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One of the hardest things about expat life is when your friends inevitably leave. For some expats, this happens like clockwork every single year (usually in June), causing heartache, disappointment, and a sense of continually having to begin again with a fresh set of expat friends. An article on The Culture Blend (that was mentioned to us by one of our expat listeners) details this phenomenon perfectly, describing the three types of expats: Stayers, Goers, and Newbies? Which one are you? Or is there, as Tiffany believes, a fourth category: Lifers? Or are those people no longer expats? Join us for this thought-provoking episode! ------------------------------------- ADVERTISE WITH US: Reach expats, future expats, and travelers all over the world. Send us an email to get the conversation started. BECOME A PATRON: Pledge your monthly support of The Bittersweet Life and receive awesome prizes in return for your generosity! Visit our Patreon site to find out more. 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Don't be afraid to start with Episode 1: OUTSET BOOK: Want to read Tiffany's book, Midnight in the Piazza? Learn more here or order on Amazon. TOUR ROME: If you're traveling to Rome, don't miss the chance to tour the city with Tiffany as your guide! ------------------------------------- EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: Katy Hello. This is the bittersweet life. I'm Katy Sewall. Tiffany I'm Tiffany Parks. Katy Tiffany is in Rome. Katy is in Seattle. I am a goer. Tiffany is a stayer. I once was a newbie, and we're going to explain to you what that means. This is from an article that was sent to us by one of our listeners, Sara. Sara, you sent this quite a long time ago. Thank you. This is letting you know that it was always on our radar. We just hadn't gotten to it yet. This is an article about the kind of transitions that expats go through all year long, every year, but also especially during the month of June. And so we figured we'd tackle it right now. Sara sent us an article that has the title the transition that never ends, the ongoing cycle of expat stayers, goers, and newbies. We'll post the link in the show notes. It's from a website called the Culture Blend. There's no author listed, so thank you. Whoever wrote this, I just want to read you a little bit of this article just to kind of lay out our premise. Whoever wrote this wrote I hate June. There's a reason for that. Where I live, people come and go a lot. That's the part that they don't put in the brochure. When you move abroad, quote adventure of a lifetime, explore exotic lands, learn new languages, say goodbye to 20% of your friends every summer and random others throughout the rest of the year. Please sign here. It's a big, painful part of the expat experience, though transition that is not the expected ones, like culture shock or bumbling language mistakes. We saw those coming a mile away. We read books and blogs about those and then jumping ahead, she he says. But here's the kicker. As long as you live abroad, transition never stops. Ever. The big ones on either end are significant, to be sure, but it's the little ones in the middle that will get you the incessant ones, the ongoing ones, the cynical shifts, the annual flip flops that never stop, that you never saw coming. We are stayers, goers and newbies figuring out life together. The stayers don't stay forever. That's me, I guess I'm all of these. The stayers don't stay forever, the goers, but don't go immediately. The newbies need some time to adjust. So that is basically what this article is getting at, is the annual expat exodus, as they put it, the people who come in, the people who flow out, and that this is just an ongoing thing, year after year, month after month. But maybe particularly when a school year ends in an expats planning on going, that's the time to go. So I really wanted to think about this, and they say that they have all these kind of silly graphs in here that are illustrating this point that it can be such a cycle. It's parties welcoming a person, saying goodbye to a person when they announce on Facebook that they're leaving, when they promise to come visit later, friends leaving, new people coming, adjusting decisions, announcements, farewells. They have all these things listed in here about the ongoing cycle that is never ending. And we've touched on this a little bit before in the past because I mentioned that as a newbie when I first got to Rome and then as a person who was obviously going to leave. Some of the longtime expats I had met really didn't have that much interest toward the end of my time in spending time with me anymore because what was the .1 of them said, which I thought at the time was very rude. The longer I have explored this as a topic, I understand more and more why, why they didn't want to do this. But Tiffany, do you have an initial reaction? And then I'll read part of Sara's email talking about why this is an article that she revisits year after year as an expat. Tiffany My initial reaction is it sounds like she's more of a corporate expat. If I had to just guess. I mean, I'm saying she, it sounds like a woman for some reason, but that might not be true. So I'll just say she, and forgive me if it's not a she. You know, with the farewell parties and the, you know, and the constant exodus, the high turnover, it sounds like somebody who is in the corporate world, you know, a multinational corporation where lots of people are there from around the world and they come and they go. And if you did work there and you worked there long term, I can see how that would be extremely difficult, especially, you know, these are your colleagues. These are people who you're spending a lot of time with, and probably they become your social circle as well because you're an expat. So you have a handicap when it comes to meeting people. So you're going to automatically begin to socialize with those same people, and you're working with them, you're socializing with them. And that would be very hard. And I don't have that experience because, a, I'm not, and I never have been a corporate expat. And secondly, because of the situation that I'm in now as a married wife of a local, mother of a local, and now a citizen myself, I feel like so many of my friends are in the same position, and none of us seem to be going anywhere. I mean, especially if you're, I don't know. I just feel like a lot of us are, not all of us. I have friends who are single moms, too, and in different situations and lots of friends who aren't in relationships and aren't mothers, but most of the ones who are, they're with someone who has a job that, being Italian, they don't want to leave because that's a typical Italian thing which we've talked about. And maybe there's a good reason for that. Maybe it's a great job. Expats famously don't have great jobs, usually, unless they're corporate expats. And so they're often relying on their partner to be the main income earner. And so I was just talking to a newish friend of mine last night. She was talking about when she had kids, she was like, oh, I wish I could live in the countryside, and I wish I could have space and a big yard and this and that