She arrived in Malta on a Thursday, and by Friday, we were stretched out on one of the island’s pale limestone beaches, watching the water shift from turquoise to deep blue at the horizon.
My best friend of 24 years was visiting from San Francisco, where she has lived since we graduated from college. She was impressed by the beauty surrounding me in my new Mediterranean home, but at some point, she looked at me and said, “You’re missing your people here.”
She wasn’t wrong.
Over the years, I’ve lived and worked across Myanmar, China, Angola, the British Virgin Islands, Malta, and a handful of other countries. The brochure version of this life is peppered with quaint local markets, passport stamps, and the pride of being someone who chose differently. That version is real, but there’s something else, something that lives just under the surface of all that freedom that isn’t as exhilarating.
Sorting the logistics is never fun
Before you can get to any of it, there are the logistics. Finding housing, opening a local bank account, sourcing health insurance, figuring out the phone plan, the grocery situation, and where anything is.
Every single move, you rebuild from zero — and you do all of it while appearing, to new colleagues and new landlords and a new country, completely fine.
Every move means starting your story over
Here’s the truth: every time you move, you start the story from the beginning.
New people, new introductions, new summarized versions of yourself that fit over drinks. You give people the highlights. What gets left behind is context, the people who know your history, who remember who you were before all this, who don’t need you to explain the reference because they were there. When you move every few years, no one holds that for you. Huge pieces of you are just missing.
You’re always the foreigner — even back home
I was surprised to realize that I am always, technically, the foreigner. After calling so many different countries home, I’ve realized that you don’t truly belong in the place you’re living; you’re an extended visitor on a contract. But when you go home, you don’t fully belong there either. You’ve changed, expanded. You’ve outgrown the shape that used to fit.
No one prepares you for the accumulation of goodbyes, either. It is, genuinely, a lifestyle of never-ending goodbyes. Goodbyes when you leave for a new country or those who you’ve formed a connection with decide to do the same. All of that sounds poetic until you’re living it — then it just feels like loss, on repeat, with the added guilt of knowing you chose it.
That’s the hard part, knowing every move was mine. So when loneliness comes, the specific loneliness of never being fully known in any one place, it arrives with a complicated chaser: you have no right to feel this.
I know, I know. And still.
The fullness and privilege of this life are real. So is the loneliness.
There is a cost to always arriving
I’m not sharing this to discourage anyone from the life I’ve chosen. I’m sharing it because I spent years confused about why I sometimes felt hollow in a life that looked so full, and I think I’m not the only one.
A lot of people living the life of a nomad carry the same weight: performing competence and enthusiasm while internally processing loss, dislocation, and the slow fragmentation of a continuous self. Looking fine on the outside, while starting over again on the inside. Maybe it’s just the honest cost of a particular kind of freedom. The cost of always arriving.
Reinvention is exhilarating. It’s also exhausting. Both things are true, even on a beautiful beach in Malta with your oldest friend.
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