I Give It a Year

I’ve been the new girl in town plenty of times in my life. It’s exhilarating in the beginning: life feels like one big holiday, and who doesn’t love to be on holiday? I love that giddy feeling of freedom, of adventure; how far removed from the daily grind life seems. And then a few months later, maybe it’s the homesickness, or maybe it’s the newness-fatigue, but day to day life with its mundane requirements can catch up with you, particularly if you're wrangling with a foreign bureaucracy. On a tough day, when you feel like an outsider or a loner, or a little bit lost, you might even wonder why you up and moved at all.

The transition from being a visitor to feeling like a local is a slow, exciting, frustrating, but fascinating journey. Everyone’s experience will be unique. Hell, every one of my moves has been unique. How it goes depends on lots of variables. Do you speak the language? That’s a huge one, obviously. Are you going on your own, and will you know people there? And a huge factor is if you have an end date. I’ve done six long term moves without an end date and have learned to not assess how a move has gone until I’ve been there at least one full year. That’s when your new home can start to almost feel like normal life again. And truly feeling like a local? Well, that takes years.