The suitcase is already half-packed.
It always is.
You’ve been in this city eighteen months, and the itch has started again.
Not boredom. Something older. Something that smells like a question you can’t quite translate.
There is a version of you that the world rewards for this. The adventurer. The citizen of everywhere. The person at the dinner party who leans back and says, “I’ve lived in seven countries,” and watches the room rearrange itself around you. That version is real. But beneath it, in the quiet after everyone goes home, there is another version. One who presses their back against the bare wall of another temporary apartment and wonders why nowhere has ever felt like enough.
This experience has a name: existential migration – coined by psychologist Greg Madison, it refers to a deep, often unspoken motivation to move, not for survival or status, but from an inner pull toward authenticity, freedom, and self-realisation. But there is a darker current beneath even that poetic framing. One that points not forward toward freedom, but backward – toward a childhood that never quite delivered a place that felt safe enough to call home.
1. The Wound That Wanders
Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby, emphasises the importance of early relationships with caregivers in shaping an individual’s ability to form stable and secure relationships throughout life. Early attachment experiences influence our relational patterns, emotional regulation, and conflict management skills. When these early attachments are disrupted or toxic, they can lead to persistent difficulties in forming healthy adult relationships.
That is the clinical language. Here is the human one.
If home never felt safe, you learned to make safety portable.
You learned to carry it in your personality. In your adaptability. In your ability to read a room in any language and make yourself belong – even if only for a season.
Attachment theory explains how humans form strong emotional bonds with key individuals, starting in childhood, to help manage stress, fear, and uncertainty. These bonds provide comfort and safety, shape how we see ourselves and others, and influence our relationships throughout life. When those bonds are unstable from the start, the self learns a different trick: keep moving, keep searching, and maybe – just maybe – the next place will be the one that finally holds you.
It never quite is. But the search itself feels like purpose. And purpose, for a while, feels like home.
2. The Insecure Cartographer
You are very good at maps.
You can read a new city in three days. You know which café will become your café, which street will feel like yours, which corner will be the one you remember years later with a specific and inexplicable grief.
But ask you to draw a map of yourself – a fixed, settled, permanent one – and the pencil hesitates.
Migration at a young age, whether domestically, internationally, or both, is associated with an insecure attachment style. And insecure attachment does not disappear when the child grows up. It migrates with them. It becomes the engine behind the engine – the invisible reason the visa applications keep coming.
Many people living away from home feel that their usual strategies and defence mechanisms no longer serve them as well as they used to, and as such, they start to feel lost at sea. At this stage, one’s personal values can seem of significant importance as well as seem relentlessly tested; and many expats speak of an identity crisis, feeling perplexed of their role, their sense of self and agency in the world.
The serial expat is not running from identity. They are running toward it. They just haven’t stopped long enough to find it in the only place it exists: inside.
3. The Childhood Blueprint
Childhood is a critical period for the development of identity and a sense of belonging. Stability, both in terms of physical environment and social connections, plays a crucial role in this process. When children move frequently, especially during formative years, it can disrupt the continuity needed for stable identity formation.
But what about the child who didn’t move at all – and still found no stability?
The house stayed the same. The parents did not.
The neighbourhood remained fixed. The emotional ground beneath it did not.
According to Freud’s classical theory, people’s core personality traits are highly affected by experience in childhood – specifically, it highly depends on whether people have learned how to regulate and satisfy their desires in early developmental stages. When that regulation is never modelled, never taught, the adult goes looking for it in new geographies. New time zones. New versions of the same unanswered question: Is this the place where I finally get to be at rest?
The blueprint was drawn before you ever held a passport.
You have been building from it ever since.
4. The Temporary Identity
Every new city gives you a gift.
Reinvention.
No one here knows who you were. No one carries the old story about you. You arrive clean, narrative-free, and for a few glorious months, you get to be exactly who you decide to be that morning.
In an attempt to belong, it’s tempting to internalise the values of one’s host country or the local international community, but if these don’t align with one’s authentic self, there is a risk of developing an incoherent sense of identity leading to unfulfillment in life.
That is the trap inside the gift.
Each reinvention costs something. A layer of continuity. A thread of the through-line that says: this is who I am, across all the cities, across all the versions. It’s the mourning of parallel lives – the versions of yourself you keep constructing and abandoning in every new zip code. It’s what psychologists recognize as identity displacement: the fracturing that happens when your sense of self can no longer find a wall to lean on.
The temporary identity is seductive. Until it is all you have left.
5. The Exit Strategy
I remember the feeling clearly.
Eighteen months in. The city had stopped being a discovery and started being a mirror. And what it reflected – the routines, the familiar faces, the slow creep of being known – made something in me want to bolt.
I told myself it was wanderlust. A calling. An appetite for experience that ordinary people simply didn’t have.
It took years – and a very quiet therapist’s office – to understand that the exit strategy was also an avoidance strategy. That the moment a place started to feel real, started to ask something of me beyond novelty, I engineered a reason to leave.
One significant push factor for many expats is the desire to escape a toxic family environment. Toxic family dynamics can include constant criticism, emotional neglect, physical abuse, or manipulative behaviours. Such environments can severely impact an individual’s mental health, leading to anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem.
The exit strategy, I finally understood, was not about the next destination. It was about not being found out in the current one.
