There’s no place like home: Embracing expat otherness

I’m writing this from Vienna airport, at about 2 in the morning (note to self: proofread sometime the sensible side of midnight), and, unsurprisingly, I’m thinking about travel. I’ve spent the last seven days in Austria, visiting friends who recently relocated here from Paris (traitors). I presume it’ll be the first of many visits, given the friends in question are two of my very favourite people, and all week I’ve been enjoying the luxury of exploring this lovely country – snippets of city and countryside and culture – at the unhurried pace you can afford to a place you know you’ll return to.

As well as travel, I’ve been thinking about the expatriate experience, and how the two together have changed my relationship to… well, the whole world, actually. Not to be dramatic or anything. As someone born to parents from two different countries, who now lives in neither of those countries, the matters of identity and belonging are often on my mind. Ever-shifting abstractions that they are, I find them endlessly interesting to interrogate. So, let’s do some interrogating.

Expat otherness

I have lived in Paris for almost exactly 8 years, and whilst it’s fair to say I’ve long since been pretty damn parisienne, I’m clearly not – nor will I ever be – French. I’m very comfortable in this country; more at home than I’ve ever felt anywhere else; thoroughly assimilated in a culture that made more sense to me than the one I grew up in long before I even moved here. But I don’t have the references of a native française, having neither been raised in France, nor by French parents. I didn’t watch French kids’ TV, or listen to the French charts on the radio whilst I ate French breakfast (quelle dommage) at the kitchen table before going to French school, or sit around the same table for French dinner (worse dommage) with my French family discussing French politics and French celebrities and so on. 

In short, as an enthusiastic expat, there are lots of things I “get” and some I simply do not. And as a result, there will always be a bit of a sense of “otherness” for me, living in Paris. That’s to be expected; an inevitable part of the expatriate experience. 

Problem is, I also feel like a fish out of water whenever I return to England. It’s an understatement to say I don’t quite “get” everything going on there either. To be honest, I never did to begin with, and that’s only been exacerbated with time, more pronounced for every year I’ve spent away. Another inevitability of expatriation? Probably. Compounded by the quirks of neurodivergent hardwiring? Almost certainly. Either way, I definitely experience an otherness, albeit of a different variety, when I’m “back home” too. This one is more uncomfortable, largely because it’s less easily-explained than any outsidership in France. (I explored this feeling at greater length here.)

Home-ish

It’s an odd feeling to grapple with, this impression of otherness no matter where you are.  (Did somebody say “identity crisis”?) But my perspective on it, never overwhelmingly negative to begin with, has shifted lately.

The thing is, I might not feel 100% at home in any single place. But the trade-off is that I feel mostly at home in multiple places. In France, my adopted country. In England, where I was born and raised. In Ireland, where my mother and that whole half of my family hail from – as well as my partner, making the country more home-feeling than ever this last year. To a lesser extent, in the US – somewhere I’ve been a frequent visitor to for a decade now, staying with friends and family. And, increasingly, in Barcelona too, the city my sister and brother-in-law have made their home in.

Apart from spending a lot of time in a particular place, having friends and family as locals is a strong factor in the depth of the experience you’re likely to have there, and subsequently (I think), the attachment you’re likely to develop. Accompanied by residents, native or otherwise, you see different sights, eat at different spots, perhaps have access to a car to get out of the city, maybe get to socialise with other locals – and if there’s a different language in the equation, having a fluent speaker on hand is inevitably going to enhance your experience a hundredfold. I can heavily attest to this, since the people I love are scattered so far and wide across the world. That’s a bittersweet thing, and perhaps something I’ll revisit in a post of its own another time, but it has given me the exceptional privilege of being able to explore a multitude of places with people who know them intimately. 

The nicest kind of normal

I’m also extremely lucky to be have been able to do a lot of solo travel over the last few years, exploring alone where I don’t have family and friends to visit or accompany me. And the more proverbial pins placed on the map, the easier it gets to slot into each new place. The more instinctive it becomes to navigate unfamiliar cities, and pick up public transport systems, and slip into the ebb and flow of local life as unobtrusively as possible. 

Learning a few phrases of the relevant language (or writing them down for easy access) has helped enormously with all of the above, and is something I’ve long since made a habit of, as much for politeness as for practicality. Though actually, make no mistake, politeness is a practicality. Hopefully, you want to be respectful to people wherever you go because, y’know, it’s the right thing to do. But there’s no denying that in many places, you’re likely to get a much warmer reception from the locals if you make any kind of effort with their language*, or are even apologetic about the fact that you’re having to revert to your own. 

This, and a hundred other little lessons picked up across 12 years of solo travel have, for me, brought an ease to slipping in and out of different countries and cultures that my teenage self, gazing ravenously at the planes passing over her trainless one-horse hometown, couldn’t have anticipated in her wildest dreams. Hand in hand with the novelty of a new horizon, there is a normalcy now, in the nicest possible way. The world has become that much smaller, more familiar, friendlier – without making its exploration any less exciting. If anything, travel has only gotten more enjoyable, relaxed and free-feeling than ever, curiosity untainted by the anxiousness or uncertainty. 

These days, my assumption is that I will always be able to figure things out, fix the issue, find my way. I’ve learned to rely on myself, to trust myself. I don’t presume everything will go according to plan – in fact, I hope it won’t. But I do presume that everything will be okay. Usually much, much better than okay. Now I think about it, my attitude towards life has gone pretty much the same way. Huh.

“Home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling”

I signed up for yoga classes in my neighbourhood shortly after I moved to Paris. They were managed through an online portal (isn’t everything?), and the teachers each had a profile with a bit of background information about themselves. In one guy’s introduction, under the “nationality” section, he described himself as California-born – “but a citizen of the world”. I thought it was the most nauseatingly pretentious thing I had ever seen. I don’t know if I was more disgusted by the sentiment at the time… or earlier this year, when I realised I now wholeheartedly shared it. Yuck.

In all seriousness, though, the idea of belonging to the world as a whole is one that has always resonated with me. Since I was a child, I’ve found it strange, and sad, how much importance and ownership we assign to the bit of land we happened to be born on. This planet is so vast and varied, and also a hell of a lot older and wilder than humans and our borders and biases and visas and divisions. It’s fifty shades of problematic, in my opinion, to cling too tightly to notions of nationality as identity. We’re so much more nuanced than that. And we can find kinship, community and belonging in all kinds of different ways and places if we’re open to seeking it out. “Home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling,” wrote Cecilia Ahern. Home is where the heart is, said… everyone, ever. Home, to me, is a lot of things, and it’s a lot of places – and it turns out, that suits me very nicely indeed. 

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*I mean any effort at all – even saying just “please” and “thank you” in the local language tends to go a long way. The bar is extremely low for anglophones in particular. Linguistically speaking, people expect VERY little of us.