Honest essays about the loneliness, identity shifts, and quiet struggles of life abroad, written for people whose move has been harder than they expected, or whose return has been harder than they thought it would be.
What living abroad reveals rather than causes: the losses of ease, the language question, what expats bring to therapy, and what the research on expat mental health actually shows.
Read more →A big part of you never lived inside you. It lived in your streets and your people. This is about what really happens when you move.
Read more →You have all the facts and you still can't decide. The stay-or-go question is rarely about the countries at all.
Read more →You grew up between countries and came out adaptable. That skill is real. It's also the thing most therapy misreads.
Read more →Culture shock is real. But it's not what breaks most people.
Read more →Before you moved, people told you it takes time. "Give it six months." "The first year is the hardest." You believed them.
Read more →Someone died and you were seven time zones away. Or your parents are aging on a screen. Grief at a distance has its own shape.
Read more →You thought you had two options: stay abroad or go home. Then you went home for a visit and realized there's no home to go back to.
Read more →You're not isolated. That's the confusing part. You have people in your life. You go to dinners. You're in group chats.
Read more →You landed two weeks ago and your body says this was a catastrophic mistake. What's happening has an explanation, and it isn't a verdict.
Read more →Not ambivalence. Not doubt. Certainty. You moved here and it was wrong and you know it in your body the way you know when you've taken a wrong turn.
Read more →You probably didn't type that into Google expecting a therapist to answer. You were hoping for a Reddit thread, or a blog post from someone who felt the same way and then found a great cafe and made a friend and now everything's fine. I'm not going to give you that.
Read more →You made the decision together. Or maybe your partner got the offer and you agreed to go. Or maybe you didn't really feel like you had a choice, but you told yourself (and everyone else) that you did. However it happened, you're here now. Your partner goes to work every morning with a purpose, a structure, a reason to get dressed. And you wake up in an apartment in a city where you don't speak the language, don't have a job, don't have friends, and increasingly don't recognize the person staring back at you in the mirror.
Read more →You agreed to come. You want to be clear about that. Nobody forced you. You talked about it, weighed the options, made the decision together.
Read more →They leave in the morning and come home in the evening and in between they have a day. A real day. With colleagues and problems to solve.
Read more →You moved to a new country together. Maybe it was for one person's job. Maybe it was a mutual decision, a fresh start, an adventure. Either way, you were supposed to be doing this as a team. Instead, you're fighting more than you ever have, or worse, you've stopped fighting and started coexisting in a silence that scares you more than the arguments did.
Read more →Back home, people knew you. Not just your name and your job, they knew you. Your humor, your moods, your history.
Read more →You were the quick one at home. Here you're half a beat behind. Part of your personality is locked behind a language.
Read more →You've started looking at flights. Not booking them. Just looking. Maybe the fantasy of going home is carrying all the weight of an admission you can't make.
Read more →You're exhausted and you can't point to why. Abroad, nothing runs on autopilot, and the cost accumulates until rest stops working.
Read more →You moved abroad for university and got exactly what you wanted. So why does something feel missing? A therapist on the disorientation of freedom.
Read more →What Clients Say
“I came in thinking I knew what my issues were. I'd been over them a hundred times. But those were just the things I could already see. Aaron helped me notice what I couldn't, and that's where everything actually started to change.”
- M.J.
“I'd been in and out of therapy for years. Different therapists, different approaches, none of it really stuck. Aaron helped me understand more in a few months than all of them combined. And he talked to me like a normal person, not like all this weird therapy-speak.”
- S.A.
“A few years ago I suddenly developed prolonged panic attacks but couldn't begin to understand what had caused them. Having been in therapy in the past, and being a counseling intern student, I felt I had exhausted my resources trying to figure out “What is wrong with me?” I can honestly say Aaron provides a form of counseling that is difficult to find anywhere else regarding efficacy. Not only has his approach been effective, but he also has provided me a safe space to explore aspects about myself I may not otherwise have felt able to. I cannot recommend him enough as he has helped me feel more myself than ever before.”
- K.R.