I Don't Know What's Wrong With Me

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

If you don’t know what’s wrong with you, therapy can help you name what you can’t yet articulate. A therapist who works with this kind of confusion knows you don’t need to arrive with a diagnosis.

You've been trying to figure it out. You've run through the list. Is it the job? The relationship? The city? Homesickness? Loneliness? Low mood? You've tried naming it different things and none of them quite fit, and the not-fitting makes you feel worse because at least if you knew what was wrong you could do something about it.

So you Google it. "Why do I feel off." "Something is wrong but I don't know what." "I don't feel like myself anymore." And you get articles about low mood checklists and sleep hygiene and you close the tab because that's not it either.

I want to offer a different way to think about it.

What if nothing is "wrong with you" in the way you're imagining? What if you're not broken or sick or conditioned? What if what you're experiencing is the completely predictable result of living in a situation where the things you need aren't available to you, and you've been trying to not need them instead of acknowledging they're missing?

That's not a label. That's a description of what happens when a person relocates their entire life and tries to keep going as if the move only changed the scenery and not the foundation.

The things you probably need and aren't getting

Being understood without having to explain everything from scratch. That's a big one. Back home, your friends knew the backstory. They knew your family, your history, your quirks. A conversation could start in the middle because the beginning was already shared. Here, every conversation starts at the beginning, and you're exhausted from all the beginnings.

A sense of competence. You used to be good at things. Getting around your city. Having conversations. Reading social cues. Knowing what to say and when. Here, you're slightly off in every interaction, and that slight off-ness accumulates into a persistent feeling of inadequacy that you can't shake because you can't point to where it's coming from.

Feeling like you matter. Not in an abstract way. In the specific way of being someone's first call, someone's close friend, someone who would be missed if they didn't show up. Abroad, especially early on, you're no one's first call. You could disappear for a week and nobody would notice, and knowing that, even subconsciously, changes how you carry yourself through the day.

Why you can't name it

You can't name what's wrong because it's not one thing. It's the absence of twenty small things that used to be there and aren't anymore. No single one of them is big enough to point to, but together they were the structure that held you up, and now the structure is gone and you're standing but you're not sure how or for how long.

That's not low mood, exactly. It's not worry, exactly. It's not homesickness, exactly. It's all of those things partially and none of them completely, which is why nothing you read online feels like it's talking about you.

What I've noticed working with people in this situation

When someone sits across from me and says "I don't know what's wrong," that's actually the beginning of something useful. Not the end. Because the not-knowing is honest, and honesty is something you can work with.

What I usually find is that the person does know what's wrong, they just don't want it to be the thing that's wrong. They don't want to admit they're lonely, because they're surrounded by people. They don't want to admit they regret the move, because they chose it. They don't want to admit they're angry at their partner, because their partner didn't do anything wrong.

The feeling of "I don't know what's wrong" is often "I know what's wrong but the truth is inconvenient."

That's not a criticism. It's human. And it's something you don't have to figure out alone.