New Moon Coaching for Expat Women

I talk a lot about the heavy side of the expat journey—the quiet grief of losing your identity abroad. When you pack up your life and cross an ocean, you don’t just leave behind a geographic location; you leave behind the scaffolding that held up your sense of self.

You might lose your professional title, your familiar routine, your community standing, or simply the effortless ease of navigating a culture that speaks your mother tongue. Suddenly, you are stripped of your old bearings. It feels disorienting, vulnerable, and deeply uncomfortable.

But today, I want to talk about the immense, breathtaking opportunity that opens up precisely because of this emptiness.

Sometimes, being stripped of who you thought you were is the very thing that forces you to look around and ask: Who am I underneath it all?

The Forgotten Drawer

When we are rooted in our native countries, we often build our identities around external structures: our studies, our careers, our social status, the expectations of those who have known us forever. But these things are often just dresses we wear. They are functional, they look good to society, but they don’t always stem from our deepest, truest selves.

And then, life gets busy. The noise of managing daily responsibilities pushes our genuine passions to the margins.

It happened to me. In my twenties, I developed a deep, quiet passion for medicinal plants. I spent hours reading about their beneficial properties, learning how to identify them in the wild, and even painting them—painstakingly copying miniatures from medieval herbaries. It fed my soul.

But then? Life happened. My advanced studies, a demanding career, and the sheer momentum of adulthood pushed that passion aside. Slowly, sadly, I forgot almost everything I had learned. That part of me was tucked away in a dusty drawer that nobody—not even me—ever opened.

An Unexpected Encounter in a Dry Land

When I moved to Colorado, the landscape was entirely different from the lush corners of Europe I knew. I felt the familiar expat pull to ground myself, so I turned to nature. I started walking the trails, looking for an anchor.

And then, the most marvelous thing happened.

As I looked closer at the dry, high-altitude earth, I started recognizing familiar plants. Green, resilient travelers that, just like me, had somehow journeyed from my native Europe and found a way to take root in this new soil.

The first time I spotted Plantago major (broadleaf plantain) growing by the path, I was moved to tears. It felt like walking down a street in a foreign city and suddenly locking eyes with an old, dear friend you haven’t seen in decades.

That tiny, stubborn plant re-ignited a spark. Little by little, I began reclaiming my knowledge of medicinal plants. I started reading again, looking closer, remembering. And it didn’t just feel like relearning a hobby; it felt like reclaiming a piece of my soul that had been waiting for me all along.

The Expat’s True Privilege: Moving Beyond the Mask

It makes me wonder: Would I have ever opened that drawer if I had stayed home? If I had kept going on the same track, comfortably wearing my old identity, wrapped in the familiar expectations of my career and social role, I likely would have left that part of myself forgotten forever. I wouldn’t have needed to look deeper, because the surface level was already full.

This is the hidden paradox of the global nomad life. Yes, losing your identity is painful. But sometimes, it is the best thing that can happen to you.

When you are forced to shed the “mask” of your old career or social status, you are given a rare, clean slate. You get to step out of the roles you accidentally grew into and deliberately choose what belongs in your heart.

If you are currently in that messy, uncomfortable middle space of feeling like you’ve lost your bearings, I want to invite you to change your perspective. Don’t just look back at what you left behind. Look down at the soil right where you are standing. Look inside the forgotten drawers of your own history.

What part of your truest self is waiting to be rediscovered?

How about you? Have you found that moving abroad forced you to drop an old mask and pick up a forgotten piece of yourself? What passions have re-emerged for you in the most unexpected places? Share your stories in the comments below—I would love to hear them.

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