What does becoming an expat feel like? Glamour and grief

The cups I drink my morning coffee from in Dubai were bought deliberately, to match the ones I have in South Africa. The cup in my hand has not changed. Everything behind it has — the view, the weather, the work. Most mornings that cup is the first thing I touch, and some mornings it asks me the same quiet question: what is this, exactly, that you have done?

Becoming an expat is usually described from the outside, in one of two ways. Either it is the highlight reel — the skyline, the reinvention — or it is the cautionary tale of homesickness and loss. Neither version matched my experience of it. What matched was a pair of things at once. Glamour and grief. Joy and pain. Gains and losses.

The most important word in each of those pairs is the smallest one.

What does becoming an expat feel like?

It feels like both columns of the ledger filling up at the same time.

The gains are real, and they deserve to be named without apology. There is the genuine thrill of a new city working its way into you. There is the reinvention — the strange freedom of being unknown, of building a practice and a self from the ground up. There is the competence you earn one errand at a time: the first time you handle the paperwork alone, the first time you give directions instead of asking for them. That stretch is one of the most alive feelings I know.

And the losses are real on exactly the same days. You become nobody in a brand-new world, after years of being somebody in your old one. You read the room a beat slower than you would at home. You miss the ease of people who have known you your whole life — an ease that took decades to build and cannot be packed.

Neither column cancels the other. The joy does not mean you have nothing to grieve, and the grief does not mean you made the wrong call. On some days both arrive in the same hour.

One note before I go on: I am writing about a move I chose, made with support and resources behind me. Leaving home under force or pressure — as a refugee, or in a move you did not want — is a different and heavier grief, and not the one described here.

And, not but

Listen to how we usually say it: “I love my life here, but I miss home.” That little “but” does quiet damage. It tells you the second half of the sentence undoes the first — that the missing disproves the loving, or the loving should have cured the missing.

Try the other conjunction. I love my life here, and I miss home. I am proud of what I am building, and I grieve what I left. Each half gets to be fully true. Nothing is subtracted.

It is not only my sentence. I recently stayed with friends and family who live as expats themselves, and every conversation eventually found the same grammar — missing home and loving the life built away from it, in the same breath. Back in Dubai I hear it again from my South African friends: the longing for home, the delight when a visitor arrives with gifts that taste like it, the genuine joy of their new lives, and some honest relief at the distance from home’s harder edges. Nothing is just one feeling. Nothing is only one thing.

My philosophy is that adjustment was never about choosing a side. The grief does not disprove the glamour, and the glamour does not disqualify the grief. You are not doing it wrong when both show up — both showing up is what it feels like when a move actually mattered.

What carries you through? Your why

Holding “and” is easier to describe than to do. On the loud days — the missed birthday, the third small misunderstanding before lunch — something has to carry you. In my experience, and in my clinical work, what carries people is not willpower. It is the why.

Why did you make this decision? What is the end goal, the dream that made you pack the boxes? I did not move for a skyline. I moved to build something — a practice, a chapter of work and life I could picture clearly enough to leave a great deal behind for it. On the hard days I go back to that picture deliberately, the way you check a map. The losses do not shrink when I do. They make sense.

That is the real function of a why. It does not make the losses smaller; it makes them worth carrying. So I encourage people to get theirs out of their head and into the world — write it down or say it to someone, and return to it on purpose when the grief is loud. And let it grow as you do. The why that moved you is allowed to become a bigger one once you are here.

What if the why was never yours?

A word for the partner whose name is not on the work visa. Many people become expats inside someone else’s why — the spouse’s promotion, the family’s plan. The move was chosen, just not by them. If that is you, the grief often runs deeper while looking less explainable, and the usual advice to “remember why you came” lands badly, because the honest answer is: I came for someone I love.

That is its own work — authoring a why of your own inside a move you did not pick. Loving someone is a reason to come; it is not, on its own, a reason that carries you through year three. Couples often need to do this work together, out loud, so that one person’s dream does not quietly become the other person’s debt. It is some of the most worthwhile work I see in the therapy room.

And a clinical note that applies to everyone: this kind of grief moves. It shifts from day to day, and it shares the day with gladness. If it stops moving — if it settles into something flat and immovable, if sleep goes and the things you care about stop mattering — that may be more than grief, and it deserves more than a blog post. Speak to someone.

How to book with me

If you are adjusting to a move — to the UAE or anywhere — and you would like a space to think it through, I see clients through Thrive Wellbeing Centre in Dubai. You are welcome to reach the reception team at reception@thrive.ae, on +971 56 895 2347 or +971 4 514 7386, and they will help you book a session with me.

If you would like more on this, my earlier post — built around a podcast conversation on adjusting to expat life in the UAE — is here: Adjusting to expat life in the UAE.

 

Find me at Thrive Wellbeing Centre for bookings:

https://www.thrive.ae
reception@thrive.ae
+971 56 895 2347
+971 4 514 7386