No one moves to another country expecting it to be easy. Creating a life abroad comes with sacrifices, compromises, and challenges that most of us knowingly accept. What I didn’t expect was that those challenges would still be with me eleven years later. They haven’t disappeared. They’ve simply changed shape.
During our first five years in the UK, the challenge of life abroad was defined by the expiration date attached to our temporary visas. No matter how difficult things became, there was always an end on the horizon.
I never predicted that gaining Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) would change everything, but removing that expiration date truly marked the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. It also marked the beginning of our journey into parenthood.
We became first-time parents just as the world locked down in 2020. Suddenly, the challenge of living abroad became harder to accept. Family felt further away than ever. Travel became difficult. The support networks we would have relied on simply weren’t available. I felt incredibly isolated and alone, but at the time, moving back wasn’t a viable option.
One complication was that pandemic restrictions meant we spent more than a year trying to register our daughter for US citizenship. As difficult as it was to stay in the UK, it was even harder to pursue a move back to the US. So we applied for ILR.
With permanent residency, the discomfort of living abroad also became permanent. What was once a challenge with an end date suddenly became a burden I would need to bear indefinitely. Looking back, I realise that was the beginning of a grief I didn’t yet know how to name.
Coping With Distance
Over the past six years, I’ve tried various ways of managing that burden.
At first, I tried to minimise the cost of living abroad. I told myself that homesickness was something I’d eventually get used to and learn to cope with. When denial stopped working, I moved on to distraction.
I threw myself into new hobbies like bouldering and paddleboarding and focused on life, work, and raising young children. Anything that kept me too busy to sit with what I was feeling. But eventually, I reached a point of burnout and began to feel detached from myself. I stopped writing. I stopped romanticising our British adventure.
The problem with ignoring wounds is that it prevented me from learning from them or seeing how they shaped who I was becoming. Six years later, I am not the same person I was before making the UK a more permanent home and becoming a parent. Unless I look honestly at the heartache I’ve carried, how can I really understand the person I am now?
How Living Abroad Changed Us
To understand how I changed, I first had to understand what I was grieving.
There is grief in missing family and feeling disconnected from your home country. But there is also a more subtle loss that took longer for me to recognise: mourning the people Andrew and I were before all of this.
The reality is that living abroad doesn’t affect everyone in the same way. Two people can build the same life overseas and emerge with completely different relationships to home. Andrew and I faced the same challenges, lived through the same milestones, and built the same life. But we responded to those challenges differently.
For Andrew, repeatedly revisiting the question of whether we should stay or move back became exhausting. Every year we remained in England strengthened his sense of belonging here and reinforced his desire to build a future in this country. Eventually, asking the question became more painful than answering it. So he stopped asking.
For me, the opposite happened. Missing family milestones and celebrations became harder with time. Watching my children grow up far from the people who love them made the possibility of returning a door I can’t bring myself to close. I also miss sharing the feeling of homesickness with someone. But more than that, I miss sharing the same vision for our future.
Somewhere along the way, Andrew and I found ourselves standing at the same crossroads and seeing different paths. When he decided to walk away from the “do we stay or do we go?” question, I felt abandoned there. At the same time, I didn’t want to follow him down the road he chose.
What hurts isn’t that we’ve reached different conclusions about where home is. It’s that we’ve slowly stopped asking the same question.
Living With Grief
So now I find myself asking different questions:
How do I want this experience to shape me?
Who do I want to become because of it?
I don’t have answers to those questions. What I have accepted is that answering them requires learning from the hurt rather than running from it. And honestly, it’s the worst.
If pain is a teacher, I want to drop out of the class. I want to cover my ears and refuse to engage. I want someone to blame. I want to argue that it’s unfair. I certainly don’t want to sit in the front row and take notes.
But there is no opt-out button for enduring hardship. Not for me or anyone.
A Permanent Resident of Grief
For a long time, I thought the hardest part of living abroad was building a life in another country. Now I think the greater challenge is accepting the ways that experience changes you and reshapes people differently. Those differences create new distances of their own. And perhaps nowhere is that more obvious than in how differently Andrew and I have been shaped by the same eleven years.
I once believed that peace could only be found by finally choosing the right road at that crossroads. Now I’m less certain. The truth is that neither road leads to a life free from loss.
The choice isn’t between suffering here and happiness there. It’s about where I will carry my grief and who will walk alongside me while I do it. More and more, I think what matters most is not the road itself, but the people willing to travel it with me.
