When you move abroad, you learn so much about yourself. At the same time, you are evolving into a new version of yourself. Who you were at the start of the first phase of your expat life is lightyears from who you will be once you move back home - even if you just go for a year.

The phases of expat life have a predictable pattern among all expats as we navigate our international life.

Managing your expectations

My purpose in writing this is simple: expectation management. I want to show you what to expect through these phases along the way. I have clients who dream for so long, that when reality hits, it can feel much more difficult than it really is.

In fact, a lot of my work as a relocation strategist revolves around expectation management plays a HUGE role in the overall happiness of expats. If you expect yourself to be speaking fluent French while smoking cigs off your glamorous veranda with a gaggle of French friends without a care in the world, then the disappointment you might feel when you aren’t progressing with your French language and are really only friends with other expats at first might be too much to handle. It might make you want to leave, rather than to dig in your heels and work at getting to that moment.

Knowing where you are in the cycle of expat life, and knowing where you might end up next, is a great way to manage your expectations and remain a successful, happy expat.

The first time you move abroad is going to be the most challenging, since you are changing your entire life for the very first time. Once you have the momentum of living a life abroad, moving from country to country is infinitely easier - and it becomes infinitely harder to identify with who you were before you took the leap.

There are three phases of expat life:
1. The first time expat
2. Becoming a serial expat
3. Repatriating (or never moving back home again!)

Let’s look at the first phase of your new life as an expat.

Phase 1: You Are A First Time Expat

When you first decide to move abroad, it can feel exhilarating, like you are truly taking your life into your own hands. After the initial adrenaline rush, you might start to feel overwhelmed. Where do you start? What do you do first? What do all the moving pieces look like?

Then you realize that while you are trying to figure out the details of moving your life to a foreign country, you are also uprooting your life back home. It’s the end of a chapter. And that takes a lot of work, too. It’s hard to build momentum toward your move when you’re simultaneously wrapping up the life you’ve been living in your home country.

That’s actually where the momentum is located. The life you’re moving away from has a lifetime of steam behind it that’s been building since as far back as your childhood.

Until your actual moving day, you find yourself on a rollercoaster — that part where you’re slowly climbing up a steep incline while gravity pulls your head and body backward.

And then, suddenly, you reach the top. have no idea how you’re going to feel on the next part of the ride aside from a vague sense that there’ll be ups and downs.

When you finally do get abroad, you start to run the track of expat life for the first time. This really requires developing a new way of thinking that is going to in part be learned by experience and in part a process of change within yourself.

From the outset, you’re going to be learning and yearning to adapt to a new culture around you. This is where our senses of identity, security, comfort, and community can become challenged. All at once you’re trying to navigate and assimilate into this new world.

At the same time, that very much heightens your awareness that you’re not a local and there can be an initial feeling of separation from the community. You’re also learning how locals view you as a representative of your home country through this process.

In addition to having those complex social and cultural experiences, on a much more pragmatic level you’re just trying to figure out how to live your daily life. The logistics of banking, setting up your utilities, adjusting to the currency, and getting a phone plan can take a lot of trial and error to figure out.

All of these aspects of your initial experience abroad can be incredibly humbling, challenging, and energy consuming.

As you push through the lessons of those challenges, the first phase of expat life starts to transition: it feels invigorating, uplifting, and fulfilling. You get the hang of your new life, your new lifestyle. The new feelings of being more mobile. You’re the kind of person who can move to an entirely different country.

In fact, you start to feel like you belong more to the international community than to the one you left back home - and that usually happens even if you’ve only been abroad for a year, but lived for decades back home.

Phase 2: The Serial Expat Blueprint

All the successes and mistakes we have during our first time living abroad create a blueprint for a life abroad. Now that you’ve been on the ride once, you can better prepare yourself for the twists and turns of doing it again. And while you might get the itch to leave the first country you moved abroad to, you also don’t feel like you want to go back home. After all, you know expats from your new circle of international friends, many who have come and gone on to new locations and got you thinking about doing the same thing!

At this point, you’ve built a set of skills that have fully prepared you to move abroad again. You understand the challenges, you know what mistakes to avoid. You know how to get to the good part faster - the fulfilling, invigorating aspects of living abroad.

The thrill of moving to another country might call you. More than that, when we go through such an impactful experience of adapting to a new life and culture, it also becomes an experience of figuring out our new, or true, identity.

After all, you’re seeing yourself in the context of a completely new background for the first time. For most of us, that reveals a lot of things that we may not have been in touch with before in our life at home.

Put all of that together and you have this growing desire to move from country to country to not only explore the world and challenge yourself, but very much explore your identity by seeing who you are in different places and cultures.

This is often the next evolution of expat life. It can be really fulfilling and give you that dopamine boost when you’re able to develop global “street smarts” that allow you to move around pretty seamlessly. Many of the challenges you experience in the first phase of expat life fade into the background because you’ve already mastered them, in a way.

As exciting as moving around from place to place is at first, it can lose its shine after a while. You don’t necessarily have the opportunity to truly establish yourself, develop deep relationships, and a sense of “home.”

Even though becoming an expat helps you discover other parts of your identity, it can also muddy the waters. At this point, you’ve really shed your previous American lifestyle and identity, and become really good at being adaptable and living amongst any culture.

It’s easy to feel lost when you develop multiple international identities — you can quickly make a new place a home while, at the same time, not feel like you’re at home anywhere.

Phase 3: Repatriating

At some point, most of us end up moving back home, at least for a while.

For some who feel lost after spending time as an expat, repatriating can come as a huge relief and create a feeling of permanence that we might crave while living abroad. You touch back down to a very familiar place and it can feel very comforting and easy at first. Large cups filled with ice, dryers with dryers sheets, you get to have all the comforts from home you have missed.

But you might also have a difficult time transitioning back to life in America. Who you were is not who you have become, but those friends and family from home still see you as the person you were before you left.

After that initial warm feeling, the reality of being back sets in. This is when most people experience reverse culture shock. Everything you don’t like about American culture relative to the cultures of the places you’ve lived as an expat really sticks out to you.

Without the thrill of exploring new places and connecting with new people, there’s a noticeable absence of excitement in daily life. Things can feel very routine, mundane. The issues that made you want to leave in the first place are still there, but now you know you could be living somewhere else. And so many people around you approach a problem or issue from what feels to you like a one-sided perspective, but you have learned a more nuanced perspective, because you know that different cultures and people from different backgrounds often see the world very differently, and no one is necessarily ‘wrong’.

For me, the repatriation process was by far the most challenging aspect of expat life for me, personally. And I find that this is where my clients feel the heaviest sense of needing outside help. If you are looking for a repatriation strategy, contact me to find out how I can help.

As an LGBTQ+ International Relocation Strategist, I provide custom relocation and life strategies and coaching tailored specifically to expats, so you can get the most out of the life you want to live, no matter where it takes you.

About Jess Drucker

I am an International Relocation Strategist supporting LGBTQ+ folks, their families and allies to move, live and thrive abroad. I spent 15 years abroad, 10 of those years as an expat in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Germany and England, followed by nearly 5 years as a digital nomad spending weeks and months in over 40 countries worldwide.

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