Hello and thank you so much for being here! I’m Kimberly Anne, a US expat (immigrant) who moved to Portugal solo in 2022, sight unseen and without a support group. Want more of my backstory? Click here.
The Tea Shop
A few months after I moved abroad, I walked into a little tea shop to buy some loose leaf tea. The owner was leaning on the counter, talking to a friend about the weather. I stood there. I waited. Nobody looked up.
No one said: I’ll be right with you. Or even hello.
Nothing, not even a single glance in my direction. I waited for 5-7 minutes, and then I turned around and walked out.
All the way home, in my head I kept thinking how this would never happen in America. Someone would have greeted me, said “welcome in, can I help you?”. The customer is supposed to come first. This place clearly did not understand customer service.
I told that story for weeks. It was evidence. Proof that things were better where I came from.
I was building a case and it’s what I did with every difference in those first months, though I could not have told you so at the time. I collected them the way a lawyer collects exhibits, and the verdict was always the same, and it was always in my favor.
It took me almost two years to understand that the tea shop was never the problem. I was.
The Body That Moved and the Head That Didn’t
And when I first arrived in Portugal, I did the thing almost everyone does. The thing that’s impossible to warn someone against, because knowing about it doesn’t stop it.
It’s the thing that keeps people disgruntled in the exact life they fought so hard to build.
I compared everything. And not only did I compare everything, most things bothered me.
This is an article about that habit. Why it grabs hold of you the moment you land, why it is so much more dangerous than it looks, and what actually made it stop for me.
There are so many reasons that people who move abroad end up moving back to their home country. I’ve covered a few in other pieces. Lack of community. Feeling like their new place needs to be their forever place. Missing family. But there’s also this one. Comparing. And I’m going to tell you what comparing actually does to you.
When you move somewhere new and you spend your days measuring it against the place you left, you are not living in your new country. You are still living in your old one. You are only visiting the new one. You took your body across an ocean and left your head behind.
There is a particular loneliness in that arrangement, and it is not the loneliness of being far from home. It is the loneliness of not being anywhere at all. Your body is on one continent. Your attention is on another. And the place you are actually standing in, the real one, with its real light and its real smells and its real people, becomes hidden or even lost. You are absent from your own life. And you are absent in the one place you cannot afford to be absent from, which is the present.
This is a completely different life than the one you moved for. You didn’t sell your things and say your goodbyes and fill out all that paperwork so you could stand in a beautiful little eclectic tea shop in a gorgeous old city and run America (or Canada or the UK) in your head.
But that is exactly what I was doing. I had moved, and yet, I hadn’t really moved at all.
That is the life that often ends with people packing back up and going home. Not because the new place failed them. But because they never actually arrived.
A Catalog of Everything That Was Wrong
So let me tell you what I compared, because I think you’ll recognize yourself in at least one of these.
I want to lay them out plainly, because the trick of this habit is that each individual grievance feels reasonable in isolation. It’s only when you stack them up that you see what they really were. Not observations. A campaign.
The trash. Where I live, a lot of apartments and houses don’t have their own bins. You carry your garbage and your recycling across the street or down the block to a shared collection point. When I arrived, this felt absurd to me. I’ll be honest with you, it still isn’t my favorite thing. But I barely think about it now. It’s a thirty-second walk and a thing I do without noticing anymore. A new habit I formed.
The heating. There’s often no central heat and no central air, and a lot of older buildings have no insulation at all. In winter it can be colder inside than it is outside. In summer sometimes it can be hotter inside than out. I have not made peace with this one but I have figured out how to adapt.
I am not going to tell you that you will learn to love every single thing in your new country. You won’t. Some things you’ll just live with. And you know what? It’ll be worth it.
The dog poop on the sidewalks. This one genuinely used to piss me off. I would walk around muttering about it. And now? I honestly don’t even notice it anymore. Same sidewalks. Same dogs. The only thing that changed was me.
And then the customer service. The tea shop. Because almost nobody works on commission here, no one chases you around a store. No one welcomes you in. You are lucky if you get a hello. At first that felt cold to me, even rude. Now I understand it completely differently. Nobody is performing friendliness at me to make a sale. Nobody is pushing me toward something I didn’t come in for, don’t want to buy and can’t afford. The other side of that tea shop is that I am never, ever pressured.
