An Emigrant’s Observations: A Fresh Look at the Exhausting Process of Adapting to Another Country

Over my nine years of living in Austria, I have noticed that almost any conversation about emigration quickly comes around to the word “difficult”: it is difficult to learn a language, find a job, make friends, deal with paperwork, and get used to new rules. And after all these years, I understand that all of this is true. But at some point, another question occurred to me: if something is difficult, why do we automatically consider it a bad thing? In today’s article, I would like to look at emigration from a slightly different perspective. If you take a closer look at what makes up a significant part of these difficulties, a rather interesting picture begins to emerge.

What Does “Difficult Emigration” Actually Involve?

The first and most obvious thing is learning a language. Then comes finding a job and proving your professional value, meeting people, understanding another culture, getting to grips with new rules, and dealing with everyday matters independently. But all of these things would be difficult back home too. Learning English to a decent level is not easy in Krasnodar either. Earning a new professional qualification also takes effort in Moscow. Making new friends as an adult is difficult in any country. Starting to take your health or fitness seriously is not easy anywhere. The difference lies elsewhere: back home, you can often simply choose not to do any of these things. Believe me, I know what I am talking about, because I did not pay much attention to them in my own country!

A Familiar Environment Often Allows You to Go Years Without Changing Anything

Back home, your life is already in place. You know the language. You have old acquaintances, relatives, useful connections, and an understanding of how to talk to a doctor, a government official, or a police officer. You have an established social circle and dozens of familiar ways of navigating society that developed many years ago. And a person can spend decades living within this structure, making small adjustments to it without really developing or changing for the better.

You can spend 20 years “learning English” and still barely speak it because you have no real need for the language. Believe me, that was exactly my situation in Krasnodar: I needed English in theory. You can spend years socialising with the same people simply because they happen to be around. You can avoid thinking about professional development as long as your existing connections are enough to keep you moving forward. Emigration takes that option away rather brutally.

The process of emigration itself quickly forces you to do things you could previously put off. In another country, learning the language suddenly stops being an abstract project for the future. You need it today, right now. Meeting new people is no longer optional either. If you feel lonely, you have to leave the house, look for people, go to a bar, attend a meetup, play tennis, join a sports club or a book club — anything. Something similar happens with work. Your old connections may no longer mean anything, so you have to study, earn certificates, develop your skills, explain to strangers exactly how you can be useful to them, and demonstrate your professional qualifications through internationally recognised documents rather than personal connections.

Even a visit to the doctor unexpectedly becomes part of your development. You feel nervous, try to speak another language, learn new words, and discover how the healthcare system works. And along the way, you suddenly ask yourself a simple question: why wasn’t I taking care of my health regularly before?

And gradually, a rather strange feeling begins to emerge: what initially seemed like an additional challenge starts making your life broader, brighter, and more interesting.

A System Takes the Place of Heroic Effort

There is another thing I began noticing particularly clearly after moving abroad. Back home, many positive changes in life often take the form of a short but exhausting heroic effort. For example, deciding to start exercising on Monday and immediately training for five hours a day, trying to bring your English up to C3 level in a couple of months, or signing up for some intensive course. You have enough energy to keep it going for a while, but then your familiar life gradually pulls you back in.

A lot of this has to do with routine itself. In a familiar environment, routine is particularly powerful. Everything is already organised in a certain way: work, your old social circle, familiar routes, family matters, a long-established list of responsibilities, and even certain rituals, such as having beer on Fridays. To fit something new into this structure, you have to deliberately make room for it every single time, not only in your own life but also in the lives of the people around you. As a result, any change can easily feel like a separate project requiring additional willpower.

Emigration itself disrupts much of your previous routine. Old patterns stop working, while new ones have yet to be created. And unexpectedly, you get the opportunity to rebuild your everyday life from scratch, this time a little more consciously: deciding what you genuinely want to spend your time on, which habits to keep, which to give up, and what should become a normal part of your life in the first place.

