Sometime in early October during my first year in college, my phone bill was atrocious. Long before cell phones became a thing, I relied on landlines to make calls. Not just any calls, but long distance and international ones. And apparently, I was making quite a few of them.
In my defense, it was the first time I was living far from my family and friends. And while many of us go through this when we head to college, I was in the precarious situation where the people I loved were a solid two hemispheres and several flights away. I’d certainly moved before, but I’d never moved by myself. Throw in the fact that I was a teenage Third Culture Kid returning to my passport country, and the adjustment wasn’t going so well.
Hence, the ridiculous phone bill.
I can’t remember how many times I called my family and friends. But apparently, phone calls to multiple states and African nations aren’t cheap, and they wreaked havoc on my budget. There was no particular reason for all the calls. There was no great emergency. Half the time, I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to talk about.
I just missed home a lot.
That feeling has a name, of course. But what most people don’t tell you is that homesickness rarely shows up alone.
Merriam-Webster defines homesickness as a longing for home and family while absent from them. Simple enough. But when you’re living it, it’s rarely that clean. It can manifest as anxiety, depression, or a quiet loss of motivation that creeps up on you slowly, often most intensely in the first six months in a new place. It disrupts your sense of routine, chips away at your confidence, and can make even small daily tasks feel heavier than they should.
Research on expats specifically is limited, but data suggests that upwards of 75% of people who relocate will experience some form of homesickness. That’s most of us. Which means if you’re going through it, you’re in very good company — even if it doesn’t feel that way when you’re sitting alone in a new apartment on a Sunday afternoon wondering why you ever thought this was a good idea.
Here’s what makes the expat version particularly layered: you chose this. You planned for it. You probably told everyone you knew how excited you were. So when the longing hits, it arrives with a side of guilt and confusion that people who moved for an employer or a partner or necessity don’t always carry in the same way. The internal monologue goes something like: I wanted this. So why does it feel like this?
Because homesickness is only part of what you’re actually feeling. It brought some friends with it.
Loneliness is the one people confuse with homesickness most often, but they’re not the same thing. Homesickness is about missing what was. Loneliness is about what isn’t yet. It’s the friendships you haven’t built, the shorthand you don’t have with anyone around you, the absence of people who already know you well enough that you don’t have to explain yourself. You can be surrounded by people and still feel profoundly lonely in a new country. The two can coexist, but treating them as the same problem means you’ll solve for the wrong thing.
Then there’s grief, which almost no one names out loud in the context of moving abroad. But grief is exactly what it is. You left something. Even if you left by choice, even if you left because you outgrew it, you still left. A version of your life, relationships you can no longer maintain in the same way, a sense of ease and belonging you hadn’t realized you’d taken for granted, all of that deserves to be mourned properly. Trying to skip past that grief by staying relentlessly busy or optimistic is one of the most common things expats do, and one of the most counterproductive.
Cultural fatigue is what happens when all of that adapting catches up with you. The mental effort of translating not just language, but behavior, expectations, and context is exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t done it. There will be days when you’re tired of figuring things out, tired of being the person who doesn’t quite get the reference, tired of having to work that hard just to get through an ordinary Tuesday.
Underneath all of it, for a lot of people, is the quiet question: did I make a mistake? That question is not the same as the answer being yes. It’s a normal response to discomfort and uncertainty, and it deserves to be examined rather than suppressed.
Here’s something worth knowing before it blindsides you: the emotional intensity of settling in tends to follow a pattern, and the six-month mark is often where it peaks.
The first few weeks are all adrenaline with new sights, new routines, the novelty of everything. Months two and three, the practicalities take over and keep you occupied. But somewhere around month four or five, the newness wears off, the to-do list shrinks, and you’re left with the quieter, harder work of actually building a life. By month six, you’ll likely have one of two experiences: you’ll feel like you’re finally finding your footing, or you’ll feel like the ground has completely shifted beneath you.
If it’s the latter, that’s not a sign that the move has failed. It’s often the sign that the real adjustment is beginning. The honeymoon is over and the actual relationship with your new home is starting. That relationship, like most real ones, takes work.
The most important thing is to stop treating what you’re feeling as a problem to be solved quickly and start treating it as a process to be moved through honestly. That starts with naming it correctly. Is it homesickness, or is it loneliness? Is it grief? Is it cultural fatigue? The answer shapes the response.
Once you can name it, say it out loud to someone who understands. Not to your family back home who will immediately worry and start suggesting you come back, but to other expats who have been in the thick of it. Online communities and local expat groups are connections matter because they normalize what you’re experiencing in real time rather than in retrospect.
Getting immersed isn’t just a distraction tactic, it’s a genuine tool. Homesickness is rooted in the past; building community is an act of investing in the present. Find the interest groups, the volunteer opportunities, the faith community, the book club — whatever it is that pulls you out of your apartment and puts you in proximity to people with shared values. This is slower than it sounds. It can take months before those connections feel real. Be patient with the timeline.
Creating new traditions matters more than it might seem. When you move, you leave behind a whole architecture of ritual — the Friday night thing, the Sunday routine, the group chat that never sleeps. That architecture made you feel held. Rebuilding it takes intentional effort. Dr. Londi Cox, a therapist with experience working with expats, recommends creating new routines that work within your host environment rather than trying to replicate what you left. The form changes; the function stays the same. That Saturday afternoon call with your best friend is still connection, even if it replaced something that used to happen in person.
If what you’re feeling is persistent, heavy, or starting to interfere with your daily functioning get it’s time to get professional support. Homesickness can be a symptom of something larger that a significant life change has brought to the surface. Undiagnosed or undertreated mental health challenges tend to intensify under the stress of relocation. There’s no version of toughing it out that serves you here. Organizations like the International Therapist Directory exist specifically to connect globally mobile people with mental wellness support, and using them is one of the more practical things you can do for yourself.
Eventually, my phone bill went down. Not because I stopped missing home, but because I remembered why I’d gone in the first place and because I’d started to slowly build something in the place I’d landed. The homesickness didn’t disappear so much as it found its proper proportion. It became one feeling among many, rather than the only one.
That’s what settling actually looks like. Not absence of longing, but the gradual arrival of something worth staying for.
This post is part of The Settling Curve, a TBE series on the emotional and psychological experience of building a life abroad. The next post in the series looks at what happens at the six-month mark — and why that specific moment in the expat journey deserves more conversation than it gets. Read The Six-Month Slump →