How cool is that? The thing I hated and the thing I came to love were not two things. They were one thing, seen from two different perspectives. Nothing about the tea shop changed in these past years. The only variable in the entire experiment was where I was mentally when I looked at it.
The Things I Braced For and Loved Instead
Here is where it gets interesting. Because some of the things I braced myself for turned out to be the things I love the most.
The food. I did not expect it to be this good, or this affordable. And you can sit in a restaurant for hours. No one rushes you. No one drops the check on your table to turn it over for the next customer. The check does not come until you ask for it. A lunch can take three hours, and that is considered completely normal. I came from a place where the table is a transaction. Here, it’s an afternoon.
Last week a friend and I closed down two different restaurants on two different nights and we were still NEVER asked to leave! We were the only people left and the restaurant staff waited patiently for us to ask for the bill. Wow, just WOW!
Strangers. I knew, going in, that people here don’t smile or say hello to strangers on the street the way they often do back home. I expected that to feel lonely. And at first it did. But once I stopped resisting it and leaned into it, something shifted in me. There is no fake warmth here. Nobody is performing. And when you actually sit down and talk with someone, one on one, they are so kind. The warmth is real precisely because it isn’t being vomited on everyone all day long.
I spent a long time mistaking a greeting for warmth and warmth for a greeting, as if they were the same currency. They are not. One is a reflex a culture trains into you. The other has to be earned and given, one person at a time. I had to lose the first before I could recognize the second when it finally showed up.
And then healthcare, which is honestly one of the biggest reasons I want to stay. Back in the US, I begged for tests. I asked for a DEXA scan, a colonoscopy, a stress test, an MRI, and I was either refused or told I didn’t need them. When I got here, my doctor insisted I have all of those and more, in my first few months, without me asking even once, mostly covered by affordable private insurance. I went from fighting to be taken seriously to being taken care of before I even knew to ask. I recently got my public (free/universal healthcare) family doctor who is running all the tests for free!
The part I want to name here isn’t just financial. It’s the feeling. There is a difference between being treated as a cost to be managed or a walking ATM and being treated as a person to be looked after. I believe our bodies know the difference long before the paperwork. I had gotten so used to being treated as a commodity that being treated as a human genuinely disoriented me. I did not know what to do with a doctor who wanted to run the test I hadn’t thought to ask for.
And the help. This is my favorite thing of all. People here offer to help you, and they don’t want anything in return for it. One day I was wrestling a heavy portable air conditioner out of my car, and a man came running across a parking lot to lift it onto a cart for me. Another time, someone who clearly had almost nothing offered to carry a heavy bag for me across the street, asking for nothing back. When I’ve been sick, friends have shown up at my door with food. I lived for most of my life in the US, and that simply did not happen to me there.
And maybe the biggest one of all. The pace.
I came from a place where the whole rhythm of life is go, go, go. Do, do, do. Drive, drive, drive. Where you EARN your rest, you don’t just take it. Here, and in a large portion of the world, the middle of the day actually slows down. Whole countries pause to eat, to rest, to breathe. And for a long time that drove me a little crazy. Things were closed when I wanted them open. Why was nobody in a hurry?
And then, somewhere in year two, I stopped fighting it. I learned how to embrace it instead and feel my nervous system relax. I learned how to stop working ten to twelve hours a day. How to sit down in the middle of the afternoon and just breathe. I didn’t even know I had forgotten how to do that until a slower country reminded me.
Here is what took me the longest to admit about the pace. My frustration with it was never really about store hours. It was about a belief I had carried across an ocean in my own chest, which was that my worth was based on how much I was producing.
TMI incoming: I was taught that my entire self-worth and my identity was soley about what I did, not who I was. In the family system I came from, the way I was raised: the values I was taught were that money is king, a worthy profession is only that of a doctor or a lawyer and the only thing more important than money was alcohol. Family values, compassion, spouses, children… none of that mattered.
I can’t blame an entire continent for these values or even a state in the US. I shouldn’t “blame” anyone because the people who modeled these values for me were just repeating what they had learned from their ancestors.
