Life Abroad Is Not All Puppy Dogs & Rainbows

There's a shadow side to traveling & living abroad

Clouds and shadows hanging over Tirana one day this spring—a metaphor for some of our harder days abroad

Our journey of traveling the world nomadically for 9 months and now having used Albania as a home base for 9 months from which to travel has not been one big Instagram highlight reel. It doesn’t mean we haven’t enjoyed many of our adventures tremendously, but for every amazing moment we’ve experienced, we’ve probably had at least one difficult one that’s counterbalanced it and sometimes more than one. The reality is that the highs really are high (hence, IG posts) and the lows can be debilitatingly low (no IG posts because sometimes we are laying on the floor wallowing in our feelings and the challenges we feel ill equipped to navigate through).

Would I choose it all again knowing what I know at this point? I will say I think the benefits have outweighed the detriments overall, and we have grown tremendously, building new muscles of resilience. We’ve also greatly expanded our perspective, which is what we were after. But I would do things differently knowing what I know now. Of course, that’s the gift of hindsight.

Why am I sharing this? I guess because we’re closing in on the end of the girls’ school year (they have just under a month left to go) and I’m in a reflective mood. Also, I continue to see IG posts from influencers trying to convince their audience that a nomadic or international lifestyle is the key to freedom and the best life ever, and they make it seem like puppy dogs and rainbows and I think it’s important to provide a fuller view. It can absolutely be amazing for some families; it really can provide freedom and flexibility. But it comes with tradeoffs. And those can be hard to navigate, even when you know you’ll be making them—and sometimes you don’t, as they may not appear until you’re well into your journey.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Choosing to do this with tweens/teens is fundamentally different than doing it with younger kids. The older kids are in a super tricky time of life that is hard enough to navigate without uprooting. But picking them up and plunking them down around the world, amazing as the experiences are, can be disorienting and isolating at this age. It requires extra care and adaptability and it is not for the faint of heart. They need community that they have some agency in building and they need autonomy. There are ways to ensure they get this, but it looks different from how it would look “back home” and can be a lot to figure out.

It’s not just teens who have massive adapting to do to make this lifestyle work—it’s also us as adults. It’s hard to walk away from the people and places we love (the relatedness we feel with them is priceless), the careers we’ve sunk years of ourselves into (the status this may have conferred can sometimes go unnoticed until it’s gone), the familiarity of knowing how to navigate the ins and outs of daily life with ease (this provides an important level of certainty), and the ease of hopping in a car to go run an errand (our autonomy looked so different). Rebalancing and rebuilding key aspects of life that give us a solid foundation from which to operate can be tricky while living nomadically and/or abroad.

As with so many things in life, it’s what you make of all the challenges (and there are many) that make or break the overall experience. It’s the mindset you choose to operate from. But in your most fragile moments, when you are on the floor, it can feel really lonely and scary, and it can be hard to find a neutral mindset, let alone a positive one. You may find that your self-confidence and self-belief are sliding toward the abyss. Finding your way back to yourself (or the version of yourself you want to be) can be hard.

You are not living a prolonged holiday, though it may seem like that to those following you in the digital space. You are figuring out how to navigate every single thing life can throw at you while in a foreign country, often in a foreign language, without a solid understanding of cultural norms, or an on-the-ground community to help you problem solve, or a level of comfort and stability from which to operate. It can be taxing and tiring and not fun.

Dishes by hand. Not fun. 🤪 Also, a metaphor for the messiness of navigating life abroad.

But you do figure it out, as best you can. And you eventually find hard moments funny (some of them, anyway). You build familiarity for little things and then bigger things. You get better at finding your people and stepping through the world knowing it’s going to feel a bit uncomfortable and disorienting and that’s just the way it is. You learn to laugh more than you cry (mostly). You try new things until you find what works (until it doesn’t). You practice non-attachment. You keep adapting. You start to find yourself again, only you’re not the old you and sometimes it catches you by surprise. You accept that for every step forward you’ll probably take one back or to the side. You realize that life isn’t linear and it’s not about progress, at least in the way you used to think of it. It’s a big, winding, messy journey of self-discovery and compassion. It’s about joy and pain and the raw experience of living. In many ways it’s an unpolished, very non-IG worthy life.

So yes, our travel experiences are pretty freaking amazing (mostly) and I am SO grateful we’re having them; after all, that’s part of what this adventure is all about. But the many things we’re navigating behind the scenes are also messy and sometimes quite hard and often full of uncertainty in ways that are extraordinarily challenging. And while I aspire to represent them in what I share in the digital space, it’s often difficult because of their complexity. Just remember that for every amazing story or photo, there’s almost certainly a flip side that you’re not hearing about.