Anxiety Abroad: What Expat Life is Teaching Me About Fear and Agency

What if a certain amount of anxiety means that you're doing it right? Could the knot sitting in your stomach simply be one aspect of things going "according to plan?" Almost three months into my move to the Netherlands from Chicago, where I now practice as an English-language therapist in Leiden, this is the question that keeps returning to me.

Moving to another country means being forced to come to grips with your own agency, and it often feels like this is the most difficult part to reconcile. For me at least, much of my life in the US was defined by a gradual winnowing down of my own agency to pursue peace, comfort, and predictability. Go to work, hit the gym, do the chores, watch the screen, go to bed, repeat. Through these comfortable patterns, I reduced the course of my life to simple choices; not one of which branched into scary or unfamiliar territory. In this way, I unconsciously traded the anxiety of freedom for the peace of predictability. But a deeper, more primal part of me knew that I was engaged in a bargain that one day I would regret.

Now, having moved to a place I have never lived before, in a country gracious but alien, I have been forced to wrestle with questions that expats and international professionals know well: who am I here, what kind of life am I actually building, and when will I feel safe?

Here, every choice has new and profound consequences, and the comfortable rhythms of my old life are fading into the distance. But gradually, and in this moment at least, I understand that the anxiety accompanying this change is part of re-learning how to take ownership of my life, and that the fear of suffering or losing control is an unavoidable part of trying to live authentically.

I don’t think the goal is to arrive at a place where our fears or anxieties disappear entirely—growth doesn’t tend to work that way. I think it’s to reach a point where you can carry them, learn from them, and keep choosing anyway, knowing that every step forward brings you into a fuller, braver vision of yourself.