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 dread sitting on your shoulder simply be one aspect of things simply 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 surfacing for me.

Moving to another country means being forced to come to grips with your own agency, and often it feels like this is the most difficult part to reconcile. For me at least, much of my life in the US was defined by the comfortable winnowing down of my own agency to pursue peace, comfort, and predictability. Go to work, go to the gym, take care of the chores, watch the screen, go to bed, repeat. Through these comfortable patterns, I reduced my agency to simple choices; not one of which branched into scary or unfamiliar territory. In this way, I pushed away responsibility for my own life.

Now, after liquidating our assets, selling our house and truck, and moving to a place we have never lived before--and in a country gracious but alien--my wife and I have forced ourselves to wrestle with questions that expats and international professionals know well — who am I here, and what kind of life am I actually building? Suddenly, every choice has new and profound consequences, and the bumper pads I had set up on the bowling lane of my life are gone. But here, in this moment at least, I understand that this anxiety is simply part of my renewed agency, and that the fear of suffering, or losing control is an unavoidable part of trying to live authentically. And maybe that's true for you too. The anxiety you're carrying might not be a sign that something is wrong. It might be a sign that you're finally doing something right.