7 lessons from 7 years living abroad

I found a draft back on my computer. It’s something I wrote in 2019, when I moved back to France after seven years living abroad. 3 years later, in 2022, back home, I’m smiling at my screen while reading these words and I wonder “why didn’t I publish it?”.

So here it is.

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May 2019 - Paris: Last March, I packed my life in 27 boxes and headed back “Home” after 7 years living abroad. I left Paris for Amsterdam when I was 20 years-old, in 2012. The 20 year old Camille did not know that her 10-month-Erasmus-University-exchange would turn into 7 years studying and working in two different countries, The Netherlands (5 years) and Germany (2 years).

Throughout these years, the idea of “going back Home” always felt to me like going “back to square 1”, as if it would be “game over”. As if going back home after many years abroad would mean going backwards.

I am not the only expat who says it: it’s a chance to choose and be able to live abroad once in your life. It gives you one of the purest feelings of freedom. A “forced” way back such as the end of an exchange program or a visa expiration can be devastating. Many exchange students actually come back and experience depression (called the post-erasmus-depression). That’s why in 2013, I decided to stay a little longer abroad, until I was ready to leave. Turns out it took me 7 years.

Though, this year (2019), taking the decision to move back to France gave me a sensation of relief. Weird! And it’s not because I moved back to the country I grew up in, but mainly because I CHOSE to do it. It’s the decision itself that makes me feel I am still in control, and that this decision is the result of what I was looking for when I moved abroad in the first place (and did not know about): I experienced freedom.

I built my young adult life in countries I don’t speak the language of, far from my family and friends. I built a bit of my personality (and working habits) at the intersection of different cultures. There are a few lessons I learnt from that, I thought I’d share them. Maybe some will agree, some will not, or some will want to experience it too… as it’s all about freedom, feel free to share your thoughts too :)?

7 lessons learnt from 7 years living abroad

1. There is no way back: You’ll never look at your culture in the same way

Let’s start with the most common lesson learnt by many freshly back-home-expats: if you are an expat once in your life, you’ll always be one, even back in your own country. Changing culture means that everything around you contradicts with what was basic knowledge to you before. You see people enjoying life differently, eating differently, working differently and even loving differently. You develop a sense of questioning and challenging the status quo strangely above the average. You realise other ways of living exist and it CAN work. So you challenge what is “normal”. And this is the number 1 habit you bring home. Potentially also the most annoying one for others ;)?

2. You experience what "freedom" feels like

If I’d have to summarise why I felt the most free during that time, it would be three things:

• First, and most importantly, because while you live abroad, you are liberated from (most of) your family, your society, or your culture's expectations. Really. Living abroad gives you the perfect excuse to say “no” without fearing to offend anyone (woop woop, best case scenario for people pleasers). You always have an excuse to free yourself from them: you live abroad! Cultural constraints like visiting family every Sunday, following your parents’ path, or following rituals are not there to fill up your time. You explore new ones, and they feel less pressearing because they are new (exciting) or different (opportunity to learn), and YOU choose to follow them or not. And if you don’t? Well, you don’t feel judged (or you don’t understand the local judgements rules) because there is no one reminding them to you.
• Second, thanks to this sensation of liberation, you are experiencing that another way of living, working, loving, might suit you better. It’s like being in the supermarket of life: you feel like you can choose more consciously what feels good, realising at the same time that what you thought you liked, you actually might not like it that much after all. You feel you are getting richer every day. You are the “you” you want to be, not the you your relatives want to see.
• Last, living abroad forces you to express yourself (and your feelings) in a different language. It even sometimes gives a sensation of a new version of yourself. And it starts creating in your head a new way of thinking, a new way of describing life, and even dreaming! Maybe in a way you never dared to be in your own country. Maybe the way of thinking which is truly uniquely yours.

3. Freedom has a cost: You miss out on important moments?

All this freedom comes with a price. One part you can’t hide from being truly challenging, while being at the same time the main driver to your freedom, is being disconnected from your family. Technologies have made it easy to communicate, but they don’t replace memories you don't create with your relatives back home. It’s a choice to extract yourself from the daily reality of people who were your reality before. The most painful (or happiest) family moments happening without you are the ones questioning your choice of living abroad the most.

In places out of my comfort zone, like living in a new country, I felt I developped an ability to listen more to my intuition and instinct. So to listen more to myself. There were moments of deep loneliness, but no matter if “Home was calling”, my instinct always told me that my journey abroad wasn’t over yet. Looking back, I could have come home a thousand times. If I tell myself that I regret some moments I missed, I know in the context, at the time, I could not have done things differently. I trust the fact that my guts took the right decision. And I know that if I want that level of freedom back home, there will also be a tradeoff.

