Losing your confidence after moving abroad (I have a slightly different take)

Confidence seems to come up a lot when people talk about living abroad, often as something you either have or lost somewhere along the way (I used to be so much more confident…).

Sometimes it feels more ordinary than that. It might show up in small stuff: a pause before you speak, an opinion you keep to yourself, a joke you decide not to make. Most of it may not look like much from the outside.

Was I ever really that person?

Maybe you were the funny one back home. Or the one people called when something needed sorting out.

Then you moved. Now you laugh a second after everyone else at the table. You ask someone to repeat themselves twice, and the third time you just nod (been there?). You explain what you do for work and watch it land as something smaller…

And somewhere in there you catch yourself thinking, was I ever really that person?

In that pause before speaking there might be a thought too, something like they won't get what I mean or I'll sound silly. Staying quiet can feel safer in the moment, even if it also means you never get to see how it would have gone.

My slightly different take

Most people put this down to the move. New country, new language, just give it time, some people say. And time does help.

My take? Back home, people might have shown you who you were every single day, and you probably never noticed. The friend who laughed before you'd even finished the joke. The colleague who asked what you thought first.

When you move, a lot of that goes quiet at once. And if a good part of how you felt about yourself was coming from there, of course you'd feel shaky.

When a lot of how we feel about ourselves comes from the people around us, it makes sense that it wobbles when they're suddenly far away (or eight hours behind). Most of us need people, that part is completely normal.

What might be there when you slow down

When you slow down and look at your week, there might be so much more in it than you noticed.

• A phone call made with a heavy accent.

• A form filled out in a language you're still learning.

• A dinner you went to when staying in felt easier.

All of that happened. Nobody around you said anything, so it slipped past you too.

And maybe, with a bit of practice, you become the one who notices.

How it might start to come back

When that starts to change, it often shows up in small moments first.

• You say something clumsy in another language and can laugh about it on the way home (well, that came out wrong).

• You walk into a room where nobody knows you yet and still feel like you arrived with something.

In CBT, this is the kind of thing we'd look at together: the thoughts that pop up in that pause before you speak, and what your week actually shows when you write it down (spoiler: usually a lot more than you gave yourself credit for).

And bit by bit, you might start to feel at home with yourself again, wherever you happen to be.

If you recognised yourself somewhere in here, that's not nothing.

Daniela x

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