There is no single way of living a successful expat life. As in everything else in life, success depends on your definition of it, or the definitions you were exposed to when growing up. Perhaps part of the adventure of being an expat is often to challenge those definitions, to make sure that you are not a fully finished ‘individual’ but someone still open to questioning your values or someone who may even be trying to go beyond one’s family’s ideas of how life should be lived. Yet what happens when the major expat hurdles come about in your new adventure?
As a Portuguese citizen who has previously been an expat myself (living in the UK for large chunks of my life) I am incredibly sensitive to questions of migration. Migration is both exciting and hard. Anxiety will be a part of your expat journey at some stage, if for no other reason than that you’re human. Culture shock is often named as the set of experiences connected to that anxiety.
Much as you are enjoying your experience abroad, remember that when living in another country, your mind is always working through things and investing effort in determining patterns. The blog text below introduces us to some of the main elements of culture shock: