The loneliness no one warns you about when you build a life abroad

After a full year of waiting, I finally got my Belgian residence permit this week. You'd think I'd feel pure relief — and I do — but mostly I keep thinking about the year that came before it.

Twelve months where I wasn't allowed to have a "normal" life. No stable access to services, no certainty about the future, and this persistent low hum of anxiety that I couldn't quite explain to anyone because, from the outside, everything looked fine.

That gap between how your life looks and how it actually feels is something I think about constantly.

Not just because I've lived it across five countries, but because I hear it reflected back to me in almost every coaching session I run. I've worked over 100 hours with clients who are, on the surface, thriving: international professionals, diplomats, therapists — people who speak three languages and hold two passports — and still can't shake the feeling that they don't fully belong anywhere.

They describe a very specific kind of loneliness: not the absence of people, but the absence of being truly understood. Being fluent in multiple languages but unable to find the words for how you actually feel. Having friends on every continent, but no one who sees the whole picture.

What's actually happening

As a mental health coach, I know there's a name for what's happening. When you repeatedly adapt yourself to fit new cultures, new languages, and new social codes, you get very good at reading rooms and performing belonging. But that performance has a cost.

Over time, the gap between who you are in public and what you feel in private becomes the source of the anxiety itself — not the new country, not the job, not the culture shock. It's the slow loss of contact with yourself.

The turning point I see again and again is surprisingly simple: when someone finally understands why they feel this way. Not just coping with it, but actually tracing the pattern back to its roots. Once that clicks, something shifts. They stop treating anxiety as a problem to fix and start seeing it as information about a life that needs realigning.

Two things that actually help

One: let yourself feel in your first language

There's a well-documented phenomenon called the "emotional distance effect" of second languages — we process emotions more shallowly in languages we learned later in life, which means we can intellectualise pain without ever actually processing it.

When the wave hits, switch back to the language your emotions were born in. Write in it, think in it, cry in it. It's not a step backward — it's the most direct path inward.

Two: find one person you can be fully incoherent with

Instead of trying to "build community" — which often feels like yet another performance — find one person who doesn't need the polished version of you. Research on perceived social support shows it's not the size of your network that protects your mental health. It's whether you feel genuinely known by even one person in it.

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I share this because I wish someone had told me these things during my own hardest transitions, instead of the usual advice to "put yourself out there" or "join a club."

If any of this landed for you, I'd love to hear your story. When did you realise that settling in wasn't the same as feeling at home? And what actually helped? Your experience might be the thing someone else needs to read today.