Why Do I Feel Like a Stranger in My Own Life?

You have been abroad long enough that it is no longer new. The job is stable, the children are settled, the paperwork is done. By any account you built what you left to build.

And yet there is a persistent sense of standing slightly outside your own life. Not depression exactly, not homesickness — more like watching from a small distance. In Nepal you are now partly foreign; where you live you are still partly a guest. There is nowhere that is simply home.

This has a shape, even without a name

People often assume this feeling means something has gone wrong with them. More often it is the predictable result of a specific situation: living long-term between two cultures without fully belonging to either.

It is common enough among people who migrate as adults to be unremarkable — it simply gets discussed rarely, because it sounds ungrateful and there is no obvious moment to raise it.

Why it arrives in midlife rather than earlier

The early years abroad are fully occupied. There are visas, qualifications, work, money, and children — a long list of urgent problems. Urgency is absorbing, and it postpones every larger question.

Then the list gets shorter. The emergencies stop. And into that space arrives the question that migration deferred: was this what I wanted, or only what I was working toward?

This is a midlife reappraisal like anyone else's, with an additional layer. The person you would have been had you stayed exists as a permanent hypothetical, and it is very difficult to stop comparing yourself to someone who does not exist.

What sits underneath

A justification that has to keep holding

Leaving was justified by what it would provide, and usually it did provide it. But that makes the question of whether it was worth it hard to ask honestly, because asking it can feel like a betrayal of everyone who supported the decision — and of your own years of effort.

So the question stays unasked, which is exactly what allows it to keep surfacing as unease rather than being thought through and settled.

Parents ageing at a distance

In the forties and fifties, parents begin to need care. Distance turns this into a particular kind of ongoing strain: the guilt of not being there, care coordinated over phone calls, and the awareness that visits are finite and being counted.

This is one of the heaviest and least discussed parts of midlife abroad. There is often no good solution, which is precisely why it produces a low, continuous weight rather than a crisis.

Children who belong somewhere you do not

Your children are of the place you moved to in a way you will never be. That is usually what you wanted for them. It can still be a quiet loss — differences in language, in what they find obvious, in what they will never need to explain to anyone.

A decision never actually made

Many people abroad have lived for years inside a provisional arrangement: eventually we will go back, or eventually we will settle properly. Neither is decided, and the years pass in a holding pattern.

Holding patterns are quietly draining. Part of what feels like not belonging is the effect of never having committed to either place.

Nepal has changed too

Visits often make it worse rather than better. The Nepal you return to is not the one you left; your friends have moved on, your reference points are dated, and people treat you as someone who lives elsewhere. The place you were homesick for is partly a place that no longer exists.

When it is more than a transition

Feeling between two places is uncomfortable but normal. It is worth treating as more than that when:

• Nothing gives pleasure any more, not only the things connected to home
• You have withdrawn from people and stopped making the effort
• Sleep, appetite, or energy have changed markedly
• You are drinking more, or otherwise managing the feeling chemically
• It has been present most days for months rather than arriving in waves
• You feel your family would be fine, or better off, without you

Why it is often hard to raise with anyone

There is nobody obvious to tell. Family in Nepal hear it as complaint from someone who is doing well. Friends abroad who did not migrate do not quite have the reference points. A partner may be managing the same thing and have no more capacity for it than you do.

And a therapist in your host country, however skilled, may need the context explained from the beginning — what joint family obligation actually means, why sending money is not optional, why moving back is not a simple matter of preference. Explaining all of that is itself tiring, and some people simply stop.

Also read: Why Nepalis abroad struggle to find the right therapist →

What helps

• Naming it accurately — this is a situation with a recognisable shape, not a personal failure
• Ruling out depression, so you know which you are dealing with
• Actually deciding about staying or returning, even provisionally — the undecided state is itself part of the weight
• Grieving the version of your life that did not happen, rather than continuing to measure against it
• Making a deliberate arrangement about parents, rather than carrying open-ended guilt
• Talking to someone who does not need the context explained first

That last point is a large part of why many diaspora clients choose a Nepal-based practice. Not because therapists abroad are less capable, but because starting from shared context leaves more of the session for the actual problem.

Also read: Therapy for international clients →