The ambiguous grief of living between cultures
I recently returned to Canada for the first time in two years. As I waited to board my long-haul flight across the Atlantic, I realized that while I was looking forward to seeing the people I love, I was not expecting to feel truly at home in my “home” country.
As a psychologist working with globally mobile clients, I see this experience more often than people expect.
On paper, nothing had changed. I was born and raised in Vancouver. I speak the language, understand the cultural codes, and can move through the city with complete familiarity. Yet internally, something felt disconnected.
After nearly nine years of living, working, and traveling across multiple countries, my sense of belonging no longer resides in one place. Instead, it is spread across relationships, cultures, and earlier versions of myself shaped by different environments.
Many digital nomads recognize this feeling, being at home in many places, yet not fully rooted in any of them.
Within each culture where I experience some degree of belonging, I am also unmistakably an outsider.
This in-between psychological space often carries a specific and rarely discussed form of grief.
The Grief of Living Between Cultures
My late partner was Italian and had lived in nine countries. Despite traveling the world and building a life across cultures, he often felt strangely disconnected when returning to his hometown. On his forearm, he carried a tattoo that read “Always a foreigner,” the final word written in Italian.
After more than twenty years of mobility, he no longer felt fully local anywhere — not in the country where he was born, nor in the many places he had called home.
At the time, I understood this intellectually. Today, my understanding of cultural in-betweenness is lived and embodied.
For many long-term travelers, digital nomads, and expats, belonging begins to change shape. Home does not disappear, but the simplicity of having one place serve as a stable emotional anchor often does.
In psychology, this experience closely relates to ambiguous loss — a form of grief that occurs when something meaningful shifts without fully disappearing. The places you have lived still exist. Many relationships may continue. Your memories remain intact.
Yet internally, your cultural positioning becomes uniquely your own.
You may move through multiple countries with familiarity, knowing how to adapt, how to belong — at least partially — in many environments. And still, beneath that competence, there can be a quiet, chronic rootlessness. Many high-functioning digital nomads learn to normalize this feeling, assuming it is simply the price of freedom.
It is important to understand that this tension is not a failure to adapt. Rather, it is often the natural psychological consequence of developing a multi-cultural identity.
As a psychologist working with globally mobile clients, I see how rarely this form of grief is named — and how relieving it can be when it finally is.
Why This Feels Unsettling to the Nervous System
Belonging is both emotional and physiological.
Humans evolved in groups where shared language, social norms, and collective meaning signaled safety. Even today, our nervous systems orient toward environments where cues are predictable and easily understood, because predictability is what the brain interprets as safe.
Cultural safety often shows up in almost invisible ways: understanding humor without translating it, knowing social rules without consciously analyzing them, sensing what is acceptable without hesitation, and feeling recognized without needing to explain who you are.
When you live across multiple cultures for years — as many digital nomads and globally mobile professionals do — your nervous system learns to operate within several frameworks at once. It becomes highly adaptive, capable of tolerating ambiguity, and often remarkably resilient.
But adaptation does not come without a psychological cost.
Over time, you may realize you are no longer fully immersed in the lived reality of any single culture — and no culture fully claims you as its own.
You become slightly foreign everywhere.
For many people, this can feel destabilizing, and at times, deeply isolating.
Yet it is important to recognize that this experience is not inherently negative. It often reflects a life that has expanded beyond a single cultural lens — a nervous system that has learned range, flexibility, and complexity.
Still, even expansion deserves support.
When Home Becomes Distributed
Over time, I have come to realize that home is no longer purely a geographic place. It is less about the birthplace listed on my passport and more about where my nervous system feels settled.
For many digital nomads and globally mobile individuals, this shift happens gradually — often without being consciously noticed.
For example, when I move through the Schengen zone in Europe, I experience a sense of familiarity that feels, contextually, like being “back home.” Not because of one specific country, but because I understand the systems, rhythms, and social patterns. After many years, my body recognizes the terrain and responds with a subtle sense of safety.
Home, increasingly, can begin to feel like regulation rather than location.
Regulation may look like not having to repeatedly explain yourself, moving through cultural cues with ease, recognizing social patterns without effort, and feeling your body soften rather than brace.
In this way, belonging often becomes distributed — held across multiple places, relationships, and experiences — supported by many smaller anchors rather than one singular home.
If You Feel Culturally Rootless
If you have lived across countries or cultures for years and feel that you no longer fully belong anywhere, there is nothing wrong with you.
This experience is more common among digital nomads and globally mobile individuals than many people realize — even if it is rarely spoken about openly.
More gratitude will not resolve this feeling. It is not a sign that your life is unstable, nor that you are failing at mobility, remote work, or building an international life.
You are navigating multiple cultural systems while integrating several evolving identities. And along the way, you may be quietly grieving the simplicity of once having one unquestioned place to call home.
Expansion often feels like loss before it begins to feel like freedom.
Home may no longer be a single city or country. It may instead live within a regulated nervous system, meaningful relationships, values that travel with you, and the small anchors you learn to carry across places.
This form of belonging is more complex — but it can also become more intentional, more self-defined, and ultimately more grounded.
And importantly, you do not have to make sense of this alone.
For many globally mobile people, having a consistent psychological space — one that exists regardless of location — can become a powerful form of stability.
If you recognized parts of your own experience in these words, you are warmly invited to learn more about how I support globally mobile individuals here.
And if this topic resonates, you may also be interested in reading:
When Your Community Keeps Changing: The Emotional Cost of Life Abroad.
