Starting Over in a New Country - Nobody Tells You How Hard the Small Things Are
Everyone talks about the big move. The flight. The new chapter. The opportunity. The excitement. Social media is full of people standing in airports with luggage, smiling into the camera, captioning it "new beginnings." Nobody talks about what happens after the airport. Nobody talks about the week you spend figuring out how to open a bank account in a country where you have no credit history, no proof of address, and no idea which documents you actually need until you show up and are told you are missing something. Nobody talks about standing in a queue in a government office, surrounded by a language you technically speak fluently, but in an accent and pace that still makes your brain work twice as hard to process. Nobody talks about the exhaustion of doing ordinary things in a completely unfamiliar system for the first time. I moved to a new country. Not as a tourist. Not for a holiday. Permanently or at least, with the intention of building something permanent. And I w...