. Today the political discourse in this country feels like a jungle drum getting louder, but I fear for the NATO countries too. There is a crack in the universe.
I'm so sorry to hear about your experience, Linda. Do you think that with the way things are going, you might follow your bones and move back to Europe?
My most recent trip back to the states was in December to spend the holidays with family. It was just 1 month after the election, so I had the opposite experience: EVERYONE wanted to know about our life abroad. I think they longed for some normalcy. They wanted to hear about a world without red hats and what it was like to go to the grocery store and not spend a mortgage payment on a cart of food. I know you wrote this a while ago, so I'm assuming it was pre-election. I wonder if you'd have a different experience now.
Ha! Actually, this was published today. And I was also in the US in December, yes, and everybody was talking about the election, but nobody in my social circle would ever dream of living abroad, so no, not much interest. But of course, I’ve been abroad for over 20 years, so they have already heard everything they want to hear about that from me.
On Substack, the experience has been quite different. My post “Are You One of the Few Americans Who Really Could Move to Europe?” went viral (or at least has been liked over 1000 times and restacked over 100 times—is that viral?). So clearly there are lots of Americans who are suddenly interested in the wider world. But few of them will be sitting be around the Christmas dinner table, in my experience.
I’m an American who has been living abroad for 25 years. The sudden interest Americans are showing in moving abroad is a repeat of what happened after Bush was elected. It was repeated the first time Trump was elected as President. And here we are again. Most will not move countries.
In general, you're right, Robin. The "let's move to Canada" rhetoric is something that comes up every time things take a turn for the worse—though to be fair, it's never been even close to this bad, so a much larger proportion of people ARE in fact moving abroad now. Most won't, but that's a good thing, as it would prove the ruin of several countries, including the US.
I've recently discovered your page and it's going to be quite helpful as I plan towards spending time (moving?) abroad. This piece puts a perspective on my ongoing grappling with how I don't feel like I fit in in the state (a New England state) I grew up in after living 35 years in an international city in the US. The frustrated looks here, eyes glazing over, if I go near the topic of how much of this state is wanting culturally. I know I've grown as a person with that adult life elsewhere and worldwide travel, but I'm still ME. It's ok to want to experience the broader world. Anyway, no problems solved here, but it's nice to know "it's a thing" experienced by many.
Welcome, Valerie! It is _totally_ a thing; I've met dozens if not hundreds of people who have had similar experiences to yours. And FYI, I've lived in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and have lots of friends from Vermont and Maine, so I know many such stories from New England. (Thinking about it, why the heck don't I have friends from Connecticut? Maybe nobody does? 😂) In any case, I wish you luck in your continued explorations and hope you will find a place where you will feel centered. Though that said, you might want to read this recent piece:
https://livingelsewhere.substack.com/p/tension-between-home-and-adventure-becoming-the-center
Thanks! I've read the essay and it is helpful. You have put into words many of the thoughts I've had bouncing around in my head. After significant personal changes. I've been waiting to wake up with an epiphany about next life steps. I've come to the conclusion that all I need is a community who thinks like me and has done the things I suspect will suit me best. The how-to is my next step!
The difficult thing about epiphanies is that they don't come when you want them to. It sounds like maybe you're finding resources that can help you to figure out what you want without waiting for that epiphany!
Gregory, thanks for your column and thanks to all the respondents as well. I’ve been seriously considering a move and have traveled extensively so it seems like a viable option but have lived my entire life in the US. The insight you have provided has been a good opportunity to further the search as the political situation worsens here. Thank you !
Thank you Joe (Joseph?), and welcome to Living Elsewhere! I hope you will find lots of food for thought here. There are already quite a few texts in the archive that relate to living abroad—something that, sadly, more and more Americans are being forced to consider.
Knowing that I'm no longer trapped in America has given me the capacity to enjoy time spent in hometown kitchens listening to stories of Adirondack vacations. Thanks for helping me realize this with your writing.
That's a really nice perspective, Carol! I'm glad my writing has been of some value to you.
Beautifully articulated. I realized that what is foreign and fascinating for me abroad, is home and banal to everyone there. So, the one thing I hope travel has taught me, is to be comfortable to have a conversation with people on how they have changed while I was away: from home or from abroad.
Thank you, Kartik! You have a good point: focusing on recent change is possibly easier than focusing on timeless differences. And people love talking about change.
Thank you for putting into words so succinctly what I have felt when I return to the home of my origin, over the past 25 years I’ve lived abroad.
I'm glad that the piece resonated for you, Robin!
Excellent piece Gregory! I do not live abroad, but for the past 5 years or so my wife and I have been bike touring pretty consistently all over the world. Check out my substack ;). Every time we come back, I get jolted and feel many of the same emotions you have described. We must re-integrate and it seems to take more and more time to feel comfortable the longer we stay away. the current “situation” makes it doubly hard in terms of foreign travel. We certainly feel a responsibility to fight back against what is happening; on the other hand, bike travel is a real draw, and it is possible to connect with people at a level that is not really possible any other way. And spend money in other countries as opposed to our rapacious USA. In any event, I do enjoy your posts as they are adjacent in a meaningful way to my own. I look forward to reading Part 2.
