The Person I Was Before I Moved Doesn't Exist Anymore

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

Expat therapy for identity loss after relocation. An identity therapist understands that the person you were before the move doesn’t exist anymore, and neither does the one you expected to become.

You catch yourself sometimes. A memory surfaces, of a party you went to, a conversation you had, a version of yourself laughing easily and knowing everyone in the room, and it feels like watching someone else's home movie. That person existed. You remember being them. But the gap between who they were and who you are now feels uncrossable.

And you're not sure if you lost that person or if they were never as real as you thought.

The grief nobody names

We have language for losing people. We have language for losing places. We don't have good language for losing a version of yourself.

But that's what happened. The person who moved abroad is not the person living abroad. The move changed you, not gradually, the way aging changes you, but suddenly. One month you were someone with a full life, a network, a context. The next month you were someone starting over in a place where none of that existed.

And the person you were needed all of that to exist. They needed the friends who understood them, the job that challenged them, the city they knew by heart. Take away the ecosystem and the creature adapted to that ecosystem can't survive.

So you became someone new. Someone more guarded. More self-reliant. More careful. Someone who learned to need less, because less was what was available.

And now when you think about who you used to be, you feel a pang of loss that doesn't make sense to anyone else. How can you miss yourself? How can you grieve for a person who's technically still alive?

But you can. And you are. And it's one of the loneliest feelings there is, because you can't explain it to anyone who hasn't lived it.

You can't go back

The tempting thought is: if the old environment created the old me, then going home will bring the old me back. But it won't. Because you've changed, and home has changed, and the person who left is not the person who would return.

People who go back often find this out the hard way. The friends have moved on. The rhythms have shifted. You don't fit the space you left behind, because the you-shaped hole closed up after you left and now there's no room.

So going back isn't an option, not really. And staying here means living as this new person you didn't choose to become. That's the trap: you can't return to who you were, and you haven't yet figured out who you're becoming.

What to do in the gap

Nothing, yet. Or rather, stop trying to either recover the old self or force the new one into shape. The gap between who you were and who you're becoming is uncomfortable but it's not empty. There's something happening in it. Something is forming. You just can't see it yet because you're too busy mourning what was or worriedly trying to construct what's next.

The people I work with who handle this best are the ones who stop fighting the gap and start getting curious about it. Not "who should I become?" but "who am I actually becoming, whether I chose it or not?"

That question requires patience. It requires someone to ask it with. And it requires accepting that the person you were before was real and is gone and that is actually sad, and the person you're becoming might be someone worth knowing, even if they're not who you planned on being.