- Nadia Crevecoeur, a 26-year-old project manager, saw friends have amazing experiences living abroad.
- But when she lived in Europe for eight months, she felt isolated, homesick, and misunderstood.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Nadia Crevecoeur, a 26-year-old project manager from New York who traveled to and lived in many countries, including China, Portugal, Ireland, Germany, France, Denmark, and Italy, before moving back to the US in 2023. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I have always had a strong interest in international culture and politics, and saw myself as somebody who would be a global citizen. It was the vision that I had for my life, and my studies also steered me towards that direction.
In college, I studied international affairs and had the privilege of living abroad in Geneva, Switzerland, and Brussels, Belgium. I had a great time in those countries. After graduating, I thought about participating in an international teaching program and following in my friends' footsteps.
A lot of people who study international affairs or work in the field end up living abroad. I had seen many people do it successfully. I thought they had great lives and had life-changing experiences, and I wanted that for myself.
When moving to a new country, you have to realize that the mindset of thinking is different. There are just so many little things that contribute to a cultural shift like food, language, and even mannerisms.
In school, I thought I wanted to be a nomad and drift around.
But after moving to Europe to teach in 2022, I found that, unless I'm living somewhere super close to the US, I don't think I can live abroad. It's just not for me.
Living somewhere is not the same as visiting
I don't think a lot of people realize that studying abroad is a completely different experience than working and living abroad.
I'm not new to European culture, but the cultural differences I experienced living there were a lot more than I initially anticipated.
The reality of social media is that whenever you mention a specific country people from there tend to send you hate mail, so I'll leave it broad.
During the eight months that I lived in Europe, I felt a lot of isolation and homesickness. I know every traveler deals with this, but mine just felt overwhelming.
I'm usually a very outgoing person. I love going out to do anything, even if it's just walking around and taking pictures or exploring a new cafe — I'm very motivated by fun. But I started to notice I didn't want to do the same things that normally bring me excitement.
My personality started to change in a way that I had not known myself to be. I became very introverted and stopped engaging with people. I'm typically characterized as an overachiever, but it became very difficult to just do basic tasks like keep a schedule.
Depression looks differently in Black women — that was something that I wasn't aware of.
I felt alone and misunderstood
I never walked into this thinking it was going to be easy, because I know it's tough. My parents are a living example of the difficulties immigrants experience.
While living in Europe, many factors contributed to a larger feeling of "I'm not from here, I'm a foreigner." They were never intentional, but they all added up.
While race is widely talked about in the US — we have it on all of our government forms — I realized it's not talked about as much in Europe.
What makes me feel whole as a person is being understood or not having to justify my existence. I was constantly doing that in Europe — people were just really confused about my identity. My parents are Haitian immigrants and I was born in the United States.
In the context of the US, I'm not just a woman, I'm a Black woman. It's a large part of how I view myself in this world.
Whenever I tried to explain my identity to Europeans, they were really confused. People would say, "Why are you always bringing race into the conversation," or, "Your parents are Haitian, so you are Haitian."
I would have to explain to them that I don't really speak Creole, and I wasn't born in Haiti. They could not compute, it was like a glitch.
Identities are complex and nuanced, so I'm not here to make an indictment on their culture. I'm just saying, as someone who grew up with a strong understanding of my own identity, finding myself in situations where I constantly felt gaslit was both surprising and exhausting.
It wasn't something I wanted to deal with.
I'm much happier living in the US
In 2023, I moved back to the States.
I'm based in New York, where I was born, and have family close by. I 100% feel like myself again and a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders — I just feel more on top of my life.
Sometimes you don't realize how much your environment weighs on you until you change it.
In the larger travel community, a lot of people just say, "Hey, it's easy to pick up your whole life and move." I see articles about people having the best time of their lives. I feel constantly inundated with that perspective, but there's so much more that nobody talks about.
On my blog, I talk a lot about feeling like a bit of a failure because I wasn't able to successfully adapt to a new culture. But reflecting back on it, I believe the fact that I went alone probably made a huge difference to my experience. I imagine that feeling of isolation is somewhat easier if you have a built-in person, like a partner or a friend, with you abroad.
For most of my life, being far from my family never fazed me. But as I got older, I became more homesick. I think it has a lot to do with the different milestones my family achieved in the last few years.
When I was working abroad in 2022, I came home to visit my family. We watched old videotapes of my siblings' and my baptisms and birthday parties, and it was so cute to see the younger versions of ourselves in those 20-year-old home videos.
I realized I was not going to be in any of my niece's home videos. I wanted my siblings' kids to remember me, not just know who I am.
Missing key family moments was really going to be difficult for me to swallow. It put everything into perspective for me.
My purpose in living abroad was to thrive, but I just wasn't seeing myself thrive like I did back in the States.