Hi Trisha,

Nice to “meet you” and thank you so much for contributing to this post. I can so much relate to this. I lived in a small village called Bruck an der Mur in Austria for 8 months before moving to Vienna, and it was the same experience.

Happier to be in Dubai right now, but I am learning that living in different countries is both a blessing and a curse; Blessing — you learn more about yourself and learn to trust your inner guidance system and, somehow you are set free from some conditioning acquired during childhood which might have not been healthy in the first place. You also become more empathetic — as humans, we do not give much attention to how we interact with others until we are the “foreign” ones. This changed how I make business/career decisions.

When I moved to Austria, I could barely speak German, and I had to completely rely on my husband (Austrian), ahhhhh, talk of patience…..this is where you learn so much about yourself and your partner, luckily we moved to Vienna after 8 months, which is not to say it was easy, but at least I could do many things without the help of my husband, and built my own small tribe of friends whom I could connect to on a deeper level.

Curse — it is difficult to find people who will actually understand what you are going through….and just like you, I couldn’t help but feel like an “ungrateful immigrant” because on the surface level, you have everything or even more than you need to be considered as “having a good life” by society standards, but man cannot live by bread alone. And, oh yes, these are our new homes and we have the right to have an opinion.