4. You say goodbye a lot

No matter how well intentioned you are to meet locals when you move to another country, (most) locals don’t need you, only you need them. They are like you when you were in your country; they have their life, friends, and family. Why would they go all the way to start a relationship with a stranger? So to start building a network, expats hangout with other expats. It’s both the biggest trap (because it’s tempting to settle for the comfort of hanging out with people from your own country) and the biggest chance (because meeting so many different nationalities is like travelling without travelling).

But expats, in most of the cases, end-up leaving their adoptive country. This leads ultimately to having quite some heartbreaking goodbye moments that make you change perspective on friendships. I said so many goodbyes in 7 years. So many. A lot of people from various horizons came into my life, like visitors and messengers. They may have been the ones I spent all my time with at a certain moment. They have even gone as far as replacing some parts of my family relationships I missed. They were brothers, sisters, dads, mums sometimes... And one day, they leave. And one day, I leave.?

Living abroad means that you live with the idea that your or your expart friends' experience abroad will end one day. It’s not like being in your country, you don’t really question the fact that you will live and die there. Abroad, you just don’t know (I mean, most of us don’t). Living with the idea that there is an expiration date to you living abroad, urges you to live in the moment.?

You also lower your expectations on long-distance friendships. Texting every day, Skyping (hey, millennials) every weekend… is conflicting with the urge you have to live your life there, in this other country, because you know it will end one day. It just makes it clear that being in the moment is too important. I started realising that a healthy relationship has nothing to do with the volume of communication. It has to do with the ability of your friend (and yourself) to be happy that the other is living their best life (also) without you. Real friendship survives to time, silence and distance. Many goodbyes gave birth to amazing long-distance friendships. Goodbyes I gave home when I moved to Amsterdam, and goodbyes I gave in Amsterdam to people who went home.

5. Forever confused about where home is??

I had 3 homes in my adulthood: 3 cities, 3 countries, 3 ways of living. France, The Netherlands and Germany. I picked from each of them aspects I liked the most to the extent that I don’t think there would be a place on earth which reassembles them all. There will always be a need to compromise. I have my ideal culture, my ideal way of living, but not my ideal home. So I sincerely ask myself “Will I ever feel at home?”. Can home be multiple places at once? Or can the feeling of “home” change overtime? I feel like home is the place where most of the things I need at one specific moment of my life are. And these needs change over time. So why shouldn't my home too?

6. We start valuing things when we’re far from them

Sounds like a spiritual quote I could put under an inspiring Instagram picture but it’s a true story: distance brings clarity – you start valuing things you didn't even know were valuable to you before. For instance, I started enjoying the long (and sometimes boring) Sunday lunches with my family; the exact ones I used to hate. You know, the ones where you eat for hours, sometimes fight over politics, often talk about the past. Why? Because I do them less often. When I was visiting my family, I knew time was counted. When time is counted not only you appreciate the present more, and its people more, but they do too. The small ordinary Sundays became special, and they created long-lasting memories while they used to feel so empty.

I find that when we stay too long in one place or way of living, we struggle to see the positive aspects of it, we can easily become lazy in relationships or life. We’re stuck in negative loops about country, culture, family.?Leaving abroad helped me see this more.

7. You leave your country for a reason, either you’re conscious of it or not (yet).

There are many questions internationals living abroad ask each other when they meet for the first time: Where are you from? & What are you doing for a living? It always seems like people go abroad to pursue something, a career, some meaningful studies, etc. The first talks never go much deeper than enumerating a list of achievements. But the burning question all internationals want to ask each other is: and you, what’s your reason for leaving Home?

When I left France, I was 20. I was in a “long-term” relationship. I was shy, not too loud, not too daring. I was succeeding on the good-pupil path. Everything was going fine, I was on the highway to please everyone. And then, one day, a teacher came to me to encourage me to do an Erasmus exchange program in Amsterdam (she was herself an expat in Paris for 20 years!). I was hesitant, what about the money? My family? My boyfriend? Still, I did it. I found fundings, and I cried when I left. But as soon as I arrived, even though I was scared, I felt super proud. I had everything to succeed at home, a supporting family, boyfriend. And I left, built everything from scratch on my own, with my rules and now I’m the only writer of my story.

It’s true for a lot of fellow expats, moving to another country is a leap forward, and time tells you what were the elements of your life or yourself you tried to escape from. And when it does, then you might just be ready to fix them by coming back, or simply by staying at peace where you are.?I broke so many chains I didn’t even know I had. And today I’m ready to go to my new Home, France, unchained, happy and excited to experience my culture with a different perspective. ?

PS: It's not because I lived and worked in english for that long that my English is perfect... but I worked real hard on removing my French accent ;)