But it always felt wrong to me. Oh so very wrong. I never fit in because my values were kindness and love and my family didn’t support those values. I was often berated and told I was useless and hopeless, called names and abused.
I’m telling you all this because I suspect at least one person will be able to identify and I want you all to know the blame game doesn’t work here. For me, the only thing that worked, was leaving the toxic relationships behind and moving to another country. Maybe for you the solution will be different.
But what I learned from living abroad is that a place closing for lunch offends no one directly, it only offended my belief in the things I was taught.
It tells us that we’re allowed to stop, and that the stopping doesn’t cost you anything, it doesn’t affect your self-worth and nobody is keeping tabs on how much you accomplish except for yourself.
After I realized I didn’t need the country to change, I allowed myself to change.
This Isn’t Only About Portugal
None of this is a Portugal thing. I happen to live in Portugal, so these are my examples. But the long, slow meals. The doctor who runs every test. The actual human being who answers the phone in a few minutes when you call up a business. The neighbors who show up. You will find versions of this in Mexico, in Spain, in Italy, in France, in Japan, in Costa Rica, in Uruguay, in so many places around the world. This is not a sales pitch for one country. I am not here to tell you where to go, though I do offer 1:1 consults to help you with that if you need. The point was never the country. The point is what stops happening inside you when you finally put the comparison down.
But there’s a trap on the other side too. If you read all of this and your takeaway is a new ranking, that the slow meals and the neighbors and the doctors make this side of the ocean the winner, then you’ve missed the point completely. You’ve just built a new scoreboard with the numbers flipped.
The Scoreboard
Here is the shift that took me almost two years to make.
I used to think the goal was to win the comparison. To finally decide that my new country was the better one, and feel good about my choice in moving here. That is not it at all. That is just keeping score with a different number at the bottom.
The real shift is putting the scoreboard down completely.
Think about what a scoreboard actually requires. It requires two teams. And when you’re an immigrant standing in your new life keeping score, only one of those teams is present. The other is a ghost. The ghost is the country you left, and you have to keep it alive, keep it present, keep it playing, in order to have something to measure it against.
Every grievance is a small act of loyalty to that ghost. Every time you say “back home we did it better,” you are, in a quiet way, refusing to let the old place live in your past so the new one can live in your present.
As long as you are ranking, better here, worse there, you are still standing with one foot in the country you left behind. You are grading your life instead of living it. The freedom doesn’t arrive when your new country finally wins. It arrives when you stop running the contest at all, when you finally stop comparing.
I still don’t love the cold apartments. I never decided that everything here was superior. That was never the assignment or the point. You don’t have to talk yourself into believing your new home is perfect. You only have to stop living it on a scoreboard.
This distinction saved me, so let me make it as plain as I can. A preference is not a grievance. I am allowed to prefer a warm apartment for the rest of my life. That preference costs me nothing and takes nothing from me. It just remains a harmless fact about me. A grievance is different. A grievance is a preference that you have hooked up to a scoreboard and plugged into the wall. It runs all day. It costs you your afternoons. The goal was never to stop having preferences. It was to unplug them.
What Actually Broke the Habit
So what actually broke the habit for me?
I wish I could hand you a clean thirty-day challenge or some clever rule I made for myself. But… you can’t make it happen by willing it to be so.
It will happen in its own time so let it.
Eighteen years ago I put down a habit in my life that mattered a great deal more than this one. My inheritance. Alcohol and drug addiction.
And an important thing I learned about that is willpower, the white-knuckle kind, was not what made it possible. You cannot muscle your way out of a habit by hating it hard enough. That just gives the habit more of your attention, which is the only thing it eats.
What actually works is quieter and slower than that. First, noticing it, then choosing a different neural pathway. A different response. A different quality of attention. And a strange willingness to stop fighting the thing head on and let it fade on its own.
The comparison habit went exactly the way many habits left me. Not with a battle won on a particular day, but with an ordinary afternoon where I noticed it had gone silent, and realized it had been silent for a good while.
The things that enraged me in year one I genuinely couldn’t even see by year two. Same trash. Same sidewalks. Same dog poop.
At the beginning when I found myself annoyed I tried to reframe. To lean in instead of bracing against. When I caught myself building a case for why my old country did it better, I tried to become curious instead. Why do they do it this way here? What does it give them? The strangers who don’t smile. The lunches that last all afternoon.
