The Suitcase Was Easy. The Identity Crisis Was Not.
When I packed two suitcases, shipped three boxes, and boarded a one-way flight from Toronto to Lisbon, I thought I had done the hard part. I had quit my stable job, said goodbye to a decade of friendships, and signed a lease on an apartment I had only seen in photographs. I was brave, I told myself. Adventurous. Ready.
What I was not ready for was the version of myself that was waiting on the other side of that flight.
Moving to a new country does not just change your address. It dismantles the scaffolding of who you thought you were. And what grows in its place, slowly and sometimes painfully, is something far more honest.
When Nobody Knows You, You Have to Decide Who You Are
Back home in Canada, I had a shorthand identity. I was the reliable one in my friend group, the overachiever at work, the daughter who called every Sunday, the person who knew where every good coffee shop was and which grocery store had the best produce. My personality was, in large part, a product of my context.
In Lisbon, none of that context existed. Nobody had any preconceived notions about me. I could have reinvented myself entirely, and for a while, that felt thrilling. But it also felt terrifying, because without the mirror of familiar relationships and routines, I had to ask myself a question I had been quietly avoiding for years: Who am I when nobody is watching?
The answer came slowly, in small moments. The way I still made my bed every single morning even when no one would ever know. The way I gravitated toward the quieter corners of busy markets. The way I felt genuinely, deeply happy eating a simple meal alone at a table by the water, no phone, no company, just the sound of tram bells in the distance.
I was, it turned out, more introverted than I had ever admitted. More content with simplicity than my career-driven life had allowed. More curious about small, beautiful things than about big, impressive achievements.
The Loneliness That Teaches You Something
I will not sugarcoat it. There were weeks in those first months when the loneliness was so thick I could feel it in my chest like something physical. I cried in a supermarket once because I could not read the label on a cleaning product and I missed knowing where things were. I felt invisible in a way I had never experienced before.
But loneliness, I learned, is one of the most clarifying emotions a person can experience. When you strip away the noise of a busy social life, the obligations, the events, the group chats that never stop buzzing, you are left alone with your own thoughts in a way that most modern lives never allow.
And those thoughts told me things.
- They told me that I had been saying yes to things out of obligation for years, not genuine desire.
- They told me that some of my closest friendships had been built on proximity and habit rather than true connection.
- They told me that I had been performing a version of ambition that I had borrowed from other people, not built from my own values.
- They told me that I was, underneath all of it, someone who wanted a slower, more intentional life.
None of that was comfortable to hear. But it was necessary.
What Other Cultures Teach You About Your Own Assumptions
Living in Portugal introduced me to a pace of life I had intellectually admired but never truly understood. Lunch is not a transaction here. It is an event. Shops close in the afternoon. People sit in plazas without looking at their phones. There is a concept in Portuguese culture called saudade, a kind of bittersweet longing for things loved and lost, and it is treated not as weakness but as a natural, even beautiful part of being human.
I had spent my entire adult life treating nostalgia and sadness as problems to be solved. Here, they were simply part of the landscape.
That shift in perspective changed me more than any self-help book ever had.
The Assumptions I Carried Without Knowing
Moving abroad is like holding your home culture up to a light you have never had access to before. Suddenly you can see its shape clearly, including the parts you never noticed because you were always inside them.
I had grown up in a culture that equated busyness with worth. That celebrated hustle. That treated rest as something you earned rather than something you needed. I had absorbed all of that without question.
Watching people in Lisbon live differently, not lazily, but deliberately, was the first time I genuinely questioned whether the way I had been living was a choice or simply a default setting I had never thought to change.
The Relationships That Survived the Distance
One unexpected gift of moving abroad was the clarity it brought to my relationships. When you remove convenience from the equation, what remains is intention. The friends who stayed in touch were not necessarily the ones I had seen most often at home. They were the ones who actually wanted to know me, not just be near me.
We had phone calls that lasted two hours. We sent long emails. We visited. The distance, painful as it was, filtered out the noise and left behind something genuinely valuable: the knowledge of who my people really were.
And perhaps more importantly, it taught me what I needed from relationships. I needed depth over frequency. Honesty over politeness. People who were curious about the world and about themselves.
Who I Am Now, Two Years Later
I still live in Lisbon. I have built a small, quiet, wonderful life here. I work as a freelance writer, which is something I told myself for years I was not brave enough to do. I have a handful of close friends from different corners of the world. I eat well, walk slowly, and read more books than I have since childhood.
Am I a completely different person? No. The core of who I was before the move is still there, and I have made peace with the parts of myself I used to try to edit away. The introversion. The love of stillness. The deep need for meaning over achievement.
But I am more honest now. More deliberate. More myself.
What Moving Taught Me That Nothing Else Could
- Discomfort is data. Every moment of struggle abroad pointed directly at something worth examining.
- Identity is more flexible than we think. You are not permanently who your environment shaped you to be.
- Belonging starts within. You cannot find a place to belong until you know who it is that needs to belong.
- Rest is not a reward. It is a requirement, and most of us are severely behind.
- Connection requires intention. Real relationships do not survive on proximity alone.
- The life you imagine is closer than you think. Fear makes it look farther away than it actually is.
A Note to Anyone Who Is Thinking About It
If you are standing at the edge of a big change, whether it is moving abroad, changing careers, ending a relationship, or simply choosing a different kind of life, I want to offer you this: the version of yourself that exists on the other side of that fear is not a stranger. It is the truest version of you, the one that has been waiting patiently beneath all the noise.
You will not lose yourself by leaving. You will find yourself, probably in a supermarket, probably crying over a cleaning product label, probably laughing about it five minutes later.
And that will be exactly where the real story begins.