I’ve noticed that there are cycles in the lives of expats. We could call them “seasons”, for like seasons of nature, they repeat with amazing regularity. Here is what I would call the seasons of the expat life: “entering”, “floating along”, and “departing”.
When you’re first entering a new community you’re the newbie – the new person who’s trying to get used to everything. The new person who’s trying to make friends and meet people. The new person who’s trying to get a family settled, who’s trying to support a spouse engaged in a new job and who is trying to keep connection with your old life. That’s a lot of work! There is a huge investment during that time. It’s a tiring time, filled with excitement, curiosity, disappointment, and mental exhaustion. There are emotional roller coasters and tasks that must be done in time during those beginnings.
After you become adjusted, connected and after you know your way around, you feel comfortable and can blissfully float around in your new surroundings. Your family has broadened its reach to those within the community and within the new country. Lessons have been learned and you figured out how to live there. The mentors who have helped you learn have become your friends. There’s a huge feeling of accomplishment. Now when you keep in touch with those you left behind you have lots of stories to tell and lots of experiences to relate. You still notice the little things that are different, but they don’t annoy you like they did at one time. You’ve stepped into a new culture and have become used to it, along with broadening your concepts of what is right and good. Bobbing along in this stream feels pleasurable.
At some point in time it’s time to leave. Now you look around at what you are leaving with a great deal of regret and sadness. There may be some happiness as to what lies ahead. There may be some excitement. There even may be some uncertainty. Like entering, departing is a highly emotional time.
The funny thing about this whole cycle of the seasons is that everybody who’s at one location on the planet at any given point in time may be in any of these cycles. The new people might cluster together as they explore; those who have been there for a while may help the newcomers find out what’s going on and how to live in that spot. It’s as if the tapestry is being woven, including everyone in that location at that same point in time. When it comes to departure time, people and the community may come to realize what it means to have a loss in their lives. The whole balance has been upset again. It takes a while to resettle, only to be put in motion all over again.
There’s a lot of emotion in this whole expat experience. The gains and the losses keep bobbing and weaving. And somehow time goes on, new friends are made, the cycle repeats over and over. But, just because we’re aware of it and we know what happens doesn’t mean that we don’t have feelings during each of the seasons and we don’t have responses to each part of the cycles.
We’re growing and learning. That is what will continue to be the thread that runs through all of the seasons. Sometimes it’s good to step back and enjoy the process.
Your post is particularly poignant for me as I find myself in the process of leaving my current location (Lima, Peru) and looking at my experiences here with a mixture of satisfaction and anxious optimism for future opportunities. I tend to find the “float around” phase to be a bit frustrating – it is good to be settled but sometimes this just highlights what is missing or what simply won’t be possible during a particular overseas tour. I’m find myself almost preferring the “departing” stage since this offers some new possibilities and maybe more opportunities.