You see them from across the piazza.
A father lifts a child onto his shoulders. A mother laughs at something only she heard. A grandmother passes bread.
Nobody is checking a flight notification.
Nobody is performing a life for an audience in another time zone.
And something in your chest – somewhere just below the sternum – goes very quiet and very heavy at the same time. This is the space between the person you present to the world – passport stamps, LinkedIn endorsements, a curated geography of ambition – and the person who still flinches at the sight of a family eating dinner together without looking at a clock. That space is not a failure. It is a consequence. You made choices. Or choices were made around you. Either way, you are here. Untethered, capable, and inexplicably sad in a piazza on a Tuesday afternoon.
1. The Ambiguous Loss
There is a clinical term for what you are carrying.
Expats often experience a form of ambiguous loss – you haven’t lost a person, but you’ve lost routine, familiarity, and a sense of belonging.
It is grief without a funeral. A mourning without an obituary. Nobody sends flowers for the life you chose not to live.
The loss is real. It simply refuses to announce itself in any form that society has prepared a ritual for.
Ambiguous loss is shaped by physical, social, and emotional displacement, the loss of identity, and cultural bereavement. It accumulates silently, like sediment. You don’t notice the weight until you try to stand still in one place long enough to feel it.
The family in the piazza did not do anything wrong. They just held up a mirror. And what the mirror showed you was the shape of everything you quietly set aside on your way to becoming who you are.
That is not a small thing. It deserves to be named.
2. The Childhood Architecture
Stability in childhood is not merely comfort. It is construction.
Rootedness refers to the sense of belonging or being deeply connected to a particular place, culture, or community, indispensable for emotional well-being and identity formation. It often encompasses the concepts of stability and security, providing an anchor in an ever-changing world.
When that architecture was absent – or interrupted – the self learns to build differently. It learns to build light. Portable. Detachable.
You got very good at not needing things that couldn’t fit in a suitcase.
And then one day, you are standing in a foreign street watching a child fall asleep in her father’s arms in front of a building her great-grandfather also knew. And the part of you that learned to travel light – that part goes very, very still.
Because it recognizes what it never got to be.
The mourning you feel is not jealousy. It is recognition. You are watching the blueprint you never received. The architectural drawing someone else got to live inside.
3. The Phantom Home
The concept of home, for the identity traveler, is not a place.
It is a feeling that was promised and never delivered.
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.
So you looked for it everywhere else. In city after city. In the texture of new streets and the sound of unfamiliar languages. In the brief, electric feeling of arriving somewhere new, before the newness fades and the old ache returns.
The family you watched in the piazza was not performing. They were simply inhabiting.
They weren’t searching. They had already found.
And you recognized it, because some primal, pre-verbal part of you has been looking for exactly that since before you knew what you were looking for.
4. The Success Mythology
There is a story the culture tells you.
It says: leave, grow, achieve, return transformed. It says the sacrifice is temporary. That the passport is the prize. That the LinkedIn profile with seven countries in the experience section is the evidence of a life well-constructed.
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.
But performance is not presence. And success is not the same as being known by a place.
Driven people may push themselves harder precisely because they’re trying to fill the void left by unmet childhood needs. Success becomes a substitute for the love and validation that were missing.
The family in the piazza is not celebrated by an algorithm. They are simply alive, together, in one place, in a way that resists being photographed from the outside without something breaking open in the photographer.
5. The Exit Strategy
I remember the exact moment it crystallized for me.
I was eighteen months into a city I had genuinely come to love. The streets had started to feel familiar. The café owner knew my order. People were beginning to know my name in the slow, generous way that means they are deciding to keep you.
And instead of relief, I felt panic.
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.
The exit is not weakness. But it is worth examining who you are protecting when you reach for the departure board.
6. The Identity Diffusion
There is a term in developmental psychology for what happens when the self cannot locate its own edges.
Unlike individuals raised in a single cultural context, those who navigate identity across multiple cultures can experience “identity diffusion,” a term coined by psychologist Erik Erikson, describing uncertainty about one’s core self.
You become fluent in many selves. The professional self in Tokyo. The casual, sunlit self in Lisbon. The guarded, watchful self in a city you haven’t cracked yet. Each version performs competently. None of them feel entirely like you.
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.
The family in the piazza has one self. One continuous, unhurried self that has been constructed in the same language, the same light, the same streets, for decades.
