By Dr Patapia Tzotzoli, Clinical Psychologist & Guest Contributor

I first left Greece at the age of eighteen. I spent six months in Italy before moving to the United Kingdom to study, beginning a journey that would eventually take me from Greece to the UK, back to Greece, then again to the UK and later to Canada. Along the way, I studied, worked, built a career, created businesses and raised a family across different countries.

Undoubtedly, a life like this can be adventurous and expansive. Living abroad exposes us to new cultures, languages, relationships, experiences and ways of thinking. It can broaden our understanding of the world and challenge assumptions we did not even realise we held. But it can also involve prolonged psychological loss, repeated reinvention and the gradual loosening of a fixed sense of identity.

Living abroad comes at a price, but it also brings a hard-earned gift: a different kind of freedom, as the source of belonging gradually shifts from place to self.

Departure

From my teenage years, my central ambition was already clear: to “know thyself,” the Socratic ideal that genuine wisdom begins with understanding oneself. I did not yet fully understand what this meant, but I knew intuitively that, to discover who I was, I needed to move beyond the identities, expectations and familiar surroundings into which I had been born. Travelling, studying and later working abroad became the stage on which that exploration unfolded.

Cavafy’s poem Ithaka has always captured this idea beautifully. The destination matters, but its deeper purpose is to set the journey in motion. The true value lies in what the traveller encounters, learns and gradually becomes along the way.

Leaving at such a young age felt both exhilarating and frightening. The world opened up before me, but the usual safety nets disappeared. Familiar language, customs and relationships could no longer be relied upon in the same way. I had to begin following my own internal compass before I fully understood how to read it. Yet the central message of Cavafy’s poem remained with me through every departure, as the poet urges:

“Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.”

Even when circumstances were difficult, I could usually remember why I was still travelling. I was on my path. Whatever happened, good or bad, remained part of moving towards the goal I had set for myself as a teenager.

 

Expansion

Living abroad can be psychologically expansive. Entering a new culture requires us to observe more carefully, for example, how people communicate, what they consider polite, what they leave unsaid and how relationships are formed.

Even small interactions can reveal profound cultural differences. We learn a new language not only through formal education, but through daily exchanges and repeated moments of misunderstanding. What sounds direct and efficient in one culture may seem abrupt in another. What feels warm and expressive somewhere else may be experienced as excessive or intrusive.

Language, however, is never only vocabulary. It carries humour, hierarchy, affection, restraint, history and ways of seeing the world. There were parts of myself that I could express naturally in Greek but struggled to convey in English with the same depth and richness. Over time, I became fluent, but fluency does not guarantee that every part of the self can be communicated equally well in every language. Even when the words can be translated accurately, the cultural meaning behind them may not be fully recognised or received in the same way by someone who does not share the same linguistic and cultural frame. As a result, the sense of being instinctively understood may be harder to achieve, and the connection may feel different.

At the same time, adapting to other cultures made me more flexible. I learned that there is rarely only one acceptable way to live, communicate, work or form relationships. Each country revealed a different possible version of me. That can be one of the greatest gifts of living abroad. We discover that identity is not as fixed as it once appeared. We are not only who we were in the place where we began.

Reinvention

Every move to another country asks us to reinvent ourselves.

After completing my studies in the UK, I worked in the NHS and as an associate in private practice before establishing my own clinic. I had always enjoyed building things from the ground up, and private practice gave me the opportunity to combine clinical work with creativity and independence. Over time, I developed My Psychology Clinic into a successful practice. I also led an independent research programme after receiving an award through a business-plan competition and began developing a web-based support service for students experiencing mental health and study-skills difficulties.

Moving to Canada transformed the landscape of my life. Once again, I had to put down roots in a new country and navigate significant personal and professional transitions. During this period, a serious health challenge affecting my young daughter also shaped my reflections on how to build a career that could remain meaningful, flexible and sustainable amid uncertainty. My Triage Network emerged from this period of profound change.

Through My Triage Network, I positioned myself as a mental health concierge, drawing on my clinical knowledge and expertise to understand each person’s circumstances and make thoughtful, informed connections with suitable mental health professionals based on their preferences and clinical needs. At the same time, the service supports practitioners in developing and strengthening their independent practices.

Having gained my qualifications and clinical experience in the UK, the unconventional decision to establish the service there while living in Canada made sense. Building it across countries and cultures, however, required considerable resourcefulness. Time differences and physical distance created practical challenges, particularly in accessing local communities and resources, building professional relationships, maintaining a visible presence and communicating a new service clearly from afar. Even so, these challenges mattered less than remaining focused on the value of what I was creating and the purpose it continued to serve.

This experience became part of the wider pattern of living abroad. It challenged me to discover what I was capable of, clarified what I did and did not want, and encouraged me to continue carving out a path that brought me closer to myself.

Reinvention is exhausting, yet it is also a form of authorship. We stop waiting for a place, an institution or other people to tell us what we can do or who we are allowed to become.

Host community

Migration is not only an individual task. The people we encounter shape the experience profoundly. A welcoming colleague, a helpful neighbour, a patient friend or a stranger willing to explain something can change how a new country feels. Such gestures may appear small to the person offering them, but to someone who is disoriented, lonely or repeatedly having to prove their competence, they can be deeply significant.

