Living Abroad: The Hardest Part

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 and winter always hit me hard, and the loneliness... indeed it's very challenging that my first blog entry here was about that.

But for me, they are not the hardest part. The hardest part is losing the certainty of who you are.

At first, you are clearly yourself: someone from somewhere specific, someone with familiar habits, familiar reactions, familiar assumptions about how life works. You know who you are in relation to the world.

And then you move to a new country, and some things are slightly different, while other things are very, very different. The way people greet each other. The way they spend their free time. The way they think about work, about family, about independence, about what they value in life. Even the way they eat, rest, celebrate, and worry.

After you observe, you adapt. Not because you want to lose yourself, but because adaptation is how humans survive. You adjust your behaviour. You soften certain parts of yourself. You amplify others. You learn new social codes, new emotional tones, new ways of being accepted.

But at the same time, something else happens. You hold on.

You keep cooking the food from home. You maintain certain rituals. You preserve certain values. You tell yourself, and others, that this is who you really are.

And so you live in two directions at once. You adjust forward, while holding backward.

You want to belong here, but you also want to belong there.

And over time, the tension grows. The person you were before no longer fully exists, but the person you are becoming does not yet feel entirely solid either.

You exist in between.

I noticed this most clearly in something very small:

When I talk about Indonesia, sometimes I say “we”: We do this. We believe this. We eat this. It feels natural, automatic.

But other times, I say “they”: They tend to do this. They appreciate this. They live like this.

And the shift can even happen in the same conversation.

The same thing happens when I talk about Italians. Sometimes I say “they”. Other times, I say “we”.

That is when I realised something unsettling: I no longer had a fixed point of reference. My identity was no longer a single place I could stand on.

For a long time, this felt as if like I had lost something essential, something that defined me.

If I am no longer fully Indonesian in the way I once was, but I am also not, and will never be, fully Italian.. then what am I?

Where do I belong?

Living abroad forces you to confront this question in a way that few other experiences do. Because identity, which once felt automatic, becomes something you must consciously renegotiate.

You realise that so much of who you were was shaped by your environment. By invisible cultural agreements. By shared assumptions you never had to question before.

When those agreements disappear, you are left with yourself.

At first, this can feel like disorientation.But slowly, something else becomes possible: Freedom.

Because if identity is no longer something handed to you automatically, it becomes something you can consciously create.

I was born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia. I spent 25 years of my life there. That shaped my earliest emotional language, my sense of connection, my understanding of community and belonging. Those roots are still part of me, a major part of me.

I spent 2 years and 9 months in the Netherlands. Brief, but I consider it to be my formative years nevertheless. That shaped my relationship to independence, to honesty, to directness. It taught me a different kind of personal responsibility. I lived in Switzerland for 4 years, most of these are the pandemic years. I live now in Italy. Each place left its own imprint: in how I see time, relationships, work, and what it means to have a personal space and boundaries.

None of these versions have to cancel each other.

And at some point, I stopped trying to resolve the tension. I stopped trying to return to a single, clear, original version of myself.

Instead, I accepted that I am not a person from one place anymore. I am a person shaped by many places. I carry multiple cultural languages inside me. Multiple ways of being. Multiple definitions of what is normal, what is polite, what is on time, what is relaxing... that two things can be at complete opposite, but equally true at the same time.

And instead of this being a loss, it has become a form of authorship: I can choose what stays. I can choose which values I keep, which ones I leave behind, and which ones I adopt. I can build an identity that is not inherited passively, but constructed consciously.

Living abroad places you in this in-between space, where identity becomes a part of ongoing question:

Which parts of you are truly yours, and which parts were simply inherited from the place you started? If you are no longer surrounded by the expectations that once defined you, who do you become when you are free to choose?

Do you allow yourself to evolve without feeling disloyal to who you once were?

Do you allow yourself to belong in new ways, without needing full permission from the past? It is continuously become a series of choices: about what you carry forward, what you release, and what you are ready to become.

There is still ambiguity sometimes. There are still moments when I do not know whether to say “we” or “they”. But now, that ambiguity no longer feels like confusion.

It feels like space: to exist in complexity, to be more than one story, to be fully myself --- not despite living abroad, but because of it.