When expat life doesn’t feel how it looks: The emotional cost of life abroad
- Phil McAuliffe
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Expat life can look exciting, successful and full of opportunity from the outside.
Over time, the pressure to maintain appearances, be endlessly successful and go through the motions of life can leave us feeling disconnected from ourselves, others and the life we’ve created.
Expat life can look like living the dream.
You live somewhere nice, whether it’s an apartment in the city or a spacious villa. There’s a nice vehicle or two in the driveway, opportunities to travel, shopping trips on weekends and the lifestyle that comes with living abroad.
The kids attend a good international school where they’re exposed to people, cultures and opportunities that many families back home can only imagine.
Socially, there’s a whole new network of people to meet who are navigating the same experience as you. Friendships form over dinners in good restaurants, coffees between meetings, gym sessions and weekends away.
Career-wise, life appears to be moving forward quickly. International experience opens doors. There are opportunities, professional growth and the sense that you’re building something meaningful for yourself and your family.
From the outside, expat life can look incredibly successful. And sometimes it genuinely is.
But how life looks and how life feels are not always the same thing.
I lived and worked internationally for almost 20 years, including in diplomatic environments where image, composure and professional performance mattered enormously. Over time, I came to understand how easy it is to build a life that looks exciting and successful while also feeling disconnected from yourself, other people or the life you’ve created.
Back in 2018, I started The Lonely Diplomat to speak more openly about the parts of international and expatriate life that are rarely spoken aloud.
As a friend eloquently said on episode 2 of The Lonely Diplomat podcast: “[It’s the] same sh*t, [just in a] different country.”
Let’s explore that further.
The pressure inside expat life
Over time, life can feel like you’re being controlled by should.
I should be grateful for everything in my life.
I should make the most of every opportunity.
I should work harder to succeed.
I should maintain the appearance that everything is great.
I should do what I need to do to meet social expectations.
I shouldn’t sound ungrateful.
I shouldn’t share what I’m really thinking or feeling, because so many other people have it worse than me and everyone around me is coping.
We can feel such pressure to be happy because our lives appear objectively successful. Our friends and family see our social media updates, hear about our adventures over Zoom, or experience a snippet of our lives during a brief visit and conjure images in their heads about what life must be like all the time.
Beyond us, social media influencers show the world days of eternal sunshine, beautiful bodies and good vibes, further feeding the general image of what life is like as an expat.
So when life happens - like geopolitical turmoil, relationship troubles, illness or something within yourself that you can’t identify - it’s tough to say aloud that things aren’t as great as the image suggests.
It takes great effort to maintain the image that everything is great when feeling fear. That effort becomes harder over time.
The emotional price of mobility and expat life
Friendships are different when living internationally. Friendships can form quickly and deeply because we’re with people who can understand what life is like. Friends can become like family.
But life can feel like an endless cycle of hellos and goodbyes as other expats come and go and we ourselves arrive and depart.
We develop superhuman levels of psychological resilience and adaptability, even if we dismiss them as normal because everyone around us has them too.
While there can be depth to the relationships we form, there can also be many transactional relationships. Networking replaces meaningful connections as we feel that others want to know us not for who we are, but for what we could do for them.
So others know how to place us in the social structure, we’re introduced as being from our employer or the significant other of someone from somewhere. That sounds like ‘That’s Stefanie, the regional manager from Deutsche Bank’ or ‘That’s Tim. His other half works at Unilever.’
This is fine for a while, but we can find ourselves wanting to scream ‘Hi, I’m Stefanie. I have a job, but I like cultivating bonsai while listening to 70s punk rock.’
We’re always ‘on’. This was particularly drummed into us as Australian diplomats. Should anything embarrassing or scandalous happen (by me or anyone in my family), because we’re known as being from the Australian Embassy, the scandal would be linked to the employer. The diplomatic mission’s (and Australia's) reputation would be damaged.
It’s safer to cultivate and project an image of eternal competence, composure, adaptability and perfection than risk damaging the employer’s reputation.
Our employers care about our wellbeing, but they will always care more about their public reputation. We pay the price for that.
We can be socially busy but become socially malnourished over time.
When expat life doesn’t feel how it looks
Over time.
Time is the great leveller.
What was once shiny and new in the first weeks and months after arriving becomes normal. Weekends away and holidays that were exciting become mundane and perhaps even a chore. Dinners and parties lose their appeal and become a little performative. Having domestic helpers in your house is wonderful, but there are times when you just want to walk around in your underwear.
