An Abstract Guide to Assimilation: How to Make a Home in a Foreign Country

It’s not always easy to adapt to life in a foreign country. Differences in culture, language, geography, and history can make the experience intensely lonely, though the rewards are sweet. Because the transition is mostly mental, here are 5 abstract but proven tips to help you on the way to feeling fully assimilated, wherever you may have chosen to settle:

1. Answer one question first: “Why am I here?”

Ask yourself this: Why am I here? What drove me – or pulled me- to this place? What do I hope to achieve? The answers may be disarmingly simple – perhaps you read a story about a far-off city long ago, and ever after aspired to live there. Maybe you just want to set up an ordinary life abroad – to wake up, go to work, meet friends for a drink, buy toothpaste on the way home – or maybe you want to affect some change. The reasons themselves don’t matter. What matters is that you have some private understanding of why you want to be here, in this situation. When you start to know that, you start to become able to let yourself feel comfortable in your new surroundings.

2. Don’t compare

Don’t spend all of your time analyzing the differences between where you’re from and where you are. Accept this at the outset: there are differences. Probably they will be vast, and many, and they will overwhelm you, and they will be all you can think about. Your dreams and memories will become confused. There will also be overlaps that you didn’t expect, and these too will become an obsession.

And it is, after all, valuable to investigate those differences, and those similarities. It’s irresistible. It’s part of why we do this, often, part of why it’s so compelling to travel and to live abroad. But you cannot do it constantly, or you will never be able to look at where you are as a home.

The problem comes when the language of comparison is the only one we use to describe where we are. Sometimes the most important thing to do is this: put down your travel writer’s pen, rest your probing eyes, forget for a while to speak. Allow yourself to simply be here. Look up at the sky, the new, different sky, and see it just as it is: wide, littered with clouds and stars. Have coffee in a square and consider that this is just a coffee, this is just a square, this is just a little table from which I can see things happen. Run yourself a bath. These are your taps now; never mind that where you’re from, they’d be different. Let yourself be ruled for a day by banalities, not revelations.

3. Learn to become intimate with places, not just people

We tend to think of relationships in human terms – we have friendships and partnerships with other people – but we relate to places in much the same way.

In order to cultivate a relationship with your adopted home, you’ll need to walk and to watch. Become a flâneur, a kind of loiterer, a wanderer. In a book on Paris, Edmund White writes that, “He (or she) is…in search of a private moment, not a lesson…it is the private Proustian touchstone – the madeleine, the tilting paving stone – that the flâneur is tracking down.” In order to adapt to your new surroundings, you’ll need this sort of quest for something intensely personal, something real to hold on to.

4. Break bread

Eat with people – friends, lovers, co-workers, just a few smiling faces from the pub. Invite them to dine at your place; accept  invitations to dine at theirs. Act graciously – cook your favourite recipe, or bring a bottle of wine or a special treat to thank your hosts. This ritual of a shared meal is your lifeline in more than one way. We need to sustain ourselves not just on food but on company, and the intimacy of cooking, eating, and cleaning will bring you closer to the people in your life. Rooting yourself in a community will ultimately make the difference between feeling adrift and at home.

5. But after all that, don’t forget where you come from

The narrator of Javiar Marias’ All Souls, a portrait of a foreigner in Oxford, marvels at one point that, “there’s no one here who knew me as a…child.” This is the great truth of living abroad. It’s lonely living somewhere that has no memory of you, and it’s also deliciously liberating. For me that’s part of the fun – the sense of freedom, the ability to reinvent myself.

But you cannot be an island. Even as you feel yourself becoming a part of the landscape, a local, someone who belongs – never forget where you’re from. Never forget that there’s a place where people did know you as a child. Adapting to a new place is not about erasing yourself. It’s about building upon what’s already there. Your funny accent, your behavioral quirks, your cultural history – it’s all part of the process.