Expatriation misunderstood

The lawyer told me I had no chance.

I had borrowed money to pay her. I was living in a temporary Airbnb — the only solution I’d managed to pull together after losing my place. I was still recovering from surgery to reconnect a nerve in my finger after the accident. And I was facing deportation from the country I had chosen to build my life in.

She agreed to take my case — not because she believed I could win, but to buy me six months to pack my things.

I looked at her and said: I agree. I accept your conditions. But… let’s make this case as strong as possible.
We won.

I’m not going to tell you that France is easy. The prefecture queues, the language barrier, the loneliness of starting from zero in a country that didn’t ask you to come — I know all of it. I lived it. But here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately, watching post after post in expat groups about isolation, rejection, frustration:

What if the difficulty is not the obstacle?

What if it’s the whole point?

When I arrived in France, I carried something I wasn’t aware of — an unexamined belief that this country, this change of scenery, would somehow deliver me a better version of my life. As if happiness was waiting for me here, like a package at the door.

France didn’t get that memo.

And the collision between my expectation and reality — the rejections, the bureaucracy, the loneliness — didn’t create my problems. It revealed them. Problems that were mine long before I ever boarded a plane.

Take the question of friendship — one of the most common complaints in every expat group.

‘I can’t find real connections here. I’m so isolated.’

I understand it. I felt it too. But I want to ask something uncomfortable: When you walk into an expat meetup, what energy do you bring with you?

Because I’ll be honest about mine: for a long time I walked in empty, expecting the room to fill me up. Lonely, disconnected from myself, silently asking strangers to fix something I hadn’t fixed in myself.

That’s not a connection. That’s extraction. And people feel it, even when nobody says it out loud.
The loneliness that expatriation surfaces — the feeling of being invisible, of not belonging — rarely begins in France. It usually has a much longer history. Expatriation just removes the distractions that were keeping it hidden.

And that, I think, is the hidden gift.

When you strip away your familiar environment, your social circle, your language, your habits — everything that was propping up a version of yourself — what’s left is just you. Raw, unfiltered, impossible to avoid.

Most people experience that as a crisis. I did too.
But it’s also the most valuable opportunity for personal transformation that life can hand you.

Looking back, the difficulties didn’t interrupt my life here. They built it.

Expatriation didn’t give me a better life in the way I naively imagined when I arrived.
It gave me something I was unconsciously looking for even before coming here: meeting my true self. Those parts of myself that all of us have: resourceful, resilient, audacious, unshakeable, sovereign, alive.

So if you’re in a hard moment right now — the paperwork, the loneliness, the feeling that this was a mistake — I’m not going to tell you it’s fine. It might genuinely be hard.

But I want to offer you a different question than “When does it get easier.”

“What is this moment asking me to become?” ❤️