Scared to Move Abroad? What That Fear Usually Means

If you’re trying to decide whether to move abroad, the fear tends to be loudest before anything has actually happened, in the deciding and the packing and the drive to the airport, and that’s worth knowing in advance, because it’s easy to read that fear as a verdict on the whole idea.

Mine was loudest in a car that still smelled like the farm we had just sold.

The drive was the worst part

The car smelled of hay and diesel caught somewhere in the seams of the seats, even though everything else was already sold off and gone, and I remember pressing my palm flat against the window and feeling how warm the glass already was, even though it was barely past dawn.

We had sold everything to get into that car, the farm, the livestock, the whole shape of a life we’d spent years building, gone in about six weeks, and what was left of us fit into two large suitcases and two backpacks, with one-way tickets in an envelope on the dashboard. My daughter was driving, the radio off, none of us reaching for it, the windows cracked, and the air outside smelled like cut grass and somebody’s charcoal grill starting early.

I stared out the window for most of that drive and ran the same questions on a loop with no answers attached to any of them. What the first day would feel like. The first week. Whether we had just made the biggest mistake either of us would ever make, the kind you can’t take back once the plane leaves the ground.

What was waiting on the other side

The fear that rode in the car with us changed shape somewhere over the ocean. By the time we walked out of the airport to find a taxi, into air that smelled completely unfamiliar, thick and warm and full of something I couldn’t place, what was left was closer to awe, and a pride I hadn’t expected to feel standing on a curb with my backpack cutting into my shoulder, thinking, oh my god, we just did this.

That’s the shape it usually takes. Terror at the threshold, pride on the other side of it, and the two are closer together than they feel at the time.

“I could never” usually means “I’m scared”

I think about that drive every time somebody tells me they could never do what we do. It comes out differently each time, must be nice, I could never, usually kind, sometimes with a wistfulness that catches me off guard, and for a long time I just smiled and let it sit there between us.

What I hear underneath it now is simpler. I could never mostly means I’m scared, and it almost never means you actually can’t.

I’m not calling it brave

I don’t say that to be smug about it, because I was terrified, genuinely, physically terrified in a way that lived in my stomach for weeks before we left. I’m still not sure I’d call myself brave so much as willing to be scared and get in the car anyway.

But I know where the fear lived for me. Loudest right at the threshold, in the drive and the not knowing, in that warm glass under my palm, turning into something closer to pride only once we were standing on the other side of it. Looking back, the fear was a measure of how much I hadn’t found out yet.

The part I say out loud when someone asks how to start

None of that makes it easy, and this is the part I make sure to say when someone leans in over coffee and asks how they would even begin.

Living like this means packing up and moving every month or so, learning a new city and a new climate and a new set of streets again and again, my hands learning new door handles and new light switches and the particular give of a lock that isn’t quite like the one before it. It means living in countries where you don’t speak the language and, if I’m honest, never quite getting to know any one language all the way through.

Some days that’s the whole adventure. Some days it’s standing under the fluorescent lights of a grocery store two towns from where I started, holding a jar I can’t read, my hand hovering over it like that will somehow translate the label, tired in a way I can’t fully explain to anyone back home.

And it isn’t for everyone

Some people are locked into jobs and families and mortgages, or it just isn’t their season, and that’s real. I’m not talking about them.

I’m talking about the person who says it with a little catch in their voice, the one who has clearly already run the whole thing through in their head a hundred times before they ever said it out loud, lying awake with it, turning it over.

Research only gets you so far

What I usually tell that person is that they can, and that it’s mostly the part right before that’s scary, the way the drive was scarier than anything that came after it. Do the research, and go in knowing that the research and the actual thing can turn out to be very different animals, because so much of it you can’t figure out until you’re standing in the place itself, feeling the heat or the cold of it hit your skin.

If you’ve said “I could never,” I’m not going to tell you what to do about it. I’d only ask you to notice which one it actually is, “I could never” or “I’m scared,” because in the moment they feel exactly the same, and they are not the same thing at all.

The longer version of this story, the full drive to the airport, is in my essay “I Could Never” Usually Means “I’m Scared”.

Related reading: How to Prepare to Move Abroad and The Week Before You Fly Abroad