The Truth About Living Abroad

Insights and reflections on almost four years abroad

My family had long joked that as soon as my kids were out of the house, I’d be out of there too. “Jen’s going to disappear into the world, and we’ll never know where she is,” they’d say. I had been taking month-long international trips every summer since my kids were young. I’ve always loved the thrill of stepping into the unknown. So, when I sold everything in 2021 to move to Mexico City, they weren’t surprised.

The move to Mexico wasn’t a hasty one; I spent three years preparing. I started taking Spanish classes and reading everything I could about Mexican history and culture. I took on more freelance work so that I could quit my job, and I traveled to Mexico several times a year.

By the time I left the U.S., I had spent months living in different neighborhoods around the city. I had friends, spoke a bit of the language, and knew the city well enough to know where I wanted to be and where I didn’t. Emma and I even spent one summer bussing around the country, visiting popular spots just to make sure that Mexico City was the best place for me.

Yet, moving abroad has turned out to be far more emotionally taxing than I ever imagined. I’ve never questioned my decision to leave the U.S., but I’ve felt lost, lonely, and exhausted. These emotions have coexisted with moments of joy and a sense of being completely true to myself. The highs are high, and the lows are low, but I’ve learned more about myself in the past three-and-a-half years than I ever would have if I had stayed in St. Louis. Here are a few takeaways from my experience.

You can prepare for the move, but you can never fully anticipate how things will go once you leave your home country. When I left the U.S., I had a plan to study Spanish in Guatemala, spend a month in Costa Rica with Oliver, and then go to Mexico. My plans unraveled within the first two weeks in Guatemala. I realized there was freedom in not having a permanent home, so I spent the next two-and-a-half years traveling. I tried to map out a plan six months in advance, but I learned that you can never predict how a place will feel until you get there. A month in some places wasn’t enough time, while in others, even a week felt too long. I lost money changing flights and Airbnb bookings and eventually embraced letting life take me where it wanted, which, in the end, led me back to Mexico.

Living in an Airbnb isn’t the same as signing a lease. By the time I finally signed a lease on an apartment in Mexico City, I had ‘lived’ in Roma Norte, Roma Sur, Condesa, Juárez, Escandon, Narvarte, Coyoacán, and Cuauthémoc. There’s something about signing a lease in a rental office, paying a deposit before being handed keys that gives you a real sense of belonging in a city. ‘I really live here,’ I thought to myself as I walked to my empty apartment for the first time. When I got my first bill, I was thrilled. “I got my first bill in Mexico,” I told a friend in a voice note, as if I had just won the lottery.

Simple tasks become little adventures. The first time I paid my Wi-Fi bill I was able to do so online, but this hasn’t worked since. Now, I go to Oxxo (a popular convenience store in Mexico). I pay the electric bill at the CFE building and my gas bill at an ATM-like machine at a nearby bank. I think I could pay them all at the bank, but they have different due dates, so it’s just as easy to go to the respective locations and pay them individually.

I will admit that I have a new appreciation for Target after searching for home goods and furniture in Mexico City. Thankfully, I have friends to help me navigate shopping for necessities. “Where would I find hangers?” I messaged a friend one afternoon. “And candles?”

Some things have been easier, though. On my first night in my new apartment, I Googled where to find an air mattress and found that the first option was the delivery service, Rappi. ‘OMG, I can Rappi an air mattress?’ Within an hour, a guy on a motorbike delivered a queen-sized air mattress to my apartment’s front door. (I tipped him well.) I’ve used Uber to transport large Ikea shopping trips and have carried side tables home on the metro.

Mexico has Amazon, but delivery times can be unpredictable. I didn’t realize the extent of this until I started buying furniture and was given week-long delivery windows. Some items arrived days before their scheduled window, leaving me and the delivery person miffed about me not being home to receive the items. My refrigerator had four different delivery dates, each with a 14-hour window, before it was delivered unexpectedly while I was on a help chat with the company.

Cooking means translating Spanish and converting temperatures from Fahrenheit to Celsius. And your bathroom scale? It’s in kilograms.

I find these little nuances entertaining and part of the experience, but you have to know that everything is an adventure when you first move to a new country. If you approach it with that mindset, it adds a layer of excitement to your days instead of frustration.

You forgo conveniences that you are accustomed to. There is nothing I hate more than seeing people on House Hunters International complaining about the size of rooms in Europe, the lack of closet space, or that there’s no dishwasher. They make some offhand joke about not being able to fit their shoe collection in the closet, let alone their wardrobe. I find myself fighting the urge to yell, ‘Then stay in Texas for fuck’s sake.’

The work-centric culture in the U.S. values excess and convenience, and while you may be seeking to escape this grind, you have to embrace all that comes with it. Life in other countries moves at a different pace, and chances are you won’t find a walk-in closet–you might not have a closet at all. (I speak from experience.) Remember your college dorm refrigerator? That’s what many of my Parisian friends use in their apartment. We hand wash dishes, hang our laundry if we’re lucky enough to have a washing machine, and store our belongings in the most creative of ways.

There is a huge difference between being able to communicate in Spanish on the streets and in social situations. I can do one, but not the other. Learning a new language in my 40s has been a humbling experience. Just when I think I’m making progress, I find myself in social situations where the conversations are fast and the vocabulary is beyond my level. I just stand there hoping that one day it’ll all make sense.

Finding like-minded friends takes time. With Facebook and WhatsApp groups, it’s not hard to find people to hang out with, but finding true friends is a slow process. I often compare it to those first couple of weeks in college when you see roommates going to the dorm cafeteria together. They look mismatched–they haven’t found their people yet. As the semester progresses, the groups start to make more sense. That’s how it was for me. I found myself becoming friends with people I had little in common with beyond the fact that we all lived in Mexico City.

Eventually, I became more selective with whom I spend my time. I have a few close friends and am happy to spend the rest of my time alone. In fact, I prefer it to hanging out with people just for the sake of having company.

It can be quite lonely. There are many days when I don’t talk to anyone. Sometimes, the only interactions I have are ordering at a coffee shop or sending and listening to voice notes over WhatsApp. I haven’t seen my two closest friends since 2019 and 2021.

There’s a difference between your favorite vacation destinations and places you want to live. I love Guatemala. It’s one of my favorite places, but the lifestyle felt too slow when I lived in Antigua and San Pedro La Laguna on two different occasions. Similarly, I find Porto, Portugal to be one of the most charming cities, so I booked an extended stay to see how it felt long-term. I knew within 10 days that it wasn’t a place I could live.

You can’t escape the politics from back home. But you’ll find distance, and that feels healthy. I get to choose whether or not to engage in media, and I’ve come to appreciate having this choice.

You’re constantly learning. I love this about being abroad. Every time I step out of my apartment, I encounter something new. I keep a list in my phone of things I want to Google later. I realize some people might find this tiring, but I find it exhilarating.

Your new friends are likely transient people, so your social circle will continually shift as people scatter themselves across the globe. One of my dearest friends from Mexico City moved to Europe a year after we met. Another friend is now in France, another in Guatemala. The person I spend the most time with is anticipating returning to the U.S. in 2025. The goodbyes never get any easier.

You will never fully feel like you belong–in your new country or in your home country. Every time I’m back in the U.S., it feels familiar yet increasingly foreign. It’s a strange conundrum to belong and not belong to multiple places at once

The process of learning to live in another country is not a linear one. There are victories and setbacks, moments when things seem to be getting easier, only to be followed by unexpected roadblocks. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything, and while I don’t know if Mexico will be my forever home, it’s not the U.S. that I dream about returning to.