Thanks, Glen! It’s interesting to hear that you experience some of the same things, even though you still live in the US. I will check out your Substack. Happy cycling!
I am catching up on my reading today and this hit home (pun intended). I am new to living abroad and have been transitioning for 3 months between Napa, CA and Zagreb, from mid-October to mid-January. I finally made the final move January 17, the day I vacated my apartment and flew to Zagreb. (My residency was finally approved on February 28.) I returned to Napa last week for some medical appointments and to host a unexpected Croatian wine tasting. For the first time – without a U.S. residential address – I felt like it was no longer home. I was a visitor, an outsider. That feeling was confirmed when friends came to my tasting, then left to go elsewhere together, and didn't invite me to join them later. I realized in that moment that was no longer part of "the group" – life went on without me.
Elizabeth, congratulations on your move, but that is a sad story. I'm sorry you had that experience. Though that said, I love the idea of an "unexpected Croatian wine tasting". I wish those were more common! I can just picture my doorbell ringing one evening...
Have wine, will travel!
It has been interesting that I've been so successful at hosting Croatian wine tastings (with follow-up sales) in Napa Valley, but I believe people are interested in trying varieties they've never had before.
It does make sense, in that people in Napa already know about wine, and you're offering them something new and different—which is exciting.
This resonated so much with me. I was out of the US for 5 years, living in Italy and Turkey. I came back before I was ready, but my partner felt he needed to return. I came back to all these references to Seinfeld and Friends, shows I have never seen. People took me downtown to proudly show off the new football stadium. No one knew much--or cared much--about the Kurds or Berlusconi or Vaclav Havel. People complained about the line to renew their drivers license at the grocery store.
Later, when my child was seriously sick and I was spending time in the land of hospitals, I was glad to be in a place where I knew the language and where there was reliable technology. At least I had that. But I will always have double vision. Seeing the world from this side where I am, and from the other side where I was. I do my best to carry both with me.
When I got back from Japan after spending my first year outside of Canada, everyone kept asking me, How was Japan? To which I had to have a very standard set of responses or I would go crazy. I found myself feeling at points like I was bragging because it was all I had to talk about.
You're so right about this feeling of being out of the loop — I haven't been able to sing along to top-40 radio in about 17 years 😅. I wonder though what it's like for people from countries that have less impact on pop culture though — I've noticed a lot of emigrants tend to work even harder to remain a part of their culture from abroad, particularly those from smaller, less powerful countries.
And finally, I have to say, you missed out with the curly fries. They're soooooo much better!!! 😋
This is funny - I too had a similar experience with curly fries and there is enough type of fries that baffled me, but I forget what they were called. Similar with words and expressions - I'm not sure if it's American thing or just me getting older (probably a combination of the two).
What really hits close to home - badoom cha! - is when I'm back visiting my parents and, as you said, no one is really too interested in my stories, not that I'm forthcoming with telling them. They sort of see wherever I've been as a blur, like all the experiences blend together.
On occasion, someone might profess an interest and I'll share something fairly innocuous and they'll say, 'wow, you should write a book!' And I'm thinking, 'yeah, you haven't travelled, nor have you read much.' There's nothing terribly fascinating about most of our stories to people not interested in travel or curious about the world beyond their own cosy confines. But to us, who've lived it, it makes us who we are. And it's impossible to relate to those who haven't experienced it.
Not that I lose a lot of sleep over this.
Yes, "it just means that we have to give them the gift of our attention..."
I've never lived outside the US, and rarely traveled abroad. Still, when I was in my late teens I went to Germany, visiting a friend who'd been an exchange student at my school for a while (switching partway through because the school was overly conservative; when she started there she was warned to avoid one person: me). I felt like I'd finally found my place. I fit in as I hadn't in years, not since I was a small child at a public school with people from all over, from all sorts of backgrounds and economic levels. It was actually the first integrated in my city though as a child I didn't realize that (and two were in my class, Marty King, Dr. King's son, and Donzaleigh Abernathy, daughter of Rev. Abernathy). I went from that school with German, French, Asian, poor, middle class, wealthy, different races, to a radically homogeneous one. In Germany, though the people I met looked similar, their minds were juicy. Then the Baader-Meinhof Gang murdered that industrialist. Every three to five blocks a table was set up, a policeman sitting at it to check identity cards or passports, another with a machine gun standing beside him. I heard emotional outbursts, anger, hate spewing. I saw friends of my friend verbally attacked; we would leave before it escalated further. People wanted retribution, revenge, violence. We tended toward rationality, humane ideas. (How do you prove murder is wrong by killing someone?) I came to understand that my home is composed of those who share my outlook, and that we are a minority in too many places, particularly now. It does sound like you're one of my people. Thank you for sharing.
