Let’s be honest. Nobody warns you about the Goodbye Problem when you sign up for a life overseas.
The brochure, metaphorically speaking (and not always correct) shows you sipping something cold perhaps on a veranda with a spectacular view, or somewhere balmy just living your best sun-drenched, passport-stamped, horizon-chasing life.
What it doesn’t show is life behind the scenes, nor does it mention towards the end of every visit ‘home’ visiting family and old friends (approximately 48 hours before your flight back to the other side of the world) you will transform into a weeping, pre-emptively grief-stricken mess who has already started mourning the goodbye before you’ve even packed your case.
It’s a special kind of madness. And it gets worse with age.
When I first left England at 19 with a backpack, guitar, and absolutely zero life plan, I was heading off to Belgium to muck out show jumping horses for a living and I didn’t intend to go ‘home’ to live again. Saying goodbye was borderline easy. Thrilling, even. I practically skipped onto the ferry at Dover leaving the suffocating intimacies of a troubled childhood behind.
I watched the White Cliffs of Dover recede.
The wide world was calling my name.
I had no idea what I was starting.
Fast forward through my life hitched to an itinerant geologist who’s career has flung us to live in some interesting places. When children appeared on the scene, there was a dawning realisation that “settling down” was simply not going to be our brand.
What began as youthful wanderlust quietly became just ... work and life. A nomadic, exhilarating, often tricky, occasionally terrifying life - but our life nonetheless.
The trouble is, somewhere along the way, selfishness loses its shine. You stop being the carefree 19-year-old waving cheerfully from the ferry and start being the person on the plane home thinking: What if this is the last time?
Dark? Yes. Dramatic? Absolutely. But any expat or immigrant reading this is nodding vigorously right now.
And once children enter the picture, everything shifts up a gear emotionally.
For us, both sets of grandparents were scattered across two continents, on literal opposite sides of the world, which made impromptu babysitting somewhat logistically challenging. There was no popping round to Grandma’s when you needed a night off, and no wise parental voice at the end of the phone when things got hard. Back then we often had no phone in the remote places we lived. So we figured most of it out ourselves, which was, depending on the trauma, either character-building, completely exhausting or downright desperate.
The saving grace then was the expat community itself. You find your people: fellow wanderers in the same boat, building makeshift villages out of shared circumstances and mutual survival instincts. Brilliant friendships form fast when everyone around you is also slightly lost. But as wonderful as those friends were, they weren’t family. And at the end of the day, when the front door closed and the house went quiet, you knew it.
And you wanted to go home. Really home. Roots home.
The Goodbye That Hits Different
Here’s the linguistic quirk nobody talks about: Farewell is a perfectly lovely word. It implies until we meet again, a gentle pause, a door left ajar. But Goodbye? Goodbye has the emotional weight of a closing chapter. It thuds.
And for expats (and immgrants) who often genuinely don’t know when they’ll be back - whether the budget will stretch, whether life will cooperate - it can feel almost impossibly heavy.
The practical reality is that your family back home might not be able to hop on a 24-hour flight to visit you, especially as everyone gets older and long-haul travel starts feeling less like an adventure and more like a mild form of punishment. Your parents want to see you desperately, but they also want access to a decent hospital and a bed they can get out of without assistance.
So the visits become precious. And the goodbyes become enormous.
The Guilt Spiral (And How to Escape It)
Here’s where we tend to get ourselves into trouble: the guilt. Oh, the guilt. The circular, 3am, am I a terrible person kind of guilt that goes something like this:-
I love my life here. But I miss my family. But I chose this. But I didn’t know it would feel like this. But they want me to be happy. But am I being selfish? But …
Stop. Breathe. Here’s the thing about guilt: It’s only useful if it leads to action. Otherwise it’s just suffering for sport.
Schedule the next visit before you’ve even left.
Nothing dissolves the black hole of goodbye quite like having a concrete date to point at. Don’t leave it as a vague “we’ll figure it out” - book something, even tentatively. It gives everyone something to hold onto.
Shift from “goodbye” to “see you in March.”
It sounds small but it genuinely rewires the moment. You’re not closing a door; you’re just going home via a very long route.
Invest in the in-between.
Video calls, voice messages, shared photo albums, the occasional handwritten letter with a photo or two (revolutionary, apparently). You cannot replace presence, but you can close the distance a little. Make contact a habit, not just a crisis response.
Let yourself feel it
But put a time limit on the spiral. Grieve the goodbye for a day or two, then consciously redirect. You have a life to be getting on with, and it’s a good one.
Reframe the narrative.
You’re not abandoning your people. You’re showing them, and any children watching, that it’s possible to build a big, brave, interesting life. That’s not selfish. That’s a gift.
The thing nobody fully prepares you for is that the Goodbye Problem works in both directions. Eventually your own children grow up, spread their wings, and may head off to careers and adventures in far-flung places. Suddenly you understand, with absolute crystalline clarity, exactly how your parents felt every single time you left.
It’s the circle of life, and it is humbling.
But here’s what remains true, whether you’re the one on the plane or the one waving from the kerb: love doesn’t actually require proximity to survive. It just requires attention.
So toss out “goodbye.” It was never the right word anyway.
Farewell — and we’ll see each other soon.
What do you think?
Until next time,
Jo x
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