Where in the World Are You Building Your Life?
You don’t fall in love with a place before you move there. You fall in love with it two years later, once you’ve stopped fighting it.
Two years ago I sat in our house in England and dreaded a move I had already agreed to make. Doha wasn’t a dream of mine. I wasn’t chasing sun or souks or a new passport stamp in my collection. I was leaving a country I understood for one I didn’t, taking my husband and two small daughters somewhere I couldn’t picture, and if I’m honest, most of what I felt in those last few months wasn’t excitement. It was grief for a life I already knew how to live.
I packed anyway. We landed anyway. And for a long while after that, I was still the American woman from England who happened to be living in Doha. Not someone building anything here. Just someone waiting to see if this was a mistake.
I didn’t open up to this place because I decided to one morning. I opened up because staying closed was exhausting, and because somewhere around month eight I noticed my daughters had quietly stopped asking when we were going home. Doha was home to them already. They had friends whose parents came from six different countries and thought nothing of it. They’d started answering “where are you from” with a shrug and three different answers instead of one. Watching them settle before I did was its own kind of correction.
What actually changed my mind wasn’t the weather or the apartment or any of the things people assume make a move abroad feel worth it. It was the options I started seeing for my kids that I never would have had in America or England. It was a culture that welcomed people from everywhere without asking them to explain themselves first. It was slowly, unglamorously finding a handful of people who understood exactly what it costs to leave everything familiar behind, because they’d done it too.
That’s the part nobody tells you before you go. The leap itself is the easy part. You sign the lease, you book the flight, you say the brave thing out loud to your friends at the goodbye dinner. The actual work starts after you land, when the adrenaline wears off and you’re standing in a kitchen you don’t recognize, in a country where you don’t know a single grocery store, wondering who you’re supposed to call when something goes wrong.
I’ve watched this play out with almost everyone I know who has made a similar move. The first year is disorientation dressed up as adventure. You’re too busy setting up a life to notice you haven’t built one yet. It’s the second year, when the newness wears off and you have to decide whether to keep resisting or actually plant something, that tells you who you’re going to become in this place. Some people never make that turn. They stay tourists in their own home for years, always half-packed, always comparing everything to what they left. The ones who do make the turn are the ones who go looking for their people instead of waiting to be found.
Building a global life was never really about the location. It was about becoming someone who could sit in discomfort long enough to find community on the other side of it. Someone who could let her kids define home differently than she was taught to. Someone who stopped treating “settled” as a place you arrive and started treating it as something you build, slowly, on purpose, usually with people you didn’t know a year ago and now can’t imagine your life without.
That’s exactly what Home Abroad has spent its first year doing for people making this leap in every direction, to every country, for every reason. And for its one year anniversary, they’re opening something I think is worth your time.
They’re calling it the Wall. It’s a place to answer one question: where in the world are you building your life? Maybe you’ve already made the move and you’re two years in like me, finally exhaling. Maybe you’re mid-leap, still unpacking boxes and unsure if you did the right thing. Maybe you haven’t gone yet and you’re just starting to let yourself imagine it. All of it belongs there.
Every name that signs the Wall is entered to win a full year of Home Abroad. Ten keys are being given away. Two of those go further, into a private half hour at Kaila’s own kitchen table, one to one.
Entries close July 11. The keys are drawn live on July 13.
Go add your line. Tell them where you are, or where you’re headed, or where you’re still deciding. Somewhere on that Wall is someone who’s about to make the same leap you did, and hasn’t found their person yet.