The job - the thing that’s brought you here - loses its lustre. You’re learning that while the increased salary and responsibilities are great, leadership is tough without peers around you.
Over time, the strain starts showing up in other places – especially in relationships. Living abroad puts unique stressors on a relationship. You become your strongest – but sometimes only – source of support. Some relationships thrive in this environment, others don’t last. Affairs and silent separations (where the couple remain living together but have separate quarters, live separate lives but present externally as still together) are rife.
As an aside: I recall a learning a statistic about the percentage of relationships in diplomacy that end in divorce, and it was far higher than the general population. Unsurprisingly, this is data that does not appear on recruitment webpages.
This is simply a fact, but we all believe that our life, our relationship, our family, our circumstances are the exception. We’re the ones who can cope and thrive.
It’s awful when life happens and we’re not prepared. It’s exhausting and profoundly isolating. It makes us ask big questions of ourselves in moments not filled with doing, and those big questions become ever more persistent over time.
We often judge ourselves harshly for these thoughts and feelings, particularly when our lives appear successful from the outside.
But perhaps this experience is not failure, weakness or ingratitude.
Perhaps it’s loneliness.
How are you going there? Did that ‘loneliness’ line just now land with a thud? If it did, stay with me. Stay curious.
Loneliness is not a personal flaw or an identity label. Loneliness is part of the human experience - one that we’re designed to experience. The thoughts and feelings of a loneliness experience are the signals our body gives us that something within us needs attention, care and meaningful connection.
Much like hunger tells us we need food and thirst tells us we need water, loneliness invites us to notice our need for meaningful social nourishment.
The problem is not that we experience loneliness. The problem is how often we ignore it, hide it or judge ourselves for being human enough to feel it. [For more on loneliness and a powerful reframe to move away from judgement towards using it as your connection ally, read this article.]
As an expat, you’re a long way from home when you don’t feel like you belong where you are.
The opportunity
Life happens no matter what we do for work, how much money we make, what our job title is or our address. No one is immune to the human experience.
It’s also true that expat life provides many opportunities to explore what life can be beyond the societal and cultural constraints of home.
Therein lies the opportunity.
You’re already intrepid by virtue of opting for the expat life. You know the joy that comes from discovering an unexpected place. You know the beauty that life has when you look at places and people with fresh eyes. You appreciate how people approach life in different ways.
Every place you live changes you in a way that’s tough to explain to anyone not living the expat life. But the expat life is still life. Remember 'same sh*t, different country'?
The experience of feeling absent from your own life, as though you’re observing it rather than living it, is inviting you to apply some of that curiosity you have about the world inwards towards yourself.
Experiences like these invite us to reconnect with ourselves and the world around us.
Those thoughts and feelings rarely disappear through working harder, training harder, partying more, travelling more or buying another high-status symbol of success.
They begin to ease when we better understand what meaningful connection looks like for us and start building lives that contain more of it.
Meaningful connection can look like being able to speak honestly without fear of judgement. It can look like feeling emotionally known instead of socially useful. It can look like relationships where you no longer feel the need to perform competence, success or perfection in mind, body and soul to belong.
The same curiosity that allows us to explore the world can also help us better understand ourselves, our relationships and what meaningful connection looks like in our lives.
You’ll be building a life – internally and externally – that feels like yours.
Eventually, we reach a point where we either continue performing our lives or begin reconnecting with them.
You have an opportunity here to make a change and choose meaningful connection.
A place to start
Perhaps the real opportunity in expat life is not simply building an externally successful life abroad, but building a life that still feels connected, meaningful and emotionally nourishing while you are there.
If parts of this article felt uncomfortable or confronting, stay curious. That discomfort is asking you to pay attention to it rather than push it away. Sometimes discomfort is the first sign that something within us is asking for more meaningful connection, honesty and nourishment.
If you’re open to exploring that more deeply, the Connection Starter Course provides a practical and reflective starting point for understanding what meaningful connection is for you and beginning the practice of reconnecting with yourself and the world around you.
Thanks for reading
~ Phil
FROM THE H:C STORE
Important:
All views expressed above are the author’s and are intended to inform, support, challenge and inspire you to consider the issue of loneliness and increase awareness of the need for authentic connection with your self, with those most important to you and your communities as an antidote to loneliness. Unless otherwise declared, the author is not a licensed mental health professional and these words are not intended to be crisis support. If you’re in crisis, this page has some links for immediate support for where you may be in the world.
If you’re in crisis, please don’t wait. Get support now.
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