There’s a version of moving abroad that exists only on Instagram. Cobblestone streets. Coffee in a foreign language. A caption that says “new beginnings” with three emojis and a sunset.
Nobody posts the part where you cry in a grocery store because you can’t find the spice your mother uses, and you don’t know the word for it anyway. No one posts the loneliness of being abroad the quiet, unglamorous kind that doesn’t make it into the highlight reel.
That part doesn’t fit the aesthetic. But it’s real. And it’s where this story actually starts.
The loneliness nobody warns you about
I didn’t expect the loneliness to be loud. I expected it to whisper a quiet ache on a Sunday afternoon when everyone back home is together and you’re three time zones and one too many flights away. I expected missing people. Surprisingly, I didn’t expect to miss versions of myself, the one who didn’t have to explain her accent, her name, her home.
For a while, I thought something was wrong with me because I was struggling. In fact, nobody had warned me that the hardest part of an adventure isn’t the adventure itself. It’s the in-between. The unglamorous Tuesday. The empty apartment. The friend group you haven’t built yet.
The culture shock that catches you off guard abroad
It’s never the big things that throw you. I expected the Alps to look different from Nairobi obviously. I expected the language barrier. However, what I didn’t expect were the small things, how silence is normal here, how punctuality is sacred, how strangers don’t hand out smiles the easy way people back home do.
Switzerland taught me that culture shock isn’t really about the place; rather, it’s about realizing how much of “you” was shaped by the place you came from, and now deciding which parts to keep and which to let evolve. According to research on the four stages of culture shock, the disorientation I felt is one of the most common and most underdiscussed parts of relocating.
Making friends as a foreigner is its own sport
Nobody tells you that as an adult, making friends, especially abroad, feels like applying for a job you’re not sure you’re qualified for. There’s no school hallway and no built-in proximity. Instead, it’s just you, choosing again and again to show up, to be the one who reaches out first, to risk the awkward silence of a first coffee with a stranger.
It took time, rejection, and staying when it would have been easier to retreat into homesickness. But slowly, I built a new kind of family, not by blood but by choice. People who didn’t know the Kenyan version of me but love the Swiss version just the same.
What I've learned about myself that I never asked to learn
Here’s the thing nobody prepares you for: leaving home doesn’t just show you the world. Rather, it shows you yourself, in a way, staying home never could.
I learned that I am more resilient than I gave myself credit for, and that homesickness and happiness can coexist in the same breath. Additionally, I learned that “home” was never really a place; it was a feeling I had the power to build, again and again, anywhere I chose to plant myself.
They say I came into the world feet first, breech, legs first, ready to go somewhere before I’d even taken my first breath. I believe “I came out already trying to leave.”
Perhaps some of us are built restless. Built for the in-between. Built to find home in the unfamiliar, again and again, until “everywhere and nowhere” stops feeling like a loss and starts feeling like the whole point.
If you're a Wild Soul too
If you’re reading this from your own version of far-from-home homesick on a Tuesday, lonely in a beautiful place, wondering if you made the right choice, I want you to know: the hard parts don’t mean you made a mistake. They mean you’re growing into someone braver than the version of you that stayed.
You’re not alone in the in-between. None of us are.
