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

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.

Two years in for me and it comes and goes rather than fully disappearing — mostly gone now, but certain moments (a specific holiday, a certain smell) still snap me back to feeling like a guest for a day or two.

Following, five months in myself and relieved to hear this is normal rather than something I’m doing wrong.

Retired here, and honestly it never fully went away for us either — but we stopped needing it to. It became less important than we expected once we accepted that “home” could mean two places at once.

OP here — that reframe from Chris genuinely helps. Maybe I’ve been chasing the wrong finish line entirely.

same, still waiting, following closely

For me it shifted the day I stopped narrating my own life in my head as “the expat version” and just started living it. Hard to pin down exactly when that happened though.

For me it was less a feeling that faded and more one day realising I’d stopped mentally comparing everything to back home. The comparison itself was what made it feel foreign.

Following, five months in and this thread describes my exact headspace right now.

Getting genuinely annoyed at something small and local, rather than charmed by it, was oddly the first sign for me. Irritation felt more like belonging than the honeymoon phase ever did.