Why Moving Abroad Makes You Feel Stupid — And Why That’s the Point

The functional identity collapse nobody talks about.

Moving abroad doesn’t just test your ego—it dismantles your competence.

The last post was about ego: how living in another language humbles you, mutes your personality, and resets your sense of self.

How Moving Abroad Resets Your Sense of Self

This is different.

Most writing about life abroad stops at aesthetics: the food, the pace, the charm, the cost-of-living arbitrage. Even the more “honest” stuff usually frames discomfort as a temporary phase—something you push through on the way to a better, easier life.

That’s not what I’m interested in.

Most writing about life abroad sells the dream or externalizes the frustrations. What I’m interested in is what happens in between—where nothing is wrong, nothing is solved, and you’re still required to show up and function.

That’s where the real work is.

This is about what happens when your ability to function—and function well—nearly 100% of the time disappears.

One minute, you’re a fully capable adult. The next, you hesitate before making a restaurant reservation, take fifteen minutes to complete a five-minute form, and stumble through small talk that would’ve been effortless in your home country.

You leave these interactions with the same questions on loop:

Do I actually have a table?

Did I mess something up?

Did I sound like an idiot?

And here’s the part that never gets said plainly enough: This doesn’t go away. At least it hasn’t for me after nearly one year. Even when you love it here. Even when you can’t imagine moving back.

There is no moment where you “arrive” and competence fully returns. There’s no clean crossover point where things become automatic again. What you get instead is something more subtle and more demanding: ongoing exposure to your limits.

And for some people, that’s intolerable.

For others—myself included—it is the point. It’s one of the reasons why you moved.

I don’t experience this as perpetual failure. I experience it the same way I experience Bikram yoga: every class kicks my ass, and that’s exactly why I keep going back. Not because I expect it to get easy, but because I trust the accumulation. The long-term payoff. The slow, compounding gains that don’t announce themselves when they happen.

People who love living abroad. People who love doing hot yoga. People who have been doing both—and thriving—longer than me tell me that this is the reality.

I believe them.

You’re always operating a half-step behind. Always trying to make sense of what just happened. If what you want is comfort, efficiency, or the feeling of being fully in control, this life will exhaust you.

But if you value process over arrival—if you’re okay trading fluency for growth, stagnation for engagement, and certainty for development—then the constant friction stops feeling like a problem and starts feeling like a practice.

I happen to be experiencing this through living abroad.

But the pattern is bigger than geography.

This is what happens anytime you choose a life that doesn’t automatically validate your strengths—changing careers, starting something from scratch, committing to a demanding practice, or opting into any path where much of what you already (think you) know ends up pretty much useless.

Moving abroad just makes the process impossible to ignore. The environment changes. The rules change. And suddenly, the version of you that used to feel capable can’t come with you.

That’s not failure. That’s the work.

In the next How it Works newsletter story, I’ll write about the part no one prepares you for: how you actually rebuild competence abroad—without becoming defensive, smaller, or stuck.