The Expat Bubble
“Stranger in a strange land. - Robert Heinlein”
Think about a bubble or snow globe. On the one hand, everything inside is protected. On the other hand whatever is inside, in this case you, is isolated and frozen in place. This is the essence of the expat lifestyle, both good and bad.
I remember how lucky we were to attend the Vienna Opera Ball; I hadn’t brought a ball gown, of course, but managed to buy one from the Embassy’s used clothing outlet. There we were in the balcony at midnight watching the flower of Viennese youth dance to the Blue Danube waltz, naturally. But we were on the outside looking in. We had not attended tanzschule (dance school) every week in middle school, nor been fitted for a long white evening dress or black tails in high school. We were just onlookers. Expats, in other words.
Your employer offers school housing support, you earn many times more than the local school staff, and you can expect a lifestyle you could never afford in your home country. You have the opportunity to travel widely and your worldview is forever changed. You are privileged.
Expat Hazards and Traps
“You have been trapped in the inescapable net of ruin by your own want of sense. - Aeschylus
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In spite of these advantages, culture shock and homesickness will no doubt sideswipe you at some point. It’s a long way back home, and where exactly is home anymore? This sense of dislocation and frustration can lead to some bad expat behaviors. Let’s start with a lack of discretion.
Social Dangers
Photo by John Arano on Unsplash
The expat life has two features which can lead to disasters. One is a frequent temptation to drinking, drug use, and subsequent stupid behavior. Expat life is generally very social. Then add in the attraction of duty free liquor with the frequent passing through airports. This means plenty of opportunity to make an ass of yourself.
The second characteristic of expat life is its small-town feel. We’ve discussed this before, but the international school community is more like moving to Drain, Oregon than to New York City, at least in terms of everyone knowing your business. Social media makes things even worse.
Protect Your Reputation
Your reputation is golden, so develop strategies for protecting it.
Confide only in trusted friends or family.
Do not post indiscreet comments on social media, or at least give yourself a waiting period before going live.
Verify that your behavior is in line with local norms, especially sexual and dating norms.
Take sensible precautions when out drinking or clubbing.
Loneliness and Negativity
“The Slough of Despond. - John Bunyan”
Loneliness is a normal feature of human life; a person can be bitterly lonely in the midst of even social uproar, plentiful activity, and tight family ties. You may be more or less an extrovert or introvert. But certain features peculiar to expat life lend a different flavor and require dealing with.
Elements Peculiar To Expat Loneliness
For one thing you are far from home and will at some point suffer from culture shock. This disorientation and homesickness can lead to bouts of piercing isolation and loneliness, even clinical depression.
Staying In Touch
You would not be suffering from culture shock at home, as this is the water you have swum in since you were born. All is familiar and comfortable.
The lifestyle is also inherently transient. Most expats will not be spending their lives in the country but will move on within a few years. This means maintaining friendships will be more difficult; most of these relationships will fade away over time.
Compare this to camping with a friend you have known since middle school. There is a history, an ease, an intimacy impossible to recreate with a member of the nomadic expat herd. This lack may wear on you over time.
Cultures also vary in their social openness and warmth. Some cultures are at ease welcoming foreigners, while others hold back and socialize mainly with family and long-time friends or take a long time to accept an outsider.
Compare gregarious Italians to reserved British, for instance. You may feel left out. You are left out; you’re a foreigner. Language will also be a barrier, of course.
Particular Expat Categories
Families and couples typically respond in two ways: they either fall apart or they pull together. Fractures in relationships will be spackled over temporarily in the excitement, change, and stimulation. Children ditto; they might be overwhelmed or they may thrive.
You’d think singles, particularly women, might be particularly susceptible to loneliness. Yes and no. On the bright side, the peculiar setup of most international schools can lead to plentiful opportunities to defeat loneliness, mainly the proximity of living in school housing.
A teacher does not need to retreat to a solitary apartment and see nobody until school starts again on Monday. Just go down the hall and see if somebody is going to the Reenok (open-air market) Saturday morning or wants to buy season tickets to the Bolshoi ballet. Ditto for finding a travel companion.
If you’re not interested in dating, you’ll find plenty of girlfriends or guy friends to do things with. If you do want to date, here are two links. This thread highlights the “homely Western man dates beautiful local woman” situation. This one summarizes some pitfalls of dating locals; you could also just date another expat.
If you are gay, socializing may be easy or more difficult depending on the country, and more or less discretion may be required. But finding a community is not impossible; just do some research and persist.
Staying In Touch
Thanks to modern technology, contact has become immeasurably easier. However, in one way Facetiming too frequently may actually worsen loneliness. For one thing digital contact is second-hand and lacks the intimacy of human contact through the five senses.
The blogger cited above has some pertinent things to say about the downside of being far from home. Making local friends overseas is a delicate dance and she notes aptly that “we carry the burden of staying in touch.” She is a trailing spouse and must have had a bad day.
Too-frequent contact could also mean that you are so closely tied to home that you may set yourself up for increased homesickness. After all, you are missing out on the action. At low points you may yearn to rejoin them on the other side of the screen.
Dealing With Loneliness
If you are a gregarious extrovert, you require lots of social stimulation, while an introvert is perfectly happy spending large amounts of time alone recharging batteries. Whichever you call yourself, the primary way to deal with expat loneliness is positive action.
If you wait around for someone to rescue you from loneliness, you really will be lonely. You must force yourself out the door, make an action plan, approach people, become a joiner even if it feels unnatural.
Unhappy In The Bubble
Here are some behaviors that mean you might be stuck in a dangerous rut.
