You Don’t Start Over, You Continue
You don’t start over. You bring everything with you.
Most people think leaving is the hard part.
It isn’t.
Leaving is a decision.
Living with it after that is where things can come apart a little—and then, slowly, come back together in a different way.
We left the United States in our 50s.
Not to retire. Not to escape.
We left because we wanted a different life.
What I didn’t fully understand at the time is that wanting a different life also means becoming a different person.
Part of an ongoing series about living abroad, rebuilding your identity, and figuring out how things work once you get there.
That’s also the good part. You moved. You wanted this.
You just might not have been ready for all of the changes that come.
You might just get a different life. You might not be as ready for it as you imagine, and that is okay.
I wasn’t.
Bref:
Leaving is a decision. Living with it is a process. You bring your habits, your identity, and your assumptions with you—and most of them don’t quite work the same way anymore. The isolation, the confusion, the small daily frictions—that’s not failure. That’s rebuilding.
After You Leave
Everyone talks about leaving. That conversation is really trending in the US these days.
Where to go. The decision to leave. The moment you finally go.
That part is hard.
It’s also just one part.
What I don’t see talked about much is what comes after.
Because you don’t just arrive somewhere new.
You arrive with everything you built before.
And if you’ve lived a full life — a career, routines, relationships, habits — you’re not starting over clean. You’re bringing it with you.
What You Carry
We left in our 50s. That wasn’t accidental.
We didn’t want to retire somewhere. We wanted to live somewhere. Build again. Meet people. Be part of something.
But there are always trade-offs.
My wife & I tend to say: “There’s no paradise.”
And we mean it in a good way.
We don’t want perfect.
I’ve seen a lot of people make this move. They leave, they land, and then… they try to recreate the same life in a different place.
Same habits. Same rhythms. Same blind spots.
But a different place, a different language, culture, history, is different in ways that reveal themselves slowly.
And if your habits are good, recreating the life you had is a good idea.
If they’re not, it really isn’t.
And if you don’t actually know what your habits are, that’s where things can get interesting.
Time Alone
Because you’re going to spend time alone.
More than you think.
And that time isn’t neutral.
It does something to you.
You start to notice things you didn’t have time to notice before. Not just about the place, but about yourself.
Without the usual stuff — work, social circles, the small confirmations you get from people who already know you — you don’t get reinforced in the same way.
You have to define yourself again, in smaller, quieter ways.
You also have to figure out how to be seen without the usual tools.
Languages are funny things. We tend to speak, and behave, differently in different languages.
Who are you in a conversation when you don’t quite have the words?
Who are you when nobody knows what you used to do, or what you were good at?
Who are you when the familiar things are not reflecting you back?
That can feel like isolation.
Sometimes it is.
But it’s also where the rebuilding begins.
After the rush
The travel slows down. Logistics settle. And what’s left is just you, in a different place, without what used to hold everything together.
No familiar markers. No automatic roles. No easy feedback loop telling you who you are.
That’s a kind of pressure.
On your routines. On your sense of self. On your relationship.
You need to be able to talk about that. Honestly, consistently.
I haven’t always done that well. I haven’t always realized that I needed to.
Writing is probably how I deal with it. It’s how I get a handle on things. If I’m writing a lot, it usually means I’m trying to understand something I don’t quite have yet.
I write a lot.
Learning Again
And there’s a lot you don’t have, at least at first.
You go from being someone who knows what they’re doing — professionally, socially, culturally — to someone figuring out basic interactions again.
Language is part of that.
I understand French pretty well at this point. When people speak to me, I’m fine. When I speak back, it’s… less precise.
But at some point, you realize the same thing applies to everything.
The “syntax” of your new life is off.
You may not be so easily understood. Or heard.
Your timing is off. Your instincts are off. Your assumptions may not be correct.
You hesitate where you never used to. You misread things you would have understood.
And you have to decide:
Do I need to be perfect here?
Or do I just need to get what I came for?
Can I be a part of this place without completely fitting in?
These are not the same thing.
You’re not an American (if you are one) until you leave America.
The deeper shift, though, is quieter.
When you leave, you lose the easy definitions.
You’re not “from there” in the same way anymore. And you’re not fully “from here” either.
For years, I’ve said you don’t really understand being American until you leave the United States.
What I meant was this:
When all the smaller identities fall away — the city, the neighborhood, the job — you’re left with something different.
Who are you, without all that?
That question doesn’t always show up right away.
A lot of people don’t ever ask that question and you might be the most introspective person in the world, but I think it’ll still surprise you.
But if you stay long enough, it comes.
It’s not always dramatic. It’s quieter. More persistent.
It sits underneath everything else. It is the underpinnings of your new life.
You don’t arrive understanding a place.
You arrive only beginning to.
You also don’t understand where you’re going as well as you think you do.
You might think you do. You’ve read about it, watched videos, maybe even spent time there. You have an idea of how it works. What it feels like. What your life will look like inside it.
But that understanding is from the outside.
It’s selective. It’s edited. It’s based on moments, not saturation.
You’re inside it now.
Living somewhere is different.
It’s not the highlights. It’s the repetitions. Small frictions.
You don’t really know a place until you have to solve problems inside it. Your problems, your life. What you need.
And even then, it takes longer than you expect.
The Place
And then there’s the place itself.
France is not easy.
It’s beautiful. The food is great. The people, once you get to know them, are often incredibly kind.
I like France.
But it’s a culture with edges.
It values language. Precision. Social awareness.
People talk to each other. A lot. That matters.
If you can’t participate in that, you feel it.
Not always directly. But you feel it.
What Changes
At the same time, your idea of the place — whatever you imagined from the outside — starts to break down.
It has to.
I can’t imagine anyone’s fantasy version of France includes a chainsaw in the supermarket.
Maybe it does.
But when you live here, at some point, that makes perfect sense.
And maybe that’s the needed shift.
You stop trying to match the place to your expectations.
Adjust yourself to what you experience.
See the place on its own terms, with its own complexities. A living, changing, dynamic culture.
That’s the part nobody really talks about.
Not the leaving.
The living with it.
I write about this a few times a week—living abroad, food, culture, and the parts people don’t usually explain.
If you’ve made a move like this—or you’re thinking about it—I’m curious what part surprised you most.
Not the leaving.
The part after.
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Keith Christiansen
Keith Christiansen
