Why You Don’t Feel Like Yourself After Moving Abroad (Even When Everything Is Working)
Updated: Apr 20
A few months after I moved to France, somewhere in between learning the language, trying to make new friends, and going through a stretch of being constantly sick with one ‘-itis’ after another, I started questioning things.
Why does this feel harder than it should?
Nothing serious had happened and nothing “big” was going wrong (unless you count running out of acetaminophen and tissues every couple of days)…that’s what made it even more confusing to me.
I had already dealt with most of the initial logistics. I knew how to get to and from my French classes by myself. I could manage rudimentary conversations (as long as they didn’t require using the past or future tenses). I could run errands, and handle the basics of daily life without too much trouble.
On paper, things were pretty much working. But something still felt off, and I couldn’t quite explain why.
It started to show up in the little moments. I remember being in a conversation at Sunday lunch with my fiancé’s family and knowing exactly what I wanted to say. It was all there, fully formed in French (albeit imperfectly). But instead of just saying it, I hesitated. I paused for a second too long, trying to make sure I had it right, trying to make sure it would come out the way I intended.
And then the moment passed. The conversation moved on, and I didn’t say anything.
What stood out to me wasn’t that I didn’t have something to say. It was that I didn’t trust or believe in myself enough to say it. That wasn’t something I was used to.
Before moving abroad, I didn’t think about how I was participating in conversations; I just spoke, reacted, and responded in the moment. Everything was easy.
But now, that ease was gone. And what replaced it wasn’t confusion…it was hesitation. There was a gap between what I wanted to do and what I actually did in the moment.
Over time, I started to notice something that wasn’t easy to admit: my self-confidence had taken a hit and I didn’t trust myself in the same way. I was still capable, mind you. I could still function…but in those everyday situations where I would normally accomplish tasks without thinking, something had very visibly changed.
I hesitated more. I second-guessed myself more. I even found myself holding back in situations where I would have normally stepped in, without thinking twice. And because I didn’t have a clear explanation for it, I tried to explain it away. I told myself I was overthinking, that I just needed more time and that things would settle once I got more comfortable.
But that didn’t fully explain what I was experiencing. What made it even more confusing was that nothing on the outside reflected it. If something had clearly gone wrong, it would have made more sense.
Instead, everything looked fine, and that made it harder to take the feeling seriously. It wasn’t about any one situation in particular; it was about how I was experiencing myself across all of them.
That’s the part that’s difficult to put into words. You can still do everything you need to do. You can manage your life, have conversations, and handle responsibilities. From the outside, it can look like you’ve adjusted but internally, it doesn’t feel the same.
There’s less ease, less immediacy, and less certainty in how you move through things…and over time, that starts to affect how you see yourself.
At first, I thought it was a confidence issue, that I needed to push through it, speak more, try harder to get back to how I used to feel. But the more I paid attention to it, the more I realized it wasn’t that simple.
There are parts of how you move through the world that depend on familiarity more than you think: the way you respond without thinking, the way you step into a moment without hesitation, the way you trust your instinct in real time.
When that familiarity is gone (even slightly), your experience of yourself changes with it. You’re still the same person, but you don’t have the same “access” to yourself in the moment.
At the time, I treated that as something I needed to fix. I kept trying to get back to how things used to feel, but that approach never really worked, because I was trying to solve the wrong problem.
This wasn’t about getting better at daily life, or even just adjusting to a new environment. It was about learning how to feel like myself in a place where everything around you was different. And without a way to understand that, it was easy to turn it into something personal, to assume it meant something about my level of confidence, my abilities, or even my decision to move in the first place.
Looking back now, what changed things for me was understanding what I was actually experiencing. Once I could see it for what it was, the feeling didn’t disappear right away, but it stopped carrying the same weight. It stopped meaning that something was wrong.
This is one of those parts of living abroad that doesn’t get talked about much. It’s the part where your life is already working, but your sense of self within it hasn’t fully caught up yet. And when you don’t have a way to understand that, it’s easy to make it mean something about you, that you’ve lost something or that you’re not showing up the way you used to.
But what’s actually happening is something more gradual. You’re learning how to move through your life again in a place where everything around you is different.
And over time, that ease does come back. Just not all at once, and not in the way you expect.
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I’ve been working on a video series that breaks this down more fully, because once you can actually see what’s happening, the experience starts to make a lot more sense.
I’ll be sharing more about it soon.
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