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Is it normal to still feel like a visitor after months?

Fatima Al-Rashid 💬 Contributor
2 May 2026, 20:10

We're coming up on 5 months here as a family and I keep waiting for the "okay, this is home now" feeling to kick in. Logistically we're sorted — kids are in school, we found a routine, the checklist on here is basically all ticked off. Emotionally though I still feel like I'm visiting someone else's life.

Does this actually go away, or do you just get better at ignoring it?

2 replies

Jimmy ⭐ Helpful member Admin Premium
3 May 2026, 08:15

This comes up more than almost anything else, and the honest pattern I've seen: the practical checklist finishing and the emotional "this is home" feeling are on completely different timelines, and it's easy to expect them to line up.

For most people it's not a switch that flips — it's small, unremarkable moments (running into someone you know at the shop, not needing your GPS for a route, a joke landing in the local language) that quietly stack up until one day you notice you stopped counting the months. It's genuinely fine, maybe even normal, for that to take longer than the paperwork did.

Helga Larsen 🌱 Newcomer
3 May 2026, 14:50

Retiree here, different life stage but same feeling honestly — took us close to a year, and what helped was joining something completely unrelated to "being an expat" (a local gardening club, in our case) rather than only socialising with other expats. Made the place feel like ours rather than a place we were staying.