You don’t find yourself by moving. You find yourself first, and then you can take that with you wherever you go. That order matters.
I’m unpacking this live on October 3rd in a complimentary online workshop, Belonging & Becoming Abroad (more at the end).
The mistake people make with a fresh start
Moving to a new country and living in a new language can give the impression you get the chance to start anew. Nobody knows who you are and they don’t even know your life story. It feels like a blank page, total freedom. You can become anyone you want here. And that’s what people try. They pick up the accent, the mannerisms, ways of being, the opinions, the looks of wherever they’ve landed. They hope that if they assemble enough borrowed pieces, a new and more authentic self will show up.
It doesn’t work like that.
I’ve watched it fail in clients and I’ve watched it fail in myself. You end up very fluent in the language and culture of whatever place you landed (no matter how superficial it might be), and still a stranger to your own values. You remain quite confused about what you actually want versus what the new culture fosters and rewards. It’s all loosely held together by new costumes, instead of a strong spine.
The blank page was never blank. It had you written all over it. You just hadn’t met yourself yet, so there was nothing to recognize on arrival.
Know yourself first, wherever “first” happens to be
Here’s the piece that gets skipped: the work of knowing yourself doesn’t require a plane ticket. It happens wherever you slow down enough to do it. Your home country, your childhood city, the apartment you’ve lived in for ten years. If you do that work there, you arrive anywhere else already whole. If you skip it there, you’ll skip it everywhere, and no border crossing will do it for you.
This is the analogy worth sitting with: think of it like learning an instrument before you join a band. You don’t learn to play for the first time on stage, in front of the audience. You learn the instrument first, in a room by yourself. At the beginning you sound bad. After enough practice you start sounding better. Then you can walk into any band, any city, any genre, and play. And even if you still don’t play perfectly, you play with a new level of confidence.
Knowing yourself is the same kind of prerequisite. Once you’ve done it, you don’t do it again every time you relocate. You’ve already learned the instrument. Now you’re just finding new rooms to play in. As long as you maintain your skills and keep them fresh (remembering who you are, what matters most to you), you’ll share your authentic sound anywhere you are.
What “knowing yourself” is actually made of
It’s not a personality type, your zodiac, your enneagram, or any letter combination you can speak. It’s slower and less glamorous than that:
- What you actually value (not what you’d like to value or what would make you ‘popular’ with the locals)
- What you care about enough to defend (even when it’s inconvenient)
- What you’re willing to say no to
- What kind of company makes you feel and act more like yourself (instead of the company that makes you perform an inauthentic version of you)
Most people never sit still long enough to answer these. You don’t have time for that. It’s boring and not as stimulating as joining any group, doing anything, taking any action first.
Moving abroad doesn’t force the answer either. It just changes the scenery around the same unanswered questions. The same thing now is dressed up as adventure. And it’s still the same thing.
Why rootedness travels better than reinvention
Here’s the part that surprises people: the more grounded you are in who you are, the easier belonging gets, anywhere you happen to be.
It sounds backwards. Shouldn’t you adapt more, blend in more or try being more flexible to fit the new place? It turns out the opposite is true. When you know your own values, you stop needing to mimic and perform. You’re not scanning a new culture for a personality to borrow, you’re scanning it for people and communities who resonate with the one you already have. The second is a much faster, less exhausting search. You’re not becoming any person just to fit in. You’re recognizing what already fits who you know you are.
People without that grounding do the opposite. They pick up fragments of the new culture indiscriminately, whatever seems to get approval and be acknowledged. And then they end up with a stitched-together identity that doesn’t hold weight under pressure. You find yourself with misaligned values, mostly adopted in a hurry, from people you were trying to impress rather than people you actually resonated with. Is that true integration? It sounds more like an improvisation without a clear melody.
And to be clear: knowing yourself doesn’t mean being finished. You can be mid-figuring-it-out and still be rooted, as long as you’re not pretending the process is over or borrowing someone else’s answer to skip it. Being at peace with the process is enough. Full certainty isn’t a requirement here. Although full honesty with yourself is.
This works whether you ever leave or not
None of this requires an airport. You can do this work in the same city you were born in. Becoming yourself first is a precondition for belonging anywhere, including the anywhere you’re already standing in. Expats don’t have a special problem here. They just have a more visible version of a universal problem: when your surroundings are unfamiliar, it’s obvious how much you were leaning on the environment to define you rather than the other way around.
That’s the actual value of relocation, if you use it well. Not that it gives you a new self. That it makes it impossible to keep hiding from the fact that you needed to build one. You already know how to play (wherever the room is).
This is exactly what I want to dig into on October 3rd, live: Belonging & Becoming Abroad, a complimentary 90 minute workshop for expats who’ve made the move and are still waiting to feel like something other than a guest. We’ll work together through what’s actually keeping you on the outside, and how to turn what makes you different into something your community values, instead of something to hide while you catch up.
Saturday, October 3, 11:00am–12:30pm Uruguay/Argentina time (10:00am EDT / 4:00pm CEST). In English, on Zoom.
Details and registration: walterfreiberg.com/belonging
A question for you to consider:
What do you actually value most in life, independent of how popular it is wherever you currently are in the world?