People do not need to understand every aspect of migration in order to help. They only need to remain open to the possibility that the person in front of them may be carrying more than is visible. They may be grieving people, places and former versions of themselves. They may be trying to navigate a system that everyone else appears to understand instinctively. They may be translating not only their words, but also their personality, humour and intentions.

This is why kindness from the host community matters so much. It is something I cannot emphasise or encourage enough. Showing curiosity, expressing genuine interest and offering practical help where possible can make someone feel welcome and help an unfamiliar place begin to feel more like home.

 

Loss

The excitement of living abroad is often easier to discuss than its losses. Migration, even when freely chosen, does not spare us moments of loneliness or the loss of familiarity, status, professional identity, community, linguistic ease and an effortless sense of belonging. Someone who was competent, recognised and socially connected in one country may suddenly find themselves unable to understand how a system works, express themselves with the same precision or call upon anyone nearby for help. With each subsequent move, some of these losses are reactivated.

Psychiatrist Dr Joseba Achotegui developed the concept of “Ulysses Syndrome,” also known as the Immigrant Syndrome with Chronic and Multiple Stress, to describe the extreme migratory stress and grief experienced by people living under particularly adverse circumstances, including separation, profound loneliness, exclusion, fear, insecurity and helplessness. It is not regarded as a mental disorder, but as a severe psychological response to extreme and prolonged migratory stress. Although voluntary migration and forced displacement are not equivalent. People fleeing war, persecution, violence or acute insecurity may face dangers and psychological pressures far beyond those encountered by people who migrate by choice and with adequate resources. Nevertheless, different forms of migration can involve some shared psychological tasks: leaving familiar people and places, adapting to an unfamiliar environment, grieving what has been lost and trying to rebuild a sense of continuity.

When people return to their country of origin, they may discover that they no longer belong there in quite the same way. The place has moved on, the people they knew have changed and they themselves are no longer who they once were. This can produce a peculiar form of homelessness: not the absence of a physical home, but the recognition that no single place now contains the whole self. Memories, attachments and parts of one’s identity have become scattered across countries.

Living abroad can make us independent. We learn to solve problems, tolerate uncertainty and rebuild from very little. Yet independence and resilience can come at a hefty price as they are often accompanied by grief. Strength does not eliminate longing, and adaptation does not erase the cost of what had to be left behind. We often celebrate people’s adaptability without asking what required them to become so adaptable in the first place. The sustained effort involved in continually adjusting, rebuilding and carrying on despite losses can easily be overlooked.

Over time, the deeper task becomes less about deciding which country or identity is the “real” one and more about allowing different parts of the self to coexist. The Greek, British and Canadian dimensions of my life do not need to cancel one another out. Nor do my identities as a psychologist, migrant, mother, entrepreneur and European.

Integration means recognising that identity can be multiple without being fragmented, as we develop a more accepting, harmonious and peaceful relationship with its different parts.

 

Freedom

A key psychological factor in this shift is the point at which belonging becomes less dependent on the environment in which we live and more deeply rooted in who we have become. This is internal belonging. It means reaching a stage at which no single country, culture, community or fixed identity is required to make us feel whole.

Home becomes the self we have built, everyone and everything we love, wherever they may be, and our growing capacity to remain present wherever we are. This freedom is gained by learning to carry loss without allowing it to erase our growth.

I still value roots, continuity and the feeling of being naturally at home somewhere. Perhaps I appreciate them even more now, precisely because I understand what it means to live without them. But I also understand that home may no longer be only somewhere I return to, but something I learn to carry within me.

 

Instead of an epilogue

There is a poignant lyric in the Greek song Penelope by Miltos Paschalidis, which I translate loosely here:

“Those left behind are consumed by the longing to travel,
while those who have travelled yearn for Ithaca.”

This paradox captures the inner tension of both positions. Neither path is complete, and each contains both gains and absences. Those who leave may gain freedom, perspective and expansion, while losing continuity, familiarity and the ease of being understood. Those who stay may preserve belonging and rootedness, while sometimes wondering who they might have become elsewhere.

Neither choice is inherently braver, easier or more meaningful. Both ask something of us, and both involve a form of sacrifice. We cannot live every possible life, but we can inhabit the life we have chosen, or the life circumstances have chosen for us with greater awareness and intention.

Perhaps what matters most is that wherever we are, the central task remains the same one I set for myself all those years ago: to know ourselves. Ithaca may be the place where we live, the place for which we long, or an inner point of return. Ultimately, home may lie not only in where we are, but in our ability to inhabit our lives fully, wherever we happen to be.

 

About the author:

Dr. Patapia Tzotzoli is a UK-trained, HCPC-registered Clinical Psychologist with over 20 years of experience. She is the Director of My Psychology Clinic, where she offers one-to-one online therapy tailored to a select clientele and the Founder of My Triage Network (mytriagenetwork.com), where she provides free consultations and personalised introductions to trusted UK-based mental health professionals for anyone seeking assessments or therapy. Looking for support? Start with a free consultation – Get Triaged today.