You watch them and feel the mourning of a coherence you never quite assembled.
7. The Disenfranchised Grief
The grief you carry has no socially recognized form.
Nobody holds a service for the neighborhood you didn’t grow up in. Nobody acknowledges the loss of the school friends you never made because you moved before the friendships could calcify into something permanent. Nobody names the grief of a childhood that was interrupted by ambition – yours, or someone else’s.
Frequent moves can lead to anxiety, loneliness, and “disenfranchised grief.”
Disenfranchised grief is the grief that has no official mourning period. No black armband. No casserole from the neighbors.
It is the grief of what was lost without ceremony. Of what was sacrificed so quietly that even you didn’t notice the sacrifice until you were standing in a piazza, watching someone else live in the continuity you gave up.
The grief you don’t name becomes the restlessness you can’t explain.
Name it. Give it the weight it deserves.
8. The Rootlessness Trap
There is a seductive mythology built around rootlessness.
There is a cultural mythology that rootlessness equals freedom.
But the research tells a harder story.
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.
Freedom and rootlessness are not the same thing. Freedom is a relationship with choice. Rootlessness is the absence of an anchor. And without an anchor, you don’t float freely. You drift.
The family in the piazza is not trapped by their roots. They are held by them. There is a difference. A profound, bone-level difference. And the mourning you feel in their presence is the body’s way of recognizing that difference before the mind has found the words for it.
9. The Performing Self
The traveler builds a public identity that is almost impossible to argue with.
Experienced. Global. Adaptable. A person who has eaten at the right tables in enough cities to seem permanently interesting at any dinner party.
But if our values differ from those of the people with whom we are attempting to belong, we are faced with a constant field of tension between authenticity and attachment.
The performing self is exhausting. It requires maintenance. It requires the constant novelty of new cities to sustain the illusion that movement equals meaning.
The temporary identity is seductive. Until it is all you have left.
The family in the piazza is not performing. They are not interesting in the way that the algorithm rewards. But they are something rarer and harder to fabricate.
They are continuous.
And when you watch them, the performing self goes quiet. And underneath it, something much older and much sadder asks: when did I decide that performance was the price of admission?
10. The Weight of What Was Set Down
Here is the thing nobody says at the networking event.
Every city you arrived in required you to set something down to get there.
A relationship that couldn’t survive the distance. A friendship that calcified into an annual message. A version of yourself that was beginning to feel genuinely at home somewhere – a version you quietly abandoned because staying felt like stopping, and stopping felt like dying.
Expats experience millions of deaths of selves attached to places, friendships fallen by the wayside, missed opportunities, and alternate realities.
This sense of loss is often accompanied by sadness, nostalgia, guilt, and anxiety. A person may feel that they have “betrayed” those left behind or that they no longer belong anywhere.
The mourning you feel when you see the local family is the accumulation of all those set-down things. It is not one grief. It is a geological formation of small surrenders, compressed over years of movement, suddenly visible in the afternoon light of a piazza you will leave in four days.
The family is not your mirror. But your nervous system treats them as one. It says: look. It says: this is what continuity looks like from the outside. It says: you once had a version of this, or you were supposed to, or someone made a decision that meant you wouldn’t.
And the grief that rises is not about them at all.
There is a particular quality to the light in the late afternoon, in cities you are only passing through. It has a way of making everything look permanent except you.
The buildings have been there for centuries. The family at the table has been gathering in some form or another for generations. The piazza itself does not know your name and will not remember your absence. You pass through it like weather. And the grief of that – the specific, low-grade grief of being the person who is always passing through – is not something that resolves with another flight, another city, another chapter opened in an unfamiliar language.
What it requires, if anything, is the willingness to sit with the question the mourning is actually asking. Not why can’t I have what they have – but rather: what did I trade, when did I trade it, and was the trade ever truly mine to make? Those are not comfortable questions. They are the kind that send people back to movement, back to the departure board, back to the clean, analgesic feeling of beginning again somewhere new. But the questions travel with you. They always have.
The family in the piazza will finish their meal, and someone will clear the plates, and the child will be carried inside half-asleep, and the lights will come on one by one in the windows above the street. And you will still be there, or you will already be gone. Either way, something in you will have been briefly, quietly, and entirely honest about what it costs to live the way you live – and that honesty, however uncomfortable, is the only kind of ground that doesn’t disappear when you step off the plane.
