Stages of grief: Moving abroad edition

July 16, 2026

When I left my job of ten years to spend a year living abroad, the emotions I had at the time were along the lines of excitement at what possibilities lay ahead and an eagerness to get started. However, within a few days of landing in Budapest these turned to lethargy and misery. Days where I looked forward to darkness rolling around so I could have an excuse to crawl into bed and go to sleep despite it only being 7pm. I didn’t understand why I felt this way, wasn’t I supposed to be on one of the greatest adventures of my life?

Only after a few months of existing with this feeling hanging over me did I come to the truth that I hadn’t mourned the death of my old identity yet. I likened this to the framework for processing grief – the five, six, seven stages of grief or however many numbers they use for it now. Like the stages of grief, they didn’t all happen in sequence, and stages would come, disappear and then reappear later. So here’s a take on the stages of grief I applied to moving abroad.

Shock

During those first few weeks of arriving, it really did hit me hard that I had completely uprooted my life to move abroad. When I made the decision to drop everything, career, friends, familiarity to move abroad, I had anticipated that there would be many difficult moments. However, the mind is very bad at anticipating how we are going to feel in future. Generally, we will apply how we feel in a present moment to how we think we will feel in the future¹. So while there was nervousness in how I’d felt at the time back in Melbourne before moving abroad, I was applying that feeling of nervousness through the lens of currently having a stable career, friends, family. Basically a big network surrounding me, that was making me view everything I thought I would feel in the future through rose coloured glasses.

When you look at moving abroad willingly for the first time you’re likely at least in your 20s and possibly older. What you’re leaving behind is 20+ years worth of friendships, family relations, hobbies tied to your home, career awareness, network, industry awareness, what food the supermarket stocks etc. This is basic knowledge, but it has compounded over your life living in your home town. You didn’t learn that lamb is a commonly eaten meat, working as a high school math teacher offers decent pay and job security, and that surfing is a popular hobby in your area within the span of a few weeks. This information was found out over years. But its all too easy to not foresee that when you move abroad this knowledge is reset to zero.

I had this exact experience where I had to re-learn over time that lamb is non-existent in the Hungarian diet, being a teacher is one of the hardest working and most underpaid professions, and that conventionally I should introduce myself using my last name THEN my first name².

The intimate knowledge of our home town is one contributor to our sense of comfort and confidence living in a place. It shouldn’t be a surprise then that when we start from zero in a new place that a large chunk of our confidence also goes with it.

The flipside of this is that every new piece of knowledge you do learn about your new place will contribute to building your new understanding of the place. Things such as understanding what food grows locally and is sold in supermarkets, what job industries are popular, what parks you enjoy walking in etc. This understanding will integrate you into the new place, and as it becomes familiar will build and inspire confidence.

Denial and bargaining

Landing abroad the overwhelming feelings of oh fuck this is real I have given everything up and am starting from scratch hit hard. But underneath that all was the false belief that I could easily just pack up and move back home, and if I was quick enough then I could ask for my old job back and just pretend the whole moving abroad thing and feeling out of my depth had never happened. It was more comfortable to fantasize about everything being alright by going back to my old environment than to suck it up and go out and start establishing my new home.

I didn’t realise until much later but my identity I had built up over so many years in Melbourne was being mourned. I didn’t have a job or friends or the knowledge of the place that had given me my confidence over so many years. This had formed such a large part of my identity that most of my initial few months was spent denying that part of me was actually gone.

The last period of significant change I had in my life was starting full time work after finishing my studies. I found a good job and stayed in it for the better part of a decade, life became a more or less stable routine with seeing similar friends and going to the same workplace each day. I hadn’t realised but my identity had become anchored to this stability. To the job that I was known for doing and enjoyed, to the friendships I would associate with and others would associate me with. There was never a conscious need to actively think about it because it was all going so well. Giving all that up exposed how much I had anchored who I was on those fixed factors in my life.

Giving all that up did make me realise later that had I stayed in my hometown and lost that job or those friendships for whatever reason, I would have faced a similar crisis. From this I chose that if I had the ability to anchor my identity to something that couldn’t be lost from me then I’d be better off.  

Depression

Most days in those first few months I’d have little motivation to do anything consequential. I’d already been pretty overwhelmed when I’d realised the magnitude of my decision to move abroad, so I didn’t want to go out and make things worse by doing anything that could have a repercussion. Things like trying to integrate into the community, start looking at jobs, I was even hesitant to go out for a bike ride and become familiar with my new city because I didn’t want to commit to the place too soon and find I really didn’t like it when I was already feeling like I’d made a mistake in moving there.

The irony of this depressive stage was that because I didn’t make any consequential decisions I stayed stuck with this feeling for ages. The reality was had I made even small decisions of consequence to accept my new city – learning the local cuisine, learn more about its history, start just looking at some jobs etc. it would have dragged me out of that funk sooner.

I don’t want to oversimplify the feelings of this stage as they are incredibly complex, and from person to person will vary. But in hindsight I recognise that this would have helped my specific circumstances.

Acceptance

After a few months I began to feel more comfortable and integrated into my new environment. Although I’d oscillate between feeling great and comfortable and happy to take on the challenges of a new environment and feeling low and not wanting to risk anything by going outside. This was perhaps the most surprising part of the process, that these alternating feelings would persist for so long.

Coming to realise and accept the truths I had come to believe about myself and my decision above were the key factors that pushed me more firmly into this acceptance phase. Moving abroad was more difficult than I had anticipated, and not even from the process of visas and bureaucracy and now living in a place with a completely different language – but instead from realising that so much of who I saw myself to be was anchored to my circumstances I had lived with back home for years.

Hope

The grieving was an important process, as difficult as it was. It gave me clarity on why I did things the way I had for so many years, where I got my confidence from back home, and forced me to sit with these discoveries about myself and question if I wanted them to stay the same for the rest of my life or go out and make a change. Without them I wouldn’t be able to move forward and come out the other side and truly understand what I had wanted to get out of the decision I had made to move abroad.

1. Stumbling on Happiness – Daniel Gilbert. Gilbert is a Harvard psychology professor and researcher who shows that we are absolutely terrible at predicting what will make us happy. ↩︎
2. Hungarian language convention is that whenever I give my name at any place where I am registered in a database – Immigration Office, the gym, my LIDL membership, that I start with my family name first and then follow with my first name. ↩︎