Chapter Two

My cat is asleep on my lap.

She’s completely relaxed, purring softly, entirely unbothered by the fact that she has moved across countries twice in her life. No existential crisis. No adjustment period to speak of. Just – lap found, mission accomplished.

I rest one hand on the keyboard and move the other absentmindedly through her fur. For a moment, everything feels still. Familiar. Almost simple.

It’s strange, I think, how some things adjust so easily. And others never quite do.

Looking back, I was so sure I was ready.

I had a job – a full-time position at the German embassy kindergarten in Beijing. I had a starting date. I had a plan. On paper, everything made perfect sense. And somehow, that made it surprisingly easy to ignore the fact that I had absolutely no idea what I was actually doing.

I remember the pride I felt when I got that job. As if being hired meant I had already figured something out. As if I had earned my place in Beijing before even arriving – and everything else would simply follow. Quietly. Logically. In an orderly fashion.

Spoiler: it did not.

The moment we landed, reality felt… slightly off. Not dramatic, not overwhelming – just that particular feeling of a picture frame hanging two millimetres crooked. Everything looked right. Nothing quite felt right.

Our first restaurant. I smiled and nodded with the quiet confidence of someone who absolutely did not understand a single word being said. I ordered something I thought looked familiar. What arrived was not what I had imagined. It wasn’t bad – it just wasn’t anything I could identify, either.

Alex tried it, adjusted, and moved on with the cheerful adaptability of someone who would probably thrive on Mars. I stayed with the rice. It felt like the only thing I could fully trust. A small, white, reliable island.

It wasn’t really about the food, of course. It was the sudden, very concrete realisation that something as simple as ordering a meal now required effort, patience, and a genuine willingness to not understand what was happening. And that feeling followed us everywhere. Quietly. Like a well-behaved but persistent shadow.

Later that day, we went apartment hunting.

One after another, we walked through spaces that were genuinely impressive – large, bright, fully furnished, with walk-in closets and multiple bedrooms and enough square footage to make our entire previous flat feel like a warm-up act. I kept thinking: we could actually live here.

And yet there was this strange distance. As if I were watching a version of my life through glass. Everything looked exactly right. The sofa was the right shape. The light came in at the right angle. But none of it felt like mine yet. I was trying on a life that hadn’t quite learned my name.

I didn’t question it too much. There was still enough excitement to cushion the uncertainty – that particular kind of beginning-of-an-adventure energy that convinces you everything will come together, somehow, at some point, probably.

And maybe that’s exactly what the beginning is supposed to look like. Not clarity. Not confidence. Just a quiet decision to keep moving anyway.

Back then, I thought being prepared meant having answers. A job, a plan, a direction, a reasonable grasp on the local menu.

What I didn’t yet understand was that none of those things prepare you for how it feels. For the small, constant moments of adjustment. For the invisible, unglamorous process of slowly becoming someone new in a place that doesn’t know you yet.

I still believed I was ready.

I just didn’t know for what.

The cat, meanwhile, had already picked her favourite spot on the sofa.

She always did know first.

If these feelings resonated with you – I created a whole journal around them. 60 prompts for expat women, from the first week abroad to the quiet moment you realise you’ve actually built something real. → The Expat Wife Journal on Etsy