and this and that. But, you know, my husband's job, it ties us to Rome. And that's just the case for so many people that I know. And I feel like none of us are really going anywhere. Katy And it's interesting because it's actually kind of changed in time. Like, I feel like you knew more of these people when you were younger and you were kind of in the churn of. Yes, because there is that energy, too. That's like a whole bunch of young people moving, like, whether or not it's for college, you know, for a college, a semester abroad, or it's a bunch of young people living their year abroad or something. But it seems like when you're in your twenties, this kind of churn could also be equally more normal. Certainly I think a lot of young. Tiffany People come to Europe, whatever the city that they fall in love with is. And it might not be Europe, it might be South America, who knows? Could be anywhere. But in my experience, I've met a lot of people who at 22, at 24, at 27, whatever year it is, they're like, oh, yes, I love Rome. I went there on vacation or I studied there. I want to go and live there. And a lot of people go, and especially British people who at that time, before Brexit, could easily go and live in Italy if they wanted to and work. And they have their experience. They have their year abroad or two years abroad, but their sort of footloose and fancy free at that time. They're not married. They don't have kids. They don't have a steady job. And so it kind of eventually, you know, the typical thing that happens is that people get kind of bored of that, or they're like, okay, I want to, like, settle down. I have so many friends who are like, I'm going to go back to Britain and settle down and get a real job or go back to the states and get a real job that has benefits and not do any of this, you know, crazy expat life anymore. Katy Yeah. Tiffany And so I had it. It was a lot. I had a lot. I feel like I lost a lot of people in my life those first few years, people that I adored and that I sadly don't keep in touch with as much as I would like to. And I miss. And I think about those times. I think about those early Rome years and how many great, fun people I knew and hung out with on a regular basis and how sad I am that they're not here anymore. But I don't, you know, what I don't agree with in this article is that, you know, the stayers never stay or the stayers don't stay forever. I feel like they do not, I wouldn't say it's a majority, but there's a certain, you know, there's a certain subset of expats who actually stay forever. And I think having, getting married and having kids is kind of what seals the deal. And it doesn't mean that they will definitely stay forever, but it's a much bigger likelihood that they will. Katy Yeah, I do think that. I agree with you what you were just saying, but I do think that when you are a goer, say, like I was, or even like your friends that you were talking about that do their one to two years abroad, and then they are like, I've got to go put down roots. My experience really was like, it was hard to. There's a certain detachment from life that is both freeing, but it also gets to be a point when you kind of know, like, I'm not going to set down roots here that you kind of start to feel a tug inside of you that's like, I've gotta go figure some stuff out now. You know, it's funny, because I never thought I'd get tired of sort of the wandering around, exploring, trying new things type thing, but I do. I recognize very strongly. You know, I think I almost recognize it more strongly from the time when we were in San Francisco. And, like, whatever, a year or so in, I realized this cannot be where I end up living. It's too expensive. It's impractical. I don't have enough connections here. I don't feel, like, the tug of love toward this city that will make me want to work as hard as it's going to take for me to make inroads here. And then I just started feeling like a pull of, like, all right, you know, you've spent a lot of time exploring this city and walking around and seeing everything there is to see and getting little jobs here and there. And then I just started feeling this pull of, like, I want to get back to doing something with people I can do stuff with. You know, like, I don't even know what. It's. I'm kind of. It's just hard to sort of explain that feeling where you're just like, I just want to get back to it. And that was when I started talking about moving back to Seattle, because I was just thinking, like, where do I have connections? Where do I have deeper friendships? Where do I have business ties? And I want to get going again. And it felt like if I didn't come back here so I can get that two year kick about how it can start to feel like, this is great, but surely there must be something more than this. Tiffany Yeah, I get that. I get that. That makes total sense. That's the same reason why I feel like sometimes, like, I could never leave Rome. Not because I have. I do love Rome. That's established. But it's not just because I love Rome and I love the city. Part of it is like, oh, my gosh, it was so much work to establish myself here. Like, now I have to go do it somewhere else. I can figure some other place out, make new friends, make new connections. No way. Katy I can handle that. Tiffany I can't handle. I can't handle the idea of doing that again. I mean, I think I would do it, but it would have to be, you know, it'd have to be the right circumstance. But it feels daunting. Katy Yeah, well, and I think that it's almost like once you. For me, anyway, if I do this long enough where I feel, like, rooted and I'm making some kind of progress, then it's equally possible that, you know, I'll start to be like, you know what? I want to have that footloose and fancy free time again, you know, and maybe I'll take off and start anew. It just felt like, you know, after about ten years of feeling like I was constantly starting anew, it becomes less novel, you know, it becomes more irritating or like that you're kind of wasting time somehow, you know, I can totally see that. Even though you totally see that. Yeah. So let me read a little more. Let me first read a little bit of what Sara said when she sent this article. She sent it after we were talking about, we did an episode on friendships that made her think about this article. And she said it was an article that she read during her first year living in Morocco. I just want to read a couple paragraphs that she wrote. She wrote, a friend shared it with me as I experienced the turnover at the end of our first school year here. It groups expats into the categories newbies, stayers, and goers, and it has been a helpful framework as we navigate the constant transition that each school year brings. I come back to this article every year. There's so much to explore with friendships abroad. And then she also says, the main reason my husband and I are stairs is because we don't want to leave Morocco until we've experienced it outside of the bar of parenthood. A friend who is leaving Morocco this spring recently asked us what's left on our Morocco bucket list. And we said, everything. That's not entirely true. We've done some traveling, we'v…
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