Why Moving Abroad Changes a Person
"I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world." – Mary Anne Radmacher
Have you noticed how someone’s personality changes after spending time abroad? When they return people around them might resist the change, but over time, it becomes aspirational.
What makes this transformation so compelling?
It’s not just the new environment it’s the language they start speaking, both literally and metaphorically.
Why didn’t the same change happen back home? Because home didn’t demand it.
In a familiar place, your habits and patterns are rarely challenged. But move to a city like New York, and suddenly, the rules shift. What was funny back home might be confusing here. What was once ordinary is now a luxury.
Every interaction forces you to adapt. You can’t stay the same, because staying the same means falling behind. Acceptance becomes survival.
Bit by bit, your identity gets rewritten. Some days, it feels like you’re being shattered and pieced back together. Other days, the change is so subtle, you barely notice. But over time, these moments accumulate, and without realizing it, you’ve grown.
When you return, people notice. You’re not speaking the same language anymore.
Your new “language” carries the weight of independent survival, exposure to countless cultures, breakthroughs in psychological limits, and new skills picked up along the way.
You might not even fully understand how you’ve changed—there’s rarely time to reflect on it all. But to everyone else, you seem different. And they chalk it up to the air of a new city.
Of course, it’s never just the air.
It’s the relentless exposure to everything unfamiliar that changes you. That’s how you become a new you—a foreign you, if you will.
Which simply means, when you expose yourself to new ideas, new challenges, and new perspectives, change follows. You just need to be open to the discomfort of learning something new.
You have to let yourself be challenged. The world around you doesn’t demand change—you do.
