Missing home abroad. Living between loss and a new life

Everyone experiences longing differently because everyone leaves behind a different life. We have different relationships with our families, different reasons for moving and different circumstances surrounding the decision. For one person, regular video calls with family may bring comfort; for another, they may sometimes make the distance feel even greater. Some people need to return home several times a year, while others discover that frequent visits make it harder to build a life where they are now. There is no single piece of advice that works for everyone, which may be why casual suggestions such as “relax,” “go for a walk” or “try not to think about it” can feel so frustrating. They often fail to reach what is really happening underneath.

Because missing home is not always simply sadness caused by distance. Sometimes it is an experience of loss.

We do not only miss people

When we think about grief, we usually associate it with death. But people also grieve when an important relationship ends, when a familiar way of living disappears or when something that formed part of their identity for years changes dramatically. Someone we once shared our life with may still be alive, yet no longer be part of our everyday world. Something similar can happen after migration. Family and friends are still there. We can call, send messages and travel back for holidays, and yet we are no longer present for many of the small moments from which closeness used to be built.

We are not there for an ordinary Saturday morning coffee. We do not overhear a conversation around the kitchen table. We cannot spontaneously stop by our parents' house or meet a friend after work. At the same time, the people we left behind are no longer part of our ordinary daily life either. Both sides gradually develop routines that the other person knows mainly through stories.

Research on migration has used the idea of cultural bereavement to describe the loss of familiar social structures, language, cultural references, roles and parts of identity that can accompany migration. Psychiatrist Joseba Achotegui has also described the intense stress experienced by some migrants who live for long periods under the pressure of multiple losses, isolation and uncertainty. This does not mean that everyone living abroad is experiencing a disorder or a crisis. It does mean that the sense of loss connected with migration is real and does not automatically mean that you are weak, ungrateful or that moving abroad was a mistake.

Emotions do not unfold in five neat stages

The experience of migration is sometimes described using Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's well-known model of denial, anger, bargaining, sadness and acceptance. It is more useful, however, to treat these ideas as a language for recognising certain emotional states than as a fixed sequence that everyone is supposed to follow. Emotions rarely behave so neatly. We can accept something and feel angry about it again months later. We can enjoy our new life and still deeply miss the old one.

The first months after moving often leave very little room for reflection. There are documents, housing, work, language, school or daycare, unfamiliar stores, a first visit to a new doctor and dozens of small things that once happened automatically. We function in problem-solving mode, sometimes with a surprising amount of energy. Everything is new and there is so much to manage that the feeling of loss may remain somewhere in the background for a while.

Only when life becomes more stable can emotions that had no space before begin to surface. Anger at a system that works differently, frustration with our own helplessness, resentment toward people back home who do not fully understand our new reality, or sometimes anger toward a partner if their job or decision was the immediate reason for the move. A thought may appear: “Why did I agree to all of this?”

Then there is the wondering. What if I had stayed? What if I had left at a different time? What if my family could be closer? What if I could somehow keep all the closeness of my old life and all the possibilities of the new one? Many of these thoughts are a very human attempt to regain control in a situation where every choice gives us something while also taking something away.

One of the hardest moments can come when we begin to understand that some things cannot be recreated exactly as they were. Even if we return, people change, relationships develop a different rhythm, children grow up, parents get older and friends build lives of their own. We are no longer the same person who boarded a plane with suitcases several years earlier either.

Acceptance therefore does not mean waking up one day and no longer missing anything. It means that longing gradually stops being proof that there must be something wrong with our present life. We can make room for it while continuing to invest energy in what exists now.

When longing begins to hold life back

Longing itself is not the problem. A more important question is what happens to our life around it. It is possible to live in a new country for many years while emotionally remaining in a state of waiting for a life that no longer exists in exactly the form preserved in memory. Every difficulty can then become evidence that “life was better there,” while everything good that appears here is treated as temporary and therefore not worth fully investing in.

Time alone does not necessarily change this pattern. It can create the conditions for healing, but it does not do all of the work for us. If we spend years comparing the present with an idealised version of the past, avoiding new relationships and never allowing the new place to become ours in any meaningful way, the passing of time may bring surprisingly little relief.

Sometimes holding on to longing also serves a protective function. Not because we consciously want to suffer, but because familiar pain can feel safer than stepping into something unknown. As long as I can tell myself “I don't have my people here,” I do not have to risk the disappointment of trying to build new relationships. As long as everything remains temporary, I do not have to fully decide that this is also a place where I am allowed to put down roots.

Fully engaging in a new life can also bring guilt. Enjoying the new place may feel like betraying the old one. Creating new holiday traditions can feel as though it diminishes the traditions we remember from our family home. Feeling less pain about the distance may even seem like evidence that the people we left behind somehow matter less.

But the strength of a relationship does not have to be measured by how much it hurts.

We can love the people who stayed behind and still allow ourselves to live well here. We can keep memories that matter deeply to us while creating new ones. We can miss home on Sunday evening and genuinely enjoy Monday morning in the country where we now live.

Healthy longing does not have to disappear

Perhaps a more useful question than “How do I stop missing home?” is “What role does this longing play in my life today?” Healthy longing can appear unexpectedly after a conversation with our parents, a photograph from our hometown or during the holidays. We can feel it, stay with it for a while and then return to our everyday life. It does not have to take meaning away from what we have built elsewhere.

It becomes more difficult when longing starts organising most of our life. When it is no longer simply something we feel, but gradually becomes part of how we define ourselves: a person who lost her place and can never fully belong anywhere else. There is an important difference between “I miss home” and “I am someone who will always be unhappy because I left.”

At that point it may be worth asking a question we often avoid: if the fear, guilt and longing disappeared for a moment, what would I actually want to do with my life? Who would I want around me? What would I like my ordinary weeks to look like? What would I want to develop, try or discover? What would my daily life look like if I stopped treating it as a waiting room?

The answer does not always come immediately. Sometimes the emptiness after that question reveals just how much space longing has occupied for a long time.

Acceptance is not resignation

One of the more difficult parts of this process is accepting that we cannot live every possible version of our life at the same time. Choosing one place means that something will be missing in another. Migration confronts us with this especially strongly because the consequences are so tangible: thousands of miles, time differences, holidays spent apart and children growing up far from their grandparents.

Acceptance does not mean saying, “I like this and I want it to stay this way.” Nor does it mean deciding that the current situation must remain unchanged forever. It is closer to stopping the daily struggle against the fact that, at this moment, reality looks the way it does. Only from there does it become easier to see what is still within our influence.

Maybe we decide to stay. Maybe we begin seriously planning a return. Maybe we discover an option somewhere in between. Any of these decisions may be right for a particular person, but it helps when the decision grows from what we genuinely need today rather than only from an attempt to reverse time.

Because perhaps the goal is not to get rid of longing at all. Perhaps it is to stop letting longing take away our ability to live.

We can continue loving the places and people we left behind. We can feel a sudden ache when we see a photograph of the family table or hear about something we wish we had been there for. We can have two places that, in different ways, both feel like home. All of this can exist alongside curiosity about the life we are building now.

A heart really can hold more than one place. We do not have to choose between “I love what I left behind” and “I want to live well here.” Perhaps a more mature relationship with migration begins when we stop treating those two things as contradictions.

How can longing remain part of my life without deciding the shape of my entire life?