This post certainly struck a nerve! I was in the US twice last year (eastern seaboard in August, Chicago in September) and felt all of those things again.
I’ve been living outside the US, my birth country, for… 33 years now? I’m not sure at what point I realized that my view of anything in the US was that of an outsider and not an insider anymore. It was a kind of relief to admit, to myself at least, that I didn’t get it anymore— and that was ok.
Caroline, I'm glad that you recognize some of what I described here. Was it traumatic for you to admit that you had become an outsider? Do you still see yourself as American to a significant degree, or do you feel like a foreigner there?
Traumatic is a big word, Gregory. The realization that I was an outsider as far as the US is concerned has been more or less a constant of choosing to live elsewhere, as probably you and many other readers know. At some point I stopped thinking about it very much.
Sometime after I moved to Switzerland and stayed there, got married to a German, and realized my American-ness was also an advantage on the job market, I made peace with my US identity. I saw the pre-plowed paths that people were given here and was thankful that my road had been allowed to meander. I grew up in a safe and prosperous time and place, and was encouraged (primarily by my family, but the US society allowed for it) to be curious about the world around me. I realized I was grateful for this background, and that it was a part of me forever, no matter where I was.
This eased my decision to renounce US citizenship once I had received my Swiss passport. And again, I’d not thought much further about my identity on paper since life continued in its merry way with no big difference (except in terms of bureaucracy and paperwork, since my banking and financial relationships became much, much simpler).
The recent "rush for the exit" in the US– or at least, the increased chatter about it– has made me reflect on my paper identity: no, I am not an American. Do I feel like I belong there? Nope, haven't felt that way for a long time and now even less so. When my fellow Europeans look at me, do they see an American? Some do, perhaps, because we don't share the same childhood cultural memories. Or because I speak flawless English. Or because I behave in a different, less conformist way, than those around me (especially evident in Switzerland!).
So, it's complicated. (shrug)
This sentence—'Your life abroad is of zero interest to the people back home'—resonates deeply with my experience. When you leave, you gradually fade from people's lives, and over time, the bond you once had becomes so fragile that one day, it simply breaks.
Milan Kundera’s wonderful novel Ignorance explores this theme through the lens of not knowing—ignorar—both in the sense of being unaware of what happened in one’s homeland and of becoming a stranger to those who stayed behind. The return is a silent reminder that time has moved on, often in different directions.
Wonderfully put, Emanuela! We fade from people's lives and—let's admit it—they fade from ours. This is part of the unbearable lightness of leaving.
I am a huge fan of Kundera, but I haven't read Ignorance since it came out. Your comment makes me want to read it again. Thank you!
This one struck a nerve, Gregory. I was born in Newfoundland and spent my childhood in England and France. We landed in California when I was ten, but I have NEVER felt like an American, despite living in the U.S. for decades, and every time I land in Europe, my sense of home, like a muscle memory, echoes down to my bones. Today the political discourse in this country feels like a jungle drum getting louder, but I fear for the NATO countries too. There is a crack in the universe.
I'm so sorry to hear about your experience, Linda. Do you think that with the way things are going, you might follow your bones and move back to Europe?
I have a dual citizenship with Canada. It’s is something we are considering. Quebec City has that old world vibe.
You are very fortunate to have dual citizenship. Quebec City sounds like it just might fit the bill. It's nice to have a Plan B, or a Plan Q!
My most recent trip back to the states was in December to spend the holidays with family. It was just 1 month after the election, so I had the opposite experience: EVERYONE wanted to know about our life abroad. I think they longed for some normalcy. They wanted to hear about a world without red hats and what it was like to go to the grocery store and not spend a mortgage payment on a cart of food. I know you wrote this a while ago, so I'm assuming it was pre-election. I wonder if you'd have a different experience now.
Ha! Actually, this was published today. And I was also in the US in December, yes, and everybody was talking about the election, but nobody in my social circle would ever dream of living abroad, so no, not much interest. But of course, I’ve been abroad for over 20 years, so they have already heard everything they want to hear about that from me.
On Substack, the experience has been quite different. My post “Are You One of the Few Americans Who Really Could Move to Europe?” went viral (or at least has been liked over 1000 times and restacked over 100 times—is that viral?). So clearly there are lots of Americans who are suddenly interested in the wider world. But few of them will be sitting be around the Christmas dinner table, in my experience.
I’m an American who has been living abroad for 25 years. The sudden interest Americans are showing in moving abroad is a repeat of what happened after Bush was elected. It was repeated the first time Trump was elected as President. And here we are again. Most will not move countries.
In general, you're right, Robin. The "let's move to Canada" rhetoric is something that comes up every time things take a turn for the worse—though to be fair, it's never been even close to this bad, so a much larger proportion of people ARE in fact moving abroad now. Most won't, but that's a good thing, as it would prove the ruin of several countries, including the US.