Are we lonely because we're alone? Or are we alone because we're lonely?
Recently while catching up with a friend while in my elongated COVID induced visit to the US, I mentioned being homesick for Bali and their response was “You’re not even from there, you can’t be homesick. You’re home now.”. I was dumb founded by this comment, and it rubbed me the wrong way on a number of levels. First, it was super dismissive and while I realize the idea of missing another country may be un-relatable (but that’s an avenue for a different blog), but even if it isn't relatable, it was so dismissive, with the attitude that what I was feeling wasn't real. During covid, we've all been struggling with feeling lonely and isolated, with lockdowns and social distancing (depending on the country) and some people are experiencing these things for the first time. For expats, loneliness and isolation isn't anything new, it isn't always in the ways people expect.
Isolated and Alone on Expat Island
I’ve found that the way most people assume I’m lonely, doesn’t match up with the ways I feel lonely. What is loneliness? It seems to be a common misconception that if you're "alone", which people seem to define either as being single or physically alone, that is when you'll be lonely. Loneliness and isolation aren’t as straight forward and white and black as people like to think they are, they’re multifaceted things in shades of grey.
It’s lonely to separated from the life I’ve built somewhere else. Maybe to some of my US friends, it seems like I’ve been on vacation for several years, but my reality is that I’ve built a life somewhere else. Moving to another country means a job, friends, a community, favorite coffee shops and restaurants, yoga studios and climbing gyms that we frequent. So being displaced from that, even if it’s back to my home country is a bit jarring, and lonely. It’s lonely when you feel like you can’t relate to your friends and the people you’re socializing with, when they’re reactions to things you’re struggling with is a complete lack of empathy and understanding, it’s extremely isolating.
That’s not to say we can’t or don’t feel isolated or alone when we’re in our new homes, that happens to. We make wonderful new friends in our new lives, but sometimes you just want to talk to a friend who has known you longer to talk to about an issue. The nature of expat life, especially in the ESL field, is that people are constantly cycling in and out, so it can be hard to have a consistent group of friends. This lack of consistent friends, a lack of having friends close by, or the need for someone who knows you on a deeper level is another way that can make us feel lonely.
Another weird way that expats can feel lonely is if we're the only one from our respective
country in our friend group. When I lived in China all the other expats that I worked with and that I was friends with were British, which was lovely in its own right and resulted in me having an occasional British accent (it still pops up from time-to-time). But sometimes I really just wanted to talk with someone or hangout with someone who has the same cultural background that I do. Even though I have a very strong British heritage (my grandfather from the UK and emigrated to the US), I wasn't raised there and there more cultural differences than people realize. Similarly, when I was in more rural locations and all my friends were natives of that country, I experienced that same loneliness of just wanting to talk with someone with my same background and culture.
Another aspect of this is wanting to talk with people who have that same expat experience when we're in our home country visiting or just stuck thanks to covid. Don't get me wrong, it's wonderful to have a chance to spend time and catch up with my family and friends in America, but that in itself brings its own sense of loneliness and isolation as quite I often I lack that interaction with people who also have that expat experience and are currently experiencing the same struggles I am. Which brings me back to the conversation from the start of this article, that complete lack of empathy, even if they can't relate, made me feel so alone. I was sitting at a table at a restaurant, there were dozens of people around, including the friend I was meeting with, and yet I felt like I was Tom Hanks in Cast Away. When I mentioned the same feeling on a video call with some of my expat friends, they all were like "girl, we hear you and we understand", several of them have also recently repatriated to their home countries, either because of covid or because they were planning to move back to their home country this year.
Home and Homesickness
I've talked before about how consider multiple places to be home, if you're not familiar with that article you can check it out here. Homesickness is an inevitable part of living abroad, I've been lucky enough to have called multiple countries home, the down side of that is that I get homesick for multiple places. It's hard to be in America or China and miss or want to be back in Bali or Korea, and that homesickness can make you feel lonely. Being homesick doesn't just mean missing a place, it can also be missing people, food...really any variety of things, and while I have coping mechanisms in place and a support structure from friends. When I go through a bout of homesickness, I do feel lonely and depending on what the circumstances are, alone.
Homesickness and our reactions to it as expats can be confusing to those who aren't familiar with it, particularly to our friends/family in our home countries, or to those who have never experienced it. Homesickness isn't as easy to describe or explain as people think, yes generally speaking it's missing home, but what if we consider multiple places home? Or if we've repatriated, we may be going through homesickness for our prior country (or countries) of residence. The truth is we do miss our life, which is or was somewhere else (or it’s both/multiple places and that’s even more confusing), it leads to feeling out of place or like we may not belong, and this serves as another way to make us feel lonely.
Trying to verbalize these jumbled up and complicated feelings to people? Personally, I even struggled to accurately talk about what I've experienced and felt in terms of loneliness and isolation...and I've talked most of this through with my expat tribe, some of whom have had similar experiences and feelings. Pair this difficulty to explain what we're feeling with comments from those around us that are well-meaning, but super unhelpful ("cheer up, you're home." or "it'll pass.") to completely dismissing how we feel to lack of understanding, and you may just end up a lonely expat time-bomb with all those feelings jammed inside you. How does that effect us? Good old loneliness and isolation come creeping in and it's a challenge to keep them at bay.
So how do we manage to deal with all this fun isolation and loneliness? I'll admit I'm not the
best at dealing with my feelings in general, but talking with my expat tribe on a regular basis has been super helpful. Not that your other friend groups won't be helpful, my best friend is not, nor has she ever been an expat, but she's always empathetic to what I'm feeling and listens...and offers wine. One of my expat friends had returned to her home country last spring, and when I was talking about the ways I was feeling lonely, all of a sudden, she said "I wish I had heard this last spring. I felt like this and it got me in a really dark place". That was a wake-up call to me, that I hadn't checked in on this friend like I should have (although I was living in China at the time and was at times completely disconnected from the outside world). Mental health issues will follow us no matter where in the world we go, but being and expat can have a big impact on the way you experience them. Expat island may seem like it's all alone in the ocean, but you're not alone on it.
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