It's not easy being "other." Being the one who doesn't quite belong, whose accent gives them away, whose presence in a room is noticed before it's understood. But what is expat life, if not exactly that? When we leave our country hoping to build something new somewhere else, we also have to accept that the people who already live there, whose whole lives have unfolded in that place, might like things the way they are. They didn't ask to be "enriched" by our arrival.
Are you actually welcome?
It's strange how rarely expats consider that they might not be a welcome addition to the place they've chosen. You can afford to be there, you're contributing, maybe you're even paying your taxes properly — but none of that guarantees open arms, and there's no real reason it should. You eat differently, speak differently, probably dress differently too. Everything around you feels new and exotic, but you should sit with the fact that you are the new and exotic one to everyone else. That's an uncomfortable realisation, and an important one. There's a real difference between being treated as different and experiencing outright prejudice, and no one should have to tolerate the latter. But expats are not automatically entitled to the space they occupy, and moving through a new culture with humility rather than expectation changes everything about how that experience unfolds.
Being the outsider means learning to sit with not belonging, at least for a while.
The comment I couldn't quite let go of
I moved to Italy nine years ago, my fourth country after Brazil, England, and France. A few years ago I started training as a counsellor, entirely in Italian. My classmates were kind, mostly. But some of the tutors seemed genuinely puzzled by my "otherness." I remember being asked, in front of the group, whether I'd "been to the Boboli Gardens" — as though that settled how Italian I was allowed to feel. Another time, a tutor told the class that I "might find it hard to understand these concepts" because of my Italian, without ever asking me directly whether that was true.
I had a response ready. Something like: "I speak four Latin languages — finding an Italian word I don't understand won't be the challenge here. How many do you speak?" I never said it. Not because I wasn't capable of holding my ground, but because I'd learned, over four countries and half a lifetime abroad, that the blood pressure spike of proving myself to someone comfortable in their own ignorance rarely buys anything worth having. I wanted good grades, not a battle. I stayed quiet, and I let it go.
Letting people sit in their assumptions about you, without correcting them, is a skill I only learned as an expat.
Letting go of the need to prove yourself
That's really what being the minority teaches you, if you let it: the freedom of not needing to be understood by everyone. If someone's world is small enough that a foreign accent reads to them as a sign of limited intelligence, that's a limitation of theirs, not a truth about you. You are allowed to stop auditioning for people who've already decided who you are. That letting go isn't resignation — it's a genuinely useful psychological skill, and one that most people never have to develop until life abroad forces the question: who am I, when the room has already decided?
Some battles aren't worth the blood pressure. Choosing which ones to fight is its own kind of growth.
Be the change, without losing yourself
None of this means staying silent about everything, or pretending difference doesn't exist. It means choosing where your energy goes. We can wish Italians drove differently on roundabouts and still accept that this isn't going to change on our timeline, so we might as well find it funny instead of infuriating. Being "other," being different, and being authentically yourself can all coexist — as long as it comes with a genuine respect for the fact that you are a guest in someone else's home, even years or decades in.
The real shift, the one that actually settles the nervous system, is going from expat to something closer to immigrant: not just visiting a life, but committing to one. That commitment carries real grief with it — for the ease of being understood without translation, for the version of yourself that never had to explain its accent. But it also carries something else: the slow, hard-won sense of having built a life that is entirely, stubbornly your own, in a place that never owed you belonging in the first place.
Being the minority doesn't stop being hard. Nine years in, I still notice it. But I've learned to carry it differently — with less need to be understood, and more trust that the life I've built here speaks for itself.