The moment I stopped treating the difference as an insult and started treating it as information, the comparison began to lose its grip on me.
A difference can be read two ways. You can read it as an accusation, as the new place doing it wrong, doing it worse, failing to meet a standard you brought with you. Or you can read it as data, as a fact about how people here have decided to live, and a quiet question about what that decision gives them.
The first reading keeps you superior and miserable, which is a genuinely terrible combination to be stuck in. The second reading makes you curious, and curious is the one posture the comparison cannot survive. You cannot rank something and be genuinely curious about it at the same moment. The curiosity crowds the ranking out.
And eventually the annoyances faded out and I stopped noticing them. As a matter of fact when I do notice is when I return to my home country and find the things there that I used to love annoy me now and I find the way things are done in my new country, often to be superior.
There’s a marker hidden in that, by the way, and it’s worth watching for. You’ll know the habit has truly loosened not when your new country stops bothering you, but when your old one starts to. When you go back and find yourself flinching at the thing you used to defend. That’s not disloyalty. It’s just proof that you finally, actually, live somewhere else.
If You’re in the Thick of It Right Now
So here is the practical companion to all of this, because I know some of you are reading this while you’re standing in the middle of it, muttering about the tea shop in your own city. This part is for you.
First, notice when you’re doing it, because you can’t put down a habit you can’t even see. The habit has a tell, and once you know your tell you’ll catch it constantly. Mine was a sentence that started forming in my head: “back home, they would have…” Yours might be the muttering, the story you keep retelling to friends, the little internal eye-roll. Learn your tell. Naming it as it happens is ninety percent of the work, because a habit you can see is a habit you can drop.
Second, when you catch yourself comparing, get curious instead of keeping score. Ask what the difference gives the people who live this way. Not rhetorically. Actually ask it, and try to answer it. The tea shop owner talking to her friend for seven minutes: what does a culture get in exchange for that, that a culture of instant service gives up? There’s a real answer. Going looking for it is the whole exercise. You are not trying to win the answer. You are just trying to be interested, because interest is the exit door to comparing.
Third, separate your preferences from your grievances. Some things you will simply prefer differently for the rest of your life, and that is completely fine. Keep those. Let them be quiet facts about you. The ones to hunt down are the preferences you’ve plugged into the wall, the ones running all day and costing you your afternoons. You don’t have to fix the country. You just have to unplug those.
And fourth, be patient, because some of this simply takes time. Give it two years before you judge how you feel. I mean that almost literally. The person you are at the eighteen-month mark is not the person who stepped off the plane, and neither is the person you’ll be at year three either. This is not a thing you complete. It’s a thing that quietly happens to you when you stop obstructing it.
One day you’ll realize that the thing which used to ruin your entire afternoon has gone completely silent, and you didn’t even do anything to make it stop. That is the day you’ll know you actually live here.
Arrive
And on the other side of all of it, life gets so much lighter.
You stop being a tourist in your own home. You stop grading every single interaction. Some things you will come to love. A few things you’ll still grumble about, and that’s perfectly fine, normal even.
But you will be here. All the way here. Living the life you actually crossed an ocean to find, instead of the one you keep replaying in your head.
Arrival is not a date. It isn’t the day your plane landed and it isn’t the day your residency came through. Those are logistics. Real arrival is an interior event, and it happens on an ordinary day you won’t see coming, the day the comparison finally goes quiet and stays quiet. You cannot schedule it. You can only stop standing in its way. Nobody can do that part for you, and no visa can do it either. You have to be the one who finally puts the old country down.
That is the whole reason you went. Don’t spend your years abroad as a permanent visitor. Arrive.
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—Expat on a Budget (AKA) Living Abroad on a Budget, Expat by Design and My Unknown Adventure by Kimberly Anne
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I cannot tell you how much I loved this. This explained so well how people go abroad wearing their “at home” glasses and the expectation that everything “should” be how it is in their home country. But to me, isn’t that the reason for moving? For something new or different? 🥰🙏🏽💜
Thank you for writing something so relatable and much needed - I just hit the one year mark in my new country (UK to Serbia) and it is easy to stack up the little annoyances opposed to taking a fresh perspective.