You Left Home. Now What?

January 2026 · 7 min read

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

Expat therapy for the disorientation that follows leaving home. A relocation therapist understands that the excitement was supposed to carry you further than it did.

You wanted this. You worked for it. You applied, you got in, you moved to a new country, and now here you are. Exactly where you’re supposed to be. Free.

So why do you feel like something is missing?

It’s not homesickness, exactly. You can FaceTime your parents. You have friends here. You like your classes, mostly. But there’s this thing underneath. This quiet, hard-to-name feeling that showed up sometime in the first few months and hasn’t quite left. Like you’re watching your own life from a slight distance. Like everyone else seems to know how to do this and you’re improvising.

What nobody tells you about freedom

Here’s something that sounds like it should be obvious but actually isn’t: freedom is disorienting. Real freedom: the kind where you’re in a new country, away from everyone who knew you before, with no one watching, doesn’t just feel liberating. It also strips away all the structures you used to lean on without realizing it.

Which sounds like it should be exciting (and it is, sometimes) but it’s also the first time in your life you’ve had to figure out who you are without a context to be it in.

That’s not a crisis. But it is a big deal. And most people your age don’t have anyone to talk to about it honestly, because everyone around them is performing the same confidence.

The performance starts early

You might not think of yourself as someone who “performs.” But consider: how often do you say “I’m fine” when you’re not? How often do you show up to a social event feeling hollow and leave having convinced everyone you were having a great time? How often do you scroll through other people’s lives and feel a quiet shame about your own, even though you know (intellectually) that what you’re seeing isn’t real?

This isn’t a social media problem. It’s a human problem. And it didn’t start at university. It started much earlier: the first time you learned that certain parts of you were more acceptable than others. The enthusiastic part, the competent part, the easy-going part: those got rewarded. The scared part, the angry part, the part that doesn’t know what it wants: those got tucked away.

Moving abroad didn’t create this pattern. (Neither did it create the loneliness, it just removed what was masking it.) But it put you in a position where the performance is harder to maintain, because all your usual props are gone. And that’s actually a remarkable opportunity, if you know what to do with it.

What therapy can be at your age

Most people your age think of therapy as something for people with serious problems. Trauma, anxiety, life crises. And therapy is for those things. But it’s also for something subtler and, I’d argue, more important: learning how to be honest with yourself before decades of habit make it exponentially harder.

I’m a therapist who works online, in English, with clients around the world. The way I work is probably different from what you’d expect. I don’t give advice. I don’t assign homework. I don’t teach breathing exercises. What I do is pay very close attention to what’s happening between us in real time, where you open up, where you shut down, where you perform, where you’re actually present. Those moments are the whole map.

If you’re twenty and you start doing this work now, you will save yourself years (years) of living inside a version of yourself that doesn’t quite fit. I know this because I’ve been in my own therapy for years, and I wish I’d started even sooner.

About the language thing

If you’re an international student in Europe and you’ve looked into therapy, you’ve probably hit the same wall everyone hits: the options are in the local language, or the English-speaking therapists are booked for months, or the university counseling service gave you four sessions and a worksheet.

Your emotional life doesn’t operate in your second language. You need someone you can talk to in the language you actually think in. That’s what I offer.

Sessions are online and scheduling is flexible across time zones. You don’t need to be in crisis. You just need to be someone who senses there’s a more honest version of your life available, and you’d like some help finding it.

Aaron Platt, MA (Counseling, La Salle; Sociology, UC Berkeley) is a therapist offering individual and couples therapy in English to clients worldwide. His psychodynamic approach focuses on the patterns that keep people stuck, not the surface symptoms, but the underlying structure.

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