You isolate yourself; whine incessantly to friends and family back home; take up heavy drinking or emotional eating; devote all your free hours to binge-watching anything available; align yourself at school with the negative crowd who have nothing good to say about the country and school.
You may actually tip over into clinical depression, putting you in serious danger. This may lead you to break contract and go home. You may fall into an emotional state that calls for professional help. Or you may just remain miserable the entire time overseas, never to return.
What Doesn’t Kill You…
If you do survive culture shock and its attendant bout of loneliness, congratulate yourself. You are now officially a stronger, more resilient, more empathetic person.
We will next discuss how to avoid falling into this negativity trap in the first place, the boring stuff like get plenty of exercise. But by far the best defense is choosing the right friends.
Which friends you choose makes all the differences. If you hang out only with negative people in the bubble, guess what? Your time overseas will be either ruined or seriously compromised. So let’s move on to coping strategies.
Social Life
“You gotta have friends. - Bette Midler”
If you expect to survive culture shock, never mind thrive, you need friends. Who will these friends be?
School Community
We’ve touched on your cohort, the colleagues you stumbled off the plane with and went through orientation together. This is an intense relationship, and they most likely will be your first group of friends.
Also, if you are in school housing, socializing is just like a college dorm; knock on next door and invite whoever answers over for coffee. At school there will be your fellow teachers. Easy-peasy. These friendships are the path of least resistance.
Some of these friendships will be lifelong while some will fade away when or if you move on with the nomadic tourist-teacher herd. The title of this article hits the nail on the head. Wanderlust gene: how expats can spot each other at 50 paces by Kate Lord Brown. “You skip several months of ‘getting to know you,’ she says. Exactly.
But while you are together overseas, you will almost certainly be closer than you would back in your home country by the intense nature of your shared experiences and everyday proximity. You take the school bus to work, eat lunch and work together, live down the hall, and inhabit the same expat bubble.
The wider school community also provides options: parents, classroom assistants and other school staff, parents of your children’s friends, expat community members you meet through school events and activities.
Outside the School Community
If you have a particular interest or existing affiliation, the pathway to a wider friendship circle just opened up. This is one of the healthiest ways to combat loneliness and negativity.
The Moscow AV guy was the Maori husband of a New Zealand diplomat. He loved rugby and back in Auckland, performed the haka even though he was the sweetest and least scary man. In Moscow he immediately joined the Moscow Dragons RFC and found a diverse gang of friends right away.
The advantage to seeking out a wider circle is that you cannot just bitch about the school copy machine, the unfair administration or parents from hell. Guess what? Nobody cares; they’re involved in their own concerns.
And guaranteed, these new friends will all have interesting stories. Teachers tend to be a certain kind of personality with similar life experiences. Expats in your new expanded circles will be different and have fascinating stories. Go for it.
Having Fun Overseas
Join, Explore, and Travel
Be open to growth and get your butt out the door. The possibilities are endless once you start looking. If you are a runner, look up Hash House Harriers (“a drinking club with a running problem.”) Join a Trivia Night team at your local. Attend church. Volunteer at the orphanage. Join the birding group, go salsa dancing, take a cooking class, sign up for walking tours. Get on the Embassy mailing list and attend outings that interest you; search Meetup or similar expat sites.
Adventures and pleasures sort themselves in categories, starting with the prime motivator for teaching overseas, meaning travel.
Travel
Home entertaining
Culture
Sports and outdoor activities
Clubbing and going out
Travel
Start with the activities mentioned above, get out the door and engage with the city and country. Between your teacher-friends and the new expanded circle you’ve cultivated, chances to travel together will come up.
Travel, of course, is one of the prime reasons to teach overseas, so do not turn down any chances. Most likely teachers have a relationship with a local wizard travel agent who can put together trips and find amazing deals. Cultivate this person.
Since you now live overseas, you can take the overnight train with friends to Venice just to eat Italian food. You can spend spring break at a Red Sea resort or attend the theater in London, and all of this without a 14-hour transatlantic flight and jet lag.
Entertaining
Since expats live for all practical purposes in a small town, dinner parties and gatherings seem to be more common than back home, where you might typically be inclined to have the weekend pizza-movie night and a big shopping trip to Costco on the weekend agenda.
Eventually, people run out of energy for throwing parties, but then they can move on to the next posting and start all again.
Overall, expats seem to fall more into the extrovert group, not the introvert. Something about the fact that they all rolled the dice and abandoned their old lives makes them particularly outgoing sorts in the first place.
Culture
If opera, art museums, and music matter to you, let’s hope you factored this into where you applied. In Moscow we regularly attended the Bolshoi and in Vienna the opera, for instance. Just find like-minded friends, figure out how to stay informed, and go. Life is short.
Sports and outdoor activities
This club is a ready-made group of friends.
If sports and the outdoors are very important to you, check out the possibilities a bit ahead of time. Consider bringing your own equipment and start looking for like-minded expats or locals even before you arrive.
Clubbing and Going Out
Do some research first and gather local sources of events and locales. Research the limitations and norms. For instance, Spanish restaurants may not even begin serving dinner until 11 pm. In some countries drunk driving laws are strictly enforced, and I mean strictly.
In some countries homosexuality is actually a crime, so best be discreet. Hundreds of expats are currently residing in foreign prisons for drug smuggling, so rethink careless drug use.
Top 10 Overseas Survival Skills Recap
1. Understand basic everyday differences.
2. Respect an alternate worldview
3. Successfully navigate the expat bubble.
4. Survive the stages of culture shock.
5. Accept the differences from Western values.
6. Rely on common sense ways to stay safe.
7. Maintain healthy social life and friendships.
8. Keep your family and children happy.
9. Deal with family and friends at home.
10. Go back home and readjust successfully.