The Biggest Myth About Moving Abroad Is That You'll Become Someone Else
What actually happens is much more interesting.
No relocation porn. No move abroad surface scratches.
I realize this won’t describe everyone’s experience. It isn’t meant to. It’s simply the clearest articulation I’ve been able to arrive at after spending the better part of two years living one of the biggest decisions my wife and I have ever made.
I spent years thinking about this move before we made it. Now I spend just as much time thinking about what actually happened after we arrived.
Just nuance inside a real view of what it’s like to leave your home country with full intention to never return.
A few weeks ago, I wrote:
The scary part that I think people should at least try to consider before moving is that there’s no undo button. This isn’t some boy-turning-into-a-man type of thing. It’s a feeling I’m not sure you can anticipate, even if you attempt to consider it in advance.
You can change forever without ever becoming someone else.
Context changes your situation, your view of the world and the place you’re from. It likely impacts your relationship with other people—strangers, people in your home country, people in your new country, family, friends, whatever.
But context isn’t only your surroundings or some basic we’re living the American dream in Spain nonsense. The meaningful context is the reality that when you move, stay long enough, and make your new country home, there really is no undo button. You have changed your life—and your perspective—forever. No matter what you do from here—go “home,” move someplace else, join a band—you function in a new context.
However, like so much else in life, you have to let yourself go there.
To me, this means stripping away parts of yourself that were shaped more by environment than personality. You don't lose yourself. You simply begin to understand yourself in a different context.
I do firmly believe that all of the little bullshit, small talk conversations we have in life reflect something bigger, particularly when they occur within the context of living abroad—with fellow immigrants (some who call themselves “expats”), locals, and others.
For example, the food isn’t spicy here OR you can’t find spicy food here—a common grievance people file with Spanish cuisine or restaurants in general in Spain. Whenever I hear these conversations, I find myself tuning out the literal complaint and focusing on something else entirely.
We can get into a debate about spicy versus flavorful and how different cuisines use spice and flavor—independent of one another or in conjunction—but that’s not the thrust of this conversation. But suffice to say falling back on spice as a barometer for food quality or the enjoyment you derive from it is tantamount to telling the bartender to make your vodka drink “stronger.”
The deeper meaning here is that people come into life abroad with a whole host of things they’re going to say before they even know they’re going to say them. Before they even set foot to live—for example—on Spanish soil, they’re armed to repeat what others have repeated a zillion times before them and treat it as fact and a way to fit in.
From spicy food to the apparently slow, bungled bureaucracy, there’s so much nonsense spewed. And all of it really amounts to people performing cultural scripts they learned before they even entered their new environment.
Like my favorite sociologist, Erving Goffman, said:
When an actor takes on an established social role, he usually finds that a particular front has already been established for it.
You enter situations with scripts that groups of people have agreed on as anticipated and appropriate for those situations, then you regurgitate them. Whether it’s about spicy food, bureaucracy, or something else entirely, it doesn’t matter if you’re saying the same thing as everybody else says. It’s your way of connecting and establishing a baseline of loose connection.
In isolation, what’s the big deal? You’d have to be a psychopath—or a real asshole—to analyze small talk like this. Maybe so. But when you add up all of the little micro interactions people have in everyday life, the sum is more meaningful—and consequential—than its parts.
In this process, you don't lose yourself. More often, you stunt your own evolution.
Whether you agree with them or not, it’s not inherently a problem that people complain about spicy food or bureaucracy. The problem is that they never stop long enough to ask why they're saying these things in the first place.
Most of these observations aren't really observations at all. They're performances—social scripts people use to reaffirm who they already believe themselves to be or think they need to be.
To be clear, we all do this. We all perform different versions of ourselves depending on the situation. The question is whether you're willing to let the performance evolve when your life changes.
Goffman believed that much of social life consists of performances that help us establish what others should expect from us and what we should expect from them.
When the American in Spain complains that the food isn’t spicy enough, or that the bureaucracy is impossible, or that things don’t work “efficiently,” they’re often doing something much bigger than expressing a preference.
Very often, they’re reaffirming who they already believe themselves to be.
I’m convinced this is a large part of why some people fail abroad—or spend way too much time questioning their experience and asking themselves and others if they really like it in a place and want to stay.
Because they weren't trying to deepen their understanding of themselves. They were trying to take on an identity that had already been written for them.
How many people move abroad because—low, or not so low-key—they want to become or identify as:
the digital nomad
the retiree
the European
the expat
the guy who “escaped Trump”
the woman who “found herself in Tuscany”
Every single one of these identities already comes with a script.
If you arrive in another country already knowing exactly who you're supposed to become there, you've eliminated the possibility that the experience might change you in a meaningful way while still allowing you to remain yourself.
Spain didn’t turn me into somebody else.
I still love Springsteen.
I still obsess over urban planning.
I still drink Fernet.
I still ride my bike.
I still write essays that are too long.
I still think about things far more than is healthy.
I’m still me.
I just exist in an environment where it’s easier to be me. Where my everyday life doesn’t fight my instincts and preferences.
That was a big part of the reason why we moved in the first place: to live in a city where we didn’t have to compromise how we really want to live—practically—in the day to day.
When people talk about moving abroad, they often talk as if immigration is an exercise in self-transformation. You reinvent yourself, become an “expat” or digital nomad, and find yourself.
While this might work for some of the people some of the time, I don’t think it works for most of the people most of the time.
Spain didn’t give me a new personality.
It removed enough friction that I could more clearly see the one I’d had all along. The things that mattered to me before I moved still matter to me now. They simply exist in a context that reinforces them rather than constantly working against them.
When I walk down the street or ride my bike, my built environment and a vast majority of the people in it respect my choice. When I walk out the door, I don’t feel like I’m being ripped off by paying outrageous prices for shitty quality food.
I didn’t move to Spain and suddenly decide I cared about public transportation.
I always cared about public transportation.
I didn’t suddenly become interested in cities, public space, walkability, food quality and food shopping, or spending less time in a car.
Those preferences were already there.
That’s why moving abroad isn’t an act of blind optimism. At least it shouldn’t be.
It’s one of the biggest bets you’ll ever make on yourself. On your judgment and on whether you actually understand yourself as well as you think you do.
The longer I live in Spain, the more I think that’s the real gamble—not whether the country will live up to the brochures, but whether you actually know yourself well enough to choose the right place.
When people arrive armed with scripts, they cockblock the process before it really has a chance to begin. They perform a part they rehearsed a million times in their head in their old setting and never let their new context fully take center stage.
So every inconvenience risks becoming evidence that the country is wrong. They complain about every instance of discomfort and treat it like a problem to solve. They filter every experience through an identity they constructed on YouTube and in Facebook Groups before they ever got on the plane.
The irony in all of this is that many people move abroad because they want to change their lives. Then they spend years trying to preserve the exact version of themselves their old life created, using social media as a crutch to endlessly rehearse the same complaints that seem to dominate nearly every “expat” conversation and Facebook group.
Increasingly, I think this might why some people thrive abroad while others struggle.
Because one person allows the experience to change their perspective while the other spends all their energy defending and projecting the perspective they crossed the border with.
Moving abroad with full commitment simply tests whether you actually know yourself as well as you thought you did.
In my case, Spain didn’t change who I was.
It has helped confirm that I knew who I was all along.
