Brief, reflective writing

When raising children abroad or in multilingual families, many parents wonder whether to use their native language at home. Some feel unsure, especially if the language is not widely spoken in their new country. Will it confuse the child? Will it make things harder at school? Will it even matter, when the world around them speaks something else? I had the same hesitation. I have been living abroad since 2014, and I found myself speaking English more than my native language, B

If you like the song “You’re On Your Own, Kid” by Taylor Swift, what makes you like it? It is my favourite song in Midnight, and it feels to me like a song about living abroad --- these lyrics specifically: --- 1 --- “I wait patiently, he’s gonna notice me…” In the early stages of living abroad, many of us are waiting (besides waiting for the paperwork!): waiting to be accepted, waiting to be recognised professionally, waiting to feel at home, waiting for someone, or somethin

I just booked a flight to Jakarta. Since then, I’ve been noticing something strange. Not the logistics of a long journey with two children, but what unsettles me is something much smaller: it's the words I use: Am I going home? Am I visiting? Am I travelling? None of them feel quite right. If I say I am going home, does that mean that here in Italy, in the apartment we carefully built, where I raise my children, where our routines live, is not my home? But if I say I am visit

People often think the hardest part about living abroad is the practical side. The language. The bureaucracy. The distance from family. The unfamiliar food, the different climate, the loneliness at the beginning... Those things are real. Yes, I am still struggling in getting beyond beginner level of Italian. And while some things work very efficiently here, don't get me started on the bureaucracy! Meeting my family once a year as a perfect scenario, the dark period of autumn

There’s something about working from home that might look so relaxing from the outside. No waking up early in the morning, no commute, no crowded public transportation transport. This is what I also thought, and experienced, back in 2019. At that time, I was living in Bern while my office was in Lausanne. That meant two hours of commuting each way, each day. Four hours of changing from tram to train to tram. I felt very lucky when my request to work from home on Wednesdays, t

Loneliness as a challenge of working from home, and what I personally do about it