When we move overseas and I begin a new posting, it’s hard to convey just how completely my life changes—let alone to describe what those changes look like. My social media may offer glimpses of where I’ve landed: snapshots of a far-flung place, unfamiliar foods, and me appearing happy and at ease among a group of strangers.
Yet curating outward appearances can give the impression of being in a kind of faux-vacation mode, masking the reality of what it means to settle into daily life in a new country. A picture can be a worth a thousand words and still not fully capture how radically everything has shifted—from your commute to your surroundings to your diet. From the outside, it might look entirely positive, or, depending on one’s perspective, overwhelmingly negative. Lately, I’ve been trying to find a way to write that describes the intangibles of this period—so that I can more accurately depict life here from afar.
Collecting Postcards 