Do you tell people back home how hard it actually is?

I tell my sister the full truth and everyone else the brave-face version. Having at least one person who knows the real picture matters more than I expected.

Mostly I tell my wife the truth and my parents the edited version. My mum worries herself sick if I mention anything harder than the weather, so she hears about the good shifts and the new friends. The problem is that the edited version starts to feel like a performance after a while, and on bad weeks that makes the loneliness worse, not better.

Chinedu, that "performance" feeling is exactly it. I think I've been performing for my sister too without noticing.

I did the brave face for about a year and then had a long call with my dad where I just said it had been a hard month. He didn't panic. He told me about his own first year working in another city when he was young, which I'd never heard about. Sometimes the people at home have more context than we give them credit for.

Tried the full-honesty approach once and my mother booked a flight. Now I wait until a bad week is over and tell it as a story, which is honest but doesn't set off alarms.

In our culture there's a lot of pressure to be the one who made it abroad, especially when you send money home. For a long time I couldn't say I was tired or lonely because it felt ungrateful. What changed things was finding two other Filipina caregivers here who understood without me having to explain. That's where the honest version goes now.

Voice notes help. Harder to fake cheerful in your voice than in a text.

Yes to the pressure of being the one who made it abroad, @Joy Villanueva. My cousins think I'm rich because I live in Europe. Very hard to explain rent to them.

My parents visit in the autumn and I'm half dreading it, because they'll see the real version. Maybe that's a good thing.

At our age the children worry about us the way we used to worry about them. I send photos of the sea and keep the plumbing stories for later.