The Story Behind Why I Do This Work
How I Came to Help People Build a Life Abroad
People often ask what made me want to become a Life Abroad Integration Coach. The answer is a little more complicated than you might expect. Many assume it began when I moved abroad to France, but it didn’t.
The story behind why I do this work actually began years earlier.
When I was 19 years old, I was driving home from university one winter evening during a snowstorm. I hit a patch of black ice and lost control of my car. Within seconds, I was in a head-on collision with a semi trailer (a.k.a. “ the big Pepsi truck”).
In one moment, the future I thought I was building disappeared.
Before the accident, I had a clear direction. I was studying sociology, psychology and criminal justice. I planned to pursue a career with the FBI. I was active, independent, and running regularly. I knew who I was, and I had a fairly clear picture of where my life was headed.
After the accident, everything became uncertain. I spent the next eighteen months recovering from multiple surgeries and injuries. At one point, I was told I might never run again.
But the physical recovery wasn't the hardest part. The hardest part was realizing that I no longer felt like the person I’d been before.
For a long time, I believed that if I worked hard enough, healed fast enough, or simply waited long enough, I would eventually become that version of myself again. After several months passed, I realized that wasn't going to happen.
The person I had been before the accident belonged to a life that no longer existed. I couldn't rebuild my future by trying to go backwards; I had to figure out who I was now.
That experience taught me a lesson that has shaped every major transition in my life since:
Sometimes life doesn't ask us to go back. Sometimes it asks us to build forward.
I had no idea then how many times that lesson would reappear.
A few years later, I met the man who would become my husband, and eventually moved from the United States to France. Like many people who move abroad, I spent a lot of time preparing for the practical side of the transition. I revived my high school French skills. I researched, planned, and imagined what my new life might look like.
What I wasn't prepared for was how deeply moving abroad would affect my sense of self.
Life in France wasn't all that bad. In many ways, it was exactly what I had hoped for (which is what made the experience all the more difficult to understand). I wasn't unhappy with my life, but some things I'd never had to think twice about back in the US now demanded extra energy, effort, and concentration…and more often than I'd like to admit, they left me feeling incompetent.
Gradually, those things became easier. I learned the language and earned a linguistics degree from the Sorbonne. I built a career, first in an international law firm and later in the advertising world, working on global campaigns for some of the world's largest beauty brands.
From the outside, my life looked settled. I’d adapted to life in France, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was still missing. That was when I realized something very important: adapting to life abroad and feeling at home in it weren't necessarily the same thing.
That realization brought me back to the lesson I'd learned years earlier after my accident. I was trying to build a relationship with a life that looked very different from the one I had imagined.
Around the same time, I began noticing that some of the most honest and vulnerable conversations I’d had about life abroad almost never happened in public. They happened with classmates at the Sorbonne, expat colleagues, close friends, and other people who, like me, were trying to build lives far from their home country.
We’d confide in one another about things we didn't always feel comfortable talking about with loved ones back home. Not because we regretted our decision to move, but because we didn't want to worry them or make them think we'd made a mistake.
Those conversations changed the way I thought about life abroad.
Again and again, I heard people describe lives that looked successful from the outside: they’d learned the language, built careers, found partners, and settled into routines. And yet many still struggled to explain why something felt missing.
For a long time, I assumed those conversations were just part of adapting to life abroad. But they never really stopped. The people changed and the stories changed, but the questions didn’t. I continued to wonder:
Why did some people feel deeply rooted while others continued feeling like outsiders, even after years? How could two people build lives that looked remarkably similar on paper, yet experience them so differently?
But it wasn't only what people were saying that stayed with me. It was the fact that so few of them felt able to say it openly. These conversations happened in trusted spaces, between people who understood the experience firsthand. They rarely happened in public. Rarely in the places where someone searching for answers might actually find them.
Years later, another major turning point arrived. A “season of change” that included divorce, corporate burnout, and several more surgeries forced me to step away from advertising and seriously think about what I wanted the next chapter of my life to look like.
As I reflected on everything that had brought me to that point, I realized something: the thread running through my life had never really changed.
Whether I thought I was heading toward law enforcement, medicine, advertising, or something else entirely, I’d always been drawn toward helping people navigate difficult transitions. I also realized that 25+ years abroad had given me something I hadn't fully appreciated before.
Not just my own experience, but hundreds of conversations and stories. Years of observing the questions people carried with them as they tried to build lives in countries that sometimes still felt completely unfamiliar.
That's when I understood that those experiences weren't separate parts of my journey; they’d been preparing me for this work all along.
Becoming a Life Abroad Integration Coach wasn't a departure from my story — it was a continuation of it.
As I began coaching, the same themes kept appearing. People whose lives abroad looked successful from the outside often described feeling disconnected on the inside. They’d adapted, but they didn't feel completely settled. They’d built lives abroad, but they didn't quite feel at home in them.
Eventually, I gave that experience a name: The Life Abroad Integration Gap™.
It’s the gap between adapting externally and feeling at home internally, the space where identity, belonging, confidence, and emotional integration intersect. Where many people assume something is wrong with them, when in reality they're navigating a part of life abroad that many of us go through, but very few actually talk about in the open.
Today, that's the work I care about most. Not because I have all the answers, but because I've spent many years learning that building a new life isn't only about changing our circumstances. It's about learning how to build a relationship with the life we're living now.
Looking back, I can see that every major transition I went through was preparing me for this work.
Life doesn't ask us to go back. It asks us to build forward.
I know how challenging it can be to build a life abroad that genuinely feels like home.
That's why I do this work.
If this story resonated with you, you're exactly why I created Thrive On Through.
Every week I write about the emotional side of life abroad: identity, belonging, purpose, and what it really takes to build a life abroad that truly feels like home.
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And if you'd like more day to day reflections and conversations about life abroad, you can also find me on Facebook & Instagram.
Because building a life abroad shouldn't be something we have to figure out alone.
I loved your story. My wife survived a rollover accident with a C-2 fracture and eye orbit fracture amongst other injuries. The accident was in 1999 and the eye orbit fracture two years ago sunk cause her to not fully close her lower lid. That left her cornea exposed and she got a fungal infection. She has had two surgeries to raise her bottom lid. She now faces surgery on her upper lid and the eye has to completely close before they will try a corneal transplant.
That is a long explanation to say that we are interested in France but face medical issues and we are both past 75 in age. Optimisticly,, she will be in her late 70s…