What 26 Years of Living Abroad Have Taught Me About Belonging
What if feeling at home abroad doesn’t require us to stop feeling different?
September 12th marked 26 years since I arrived in France.
26 years.
Sometimes I find that hard to believe. When I think back to the person I was when I first arrived, and everything that has happened since, there are so many things I wish I could go back and tell her.
Some of them would be about France, certainly. But even more would be about what it means to build a life in another country. About adapting and changing, and figuring out who you are when so much of what once made life familiar has disappeared.
And perhaps most importantly, I would tell her a few things about belonging.
I think I spent years trying to understand what it actually meant to feel at home here. Was it speaking the language well enough? Understanding the culture and knowing how things worked? Having French friends? No longer missing the US? Or was I eventually supposed to reach some invisible point where France felt completely natural and I stopped feeling foreign?
If there’s one thing I’ve learned after all these years, it’s that belonging doesn’t really work like that. Because even now, there are still moments when France reminds me that I didn’t grow up here.
There are still things I don’t know
Someone will mention a television program everyone watched as a child, and I’ll have no idea what they’re talking about. A song will come on and everyone around me seems to know every word. There are expressions I still occasionally have to ask someone to explain, along with cultural references I missed simply because I didn’t grow up here. And yes, there are still times when the way I pronounce something reminds everyone in the room that I wasn’t born in France. In those moments, I find myself feeling like an outsider because there’s this shared thing that everyone else but me seems to automatically understand.
Years ago, those situations bothered me a lot more. I think part of me believed that if I lived here long enough, learned enough, adapted enough and integrated enough, they’d eventually disappear. Like there would be some imaginary finish line where I finally knew everything I was supposed to know and stopped feeling different.
Twenty-six years later, I’m not sure that finish line exists. And more importantly, I’m no longer sure I want it to, because those moments now exist alongside something much bigger.
I have a history here too
I didn’t grow up in France, but I have grown in France.
There’s a difference.
I have relationships here that have developed over decades, places filled with memories, and routines that are so much a part of my life that I barely think about them anymore. There are traditions I look forward to every year, and things about France that once felt completely foreign to me now feel completely ordinary.
There are also parts of the person I am today that probably would not exist had I never moved here. France may not contain my childhood memories, but it contains an enormous part of my adult life. Over time, I stopped needing my history here to look like everyone else’s in order for it to mean something, and that’s changed the way I think about integration.
What if difference isn’t actually the problem?
We often talk about integration as though the ultimate goal is to become so “adapted” that our differences eventually disappear. We should speak the language perfectly, understand every cultural reference, know every unwritten rule and stop making the “foreigner” mistakes. As though eventually, if we do this well enough, nobody would ever know we came from somewhere else.
But is that really what belonging requires? I don’t think it is.
Because for me, there’s an important difference between being different and being on the outside. We can carry a different history and still participate deeply in the life around us. We can have an accent and still be known to others, or miss a cultural reference and still be included. We can maintain traditions from somewhere else while creating new ones where we live now. And we can occasionally misunderstand something while still having relationships in which we feel completely ourselves.
Maybe the goal shouldn’t be to eliminate difference at all, but to change the power that difference has over us.
When difference starts to mean something more
Sometimes it isn’t the difference itself that hurts. It’s what we make that difference mean. Instead of simply thinking, I didn’t understand that reference, we think, I should understand this by now. We mispronounce something and wonder, Will I always sound like an outsider? We realize we didn’t grow up with a particular tradition and suddenly find ourselves asking, Will I ever really belong here?
The moment itself may be tiny, but the conclusion we draw from it can be enormous.
Because let’s face it: if belonging required us to eliminate every difference between ourselves and the people who grew up around us, many of us would spend our entire lives abroad chasing an impossible standard. I just don’t think we need to become indistinguishable from the people around us in order to have a place among them.
What 26 years have shown me instead
There were, of course, plenty of practical things I needed to learn in the beginning to help me feel more settled. Learning the language mattered. Understanding how things worked mattered too, as did becoming more capable and independent. All of those things helped me learn how to live here.
But feeling at home came from more than knowing how to function.
It developed through the relationships I built and the people who got to know me. It came from participating instead of simply observing, returning to the same places until they carried memories, having people who expected me to be there, and finding ways to contribute something of myself.
I also created routines and traditions that belonged to my life in France rather than trying to recreate the life I had left behind. None of that required me to stop being someone who came from somewhere else. Both things could be true: I came from somewhere else, and I have a place here.
That doesn’t mean those outsider moments are never hurtful; they certainly can be. Being excluded is real, and being continually treated as “the foreigner” can hurt. There are also times when the people or culture around us can make belonging more difficult, because belonging isn’t something we create entirely on our own. But I don’t think we need to wait until every difference disappears before allowing ourselves to feel at home in the lives we’ve built abroad.
Twenty-six years later
When I think about the 26 years I’ve now spent in France, I find myself thinking less about the number and more about what all of those years have contained. I came here needing to learn how to live in another country, but I didn’t realize that I’d also be building a relationship with it. I’d accumulate my own history here. Some people would become part of my life, and I’d become part of theirs. Places would begin to carry memories, while things I once had to think about would eventually become ordinary. France would influence parts of who I became without erasing who I’d been before I arrived. And I could belong here without needing to become the same as everyone around me.
So the question I ask myself now is very different from the one I might’ve asked years ago. It’s no longer How do I become less different? It’s: How do I continue becoming more connected?
I don’t think feeling at home abroad means reaching a point where nothing ever reminds us that we came from somewhere else. I think it means reaching a point where those reminders no longer have the power to make us question whether we have a place in the life we’ve built.
For me, that means I can be different. I can carry more than one version of “home” in my heart and still be learning, even after all these years.
And I can know, without needing to prove it, that I belong here too.
Building a life abroad that feels like home?
If some of what I’ve shared here feels familiar, I’d love to invite you to join Thrive On Through Life Abroad, my free community for people navigating the emotional side of living in another country.
It’s a place for deeper conversations about identity, connection, belonging, and what it means to create a life abroad that genuinely feels like home to you.
You’ll also find resources to help you understand your own experience and take more intentional steps in the life you’re building abroad.
Join us inside Thrive On Through Life Abroad.
