I Don't Belong Here But I Don't Belong There Either

What follows is how I understand and approach this issue in my work with clients.

Expat therapy for the in-between: not belonging here and not belonging there either. An expat counselor who understands this liminal space can help.

You thought you had two options: stay abroad or go home. And then you went home for a visit and realized there's no home to go back to. Not because anything changed physically, the house is still there, the streets still look the same, but because you changed, and the place that used to hold you doesn't fit anymore.

Your old friends are happy to see you, but the conversations feel off. They're talking about things you don't connect to anymore. You're talking about things they can't relate to. There's love there, but the ease is gone. You're performing again, a different performance than the one abroad, but a performance still.

And then you come back to the country you moved to, and that doesn't feel like home either. It's better, you know how things work now, you have some routines, but it's not home in the deep sense. It's a place you live. It's where your stuff is.

So now you're stuck in a space that has no name. Not home, not abroad, not belonging here, not belonging there. Floating between two versions of yourself that each make sense in one place and not the other.

The third culture problem

This gets talked about with children, "third culture kids", but it happens to adults too. You've lived long enough in a different culture that you've absorbed parts of it. Your expectations have shifted. Your tolerance for certain things has expanded while your tolerance for other things has shrunk. You're not the person who left home, but you're also not a person from here.

You're a third thing. A hybrid. And there's no community built for the hybrid because every community assumes you're one thing or the other.

Back home: "You've become so European." Abroad: "You're still so American." Neither place lets you just be the person you've actually become.

Why this feels existential

Because belonging is a fundamental human need and you've lost access to it in both directions. It's not homesickness, you can't be homesick for a place that no longer feels like home. It's not dissatisfaction with abroad, you might actually like it here. It's something more unsettling: the realization that there's nowhere on earth where you fully, completely, without reservation fit.

That's a heavy thing to carry. And most people carry it silently because saying "I don't belong anywhere" sounds dramatic and ungrateful. You live in a beautiful country. You have options. You have freedom. How can you not belong anywhere?

But belonging isn't about geography. It's about being known and accepted as you actually are, not as you were or as people expect you to be. And when you've changed in ways your home community doesn't understand and your abroad community doesn't fully see, that kind of belonging is actually hard to find.

What people do with this

Some people keep moving. New country, new start, hoping that the next place will be the one that fits. It rarely is, because the problem isn't the place, it's the fact that they've outgrown the kind of belonging that a single place can provide.

Some people go home and squeeze themselves back into the old shape. It works, sort of, but there's always a part of them that feels compressed. The parts that grew abroad have to go quiet.

Some people stay abroad and grieve. They accept that the old home is gone, that this new place will never be home the way home was home, and that what they need to build is something different from what either place offers: an internal sense of home that doesn't depend on a zip code.

That last one is the hardest. It's also the only one that actually works.