6. The Phantom Home
There is a home you carry inside you that doesn’t exist on any map.
It has a particular quality of light. A specific emotional temperature. A feeling of being entirely held, entirely known, entirely safe.
You have never lived there. But you recognise it the moment you arrive somewhere new – for about six weeks – before the dream dissolves and the search resumes.
Home, in this global life, is not a fixed place; it is a shifting concept explored through movement and adventure. That sounds like liberation. For the serial expat with an unresolved childhood wound, it can also sound like a life sentence.
The trap is this: the more places you’ve lived, the harder it becomes to choose one. Every commitment to a place feels like a betrayal of all the other cities waiting to know you. And so you keep moving. And the trap tightens.
The phantom home is not a place. It is an emotional state. And it was supposed to be built in childhood, by people who were supposed to know how.
7. The Rootlessness Religion
The culture celebrates you.
Instagram celebrates you. LinkedIn celebrates you. The algorithmically optimised version of your life – the rooftop in Lisbon, the market in Oaxaca, the co-working space in Chiang Mai – performs beautifully.
There is a cultural mythology that rootlessness equals freedom. It is a seductive lie.
Freedom and rootlessness are not the same thing. Freedom is a relationship with choice. Rootlessness is the absence of an anchor.
Signs of lacking rootedness include feelings of restlessness, difficulty forming long-term relationships, and a persistent sense of not belonging. These are not signs of a life well-wandered. They are symptoms. Quiet ones. The kind that only announce themselves at 3 AM in a beautiful apartment in a city that everyone else would kill to live in.
The rootlessness religion has a lot of converts. Very few of them will admit they are not, actually, at peace.
8. The Avoidant Pilgrim
Avoidantly attached individuals might find it difficult to form new connections, leading to loneliness and social withdrawal. But here is the particular cruelty of the avoidant expat: they are extraordinarily good at the surface of connection.
They make friends in every city. Brilliant, fast, exhilarating friendships forged in the intensity of shared foreignness. And then they leave. And the friendship, deprived of geography, slowly dissolves.
This is not coldness. This is armour.
Some have fearful-avoidant attachment styles and, though craving intimacy and close relationships, the overwhelming sense of risk in relation to being dismissed or even abandoned makes it seem dangerous to truly connect with new people. Expats with this attachment style often find relief in living far away from loved ones as contact is less anxiety-inducing.
The serial move becomes a choreography of closeness without vulnerability. All the warmth of connection, with a built-in expiration date that makes depth unnecessary. The leaving is not an accident. It is the point.
9. The Third Culture Grief
One of the primary mental health concerns for third culture individuals is the feeling of not fully belonging to any one culture. Studies show that belonging is both a biological and social need, and it promotes feelings of safety and wellbeing. Lacking this can lead to a sense of rootlessness and isolation, as you may struggle to fully integrate or feel accepted in either your host or home culture.
This grief has no funeral.
There is no designated moment of mourning for the place you almost were. For the identity you could have built, had you stayed. For the version of yourself that belongs somewhere, without quotation marks around the word “belongs.”
This journey, marked by navigating multiple cultures, languages, and communities, offers a broadened perspective of the world, yet it frequently accompanies a nuanced form of loneliness. Third culture loneliness stems not from isolation but from the complexity of belonging everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.
That is the grief that lives in the serial expat’s ribcage. Not the grief of what was lost. The grief of what was never quite found. And the dawning suspicion that the search itself might be the thing keeping the finding at bay.
10. The Reckoning
At some point, the movement slows.
Not because the world runs out of cities. It doesn’t. There are always more cities. More neighbourhoods that smell like possibility. More morning markets in languages you can almost understand.
The movement slows because the body gets tired of carrying what the mind refuses to unpack.
Frequent moves during childhood have negative long-term consequences, such as lower life satisfaction, fewer quality relationships and worse psychological well-being in adulthood. These consequences don’t arrive dramatically. They arrive as a quiet diminishment. A thinning of something that used to feel rich.
Expat uprooting is not only about severing ties from home. The significant changes you experience from uprooting can make you feel disconnected from yourself. The person you need to stay connected to the most right now is yourself. When you uproot your life, you don’t need to lose yourself in the process.
The reckoning is not a crisis. It is an arrival. The first real one. The moment when the serial expat finally stops searching the map for the feeling they were always supposed to find inside. It is the heaviest moment. And it is also, quietly, the most important one. Because the version of home that childhood never provided cannot be found in a postal code. It has to be built. Slowly. From the inside out. In whatever city you happen to be in when you finally decide to stop running from the one person you’ve been avoiding all along: yourself.
There is something almost sacred about the moment you stop performing the life of the adventurer and start living the life of the person who was always underneath. It does not arrive on a specific continent. It does not come with a view. It tends to arrive in the most ordinary of moments – doing dishes in a kitchen that might, this time, be yours for more than a year – when something in the chest goes quiet in a way it never has before.
The maps you have collected are beautiful. The stamps in the passport are real. None of that is wasted. But the home you were always looking for was never on the other side of a departure gate. It was the thing you almost touched every time you stopped long enough to feel it – before the suitcase called, and you answered, and the searching resumed its ancient, faithful, exhausting work.
Maybe the bravest move you will ever make is the one where you stay.