Perhaps this is precisely where the feeling of constantly having to make heroic efforts gradually disappears. You stop ceremoniously “starting a new life” every time. Emigration is already your new life. Certain things simply find their place in your schedule and stay there. And with that comes a pleasant feeling: your personal development no longer looks like an occasional burst of enthusiasm. It becomes an ordinary way of living.

Over time, personal development stops being merely a response to necessity. It gradually becomes a habit and part of everyday life. Languages no longer feel like a difficult obligation that you need to complete once and for all. Once you have mastered one well enough for everyday life and work, you start thinking about the next. Travelling only strengthens this desire: you hear a new language, understand a few words, observe people, and suddenly want to explore it a little more deeply.

The same thing happens in other areas of life. Meeting new people stops being simply a way to fill the emptiness left by moving abroad. You develop an interest in people, their experiences, professions, and perspectives. Education, too, gradually moves beyond the need to “get a piece of paper for an employer.” The very process of learning something new begins to bring pleasure.

At some point, you notice that personal development no longer requires a separate decision. It becomes a normal part of your everyday routine, just as natural as work, meeting friends, or making plans for the weekend.

Life Becomes Bigger

There is another change that you begin to appreciate more and more over time. Life back home can often become quite closed off, although you barely notice it from within. Work, family, a few old friends, familiar places, the same conversations, and the same social routines. All of this can be perfectly comfortable, but your world gradually becomes rather predictable. After moving abroad, it starts expanding almost by itself. People enter your life whom you might never have met under different circumstances. They have different experiences, professions, and ways of looking at familiar things. One person introduces you to others, and conversations lead to new interests, places, ideas, and activities.

Gradually, your very perception of your own life begins to change. It becomes less confined to a long-established social circle and increasingly filled with new connections, unexpected conversations, and discoveries. At some point, you realise that emigration has expanded not only your geographical horizons but also the range of possibilities for how you can actually live.

Difficult Still Doesn’t Mean Bad

I think that when we talk about emigration, we are too quick to connect two different things. If an experience is difficult, we seem to assume that something must already be wrong with it. As though difficulty itself were an argument against it. But a difficult experience can also be valuable. Sometimes it is precisely what forces a person to look more carefully at themselves, reconsider their habits, and make decisions that could have been postponed for years in a more comfortable life.

That is why I increasingly dislike the tone in which emigration is described exclusively as a series of hardships. Yes, it really can be exhausting. But that does not automatically mean it destroys a person or makes their life worse. Sometimes difficulty simply means that the old ways of living no longer work, while new ones are still taking shape. And if you see this process only as a loss of comfort, it is easy to overlook how much a person is gaining along the way. Perhaps that is why, for me, it all comes down to one simple thought: difficult does not necessarily mean bad.

Emigration is certainly not for everyone. Some people genuinely need nothing more than one city, one neighbourhood, and one familiar street, and there is nothing wrong with that. But if someone has already emigrated and is finding the experience difficult, I think it can be useful to sometimes look at what is happening as a process of personal development as well.

Personal development is rarely comfortable. It requires effort, discipline, patience, and a willingness to feel less capable than you would like for a while. But eventually, there are tangible results: you become more independent, calmer, more confident in your abilities, understand yourself better, and gradually build a version of yourself that depends less on familiar surroundings.

This particular thought helps me a great deal. Whenever another stage of emigration becomes difficult again, I try to see it as part of a larger process of rebuilding myself — sometimes unpleasant, sometimes exhausting, but almost always leaving something valuable behind.

And perhaps this perspective will help someone else too. If you are finding things difficult right now, it may be worth occasionally asking yourself not only what emigration is taking away from you, but also what it is teaching you and what kind of person it is gradually helping you become. And if the very need to change only makes you irritated, and you feel that there is absolutely no room left for personal growth, then perhaps that is exactly where the most interesting question to ask yourself begins.

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О проекте:

An Emigrant’s Observations: A Fresh Look at the Exhausting Process of Adapting to Another Country

What Does “Difficult Emigration” Actually Involve?

A Familiar Environment Often Allows You to Go Years Without Changing Anything

A System Takes the Place of Heroic Effort

Life Becomes Bigger

Difficult Still Doesn’t Mean Bad

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