Expatriatism

A quote from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun also Rises:

“You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You're an expatriate, you see? You hang around cafès."

I read this quote to illustrate what I think is a common American view of Europe – that life here is easy, holidays are frequent, and stress, along with polio and malaria, has been virtually eradicated.

Indeed, most of my friends and all of my family members believe that my expatriate lifestyle is not only exciting, but also deeply relaxing, culturally rewarding, and virtually free of the normal hassles of daily living. And to a degree, they’ve got a point – for example, in my professional life, I can walk or bike to my classes, I do most of my editing and writing at home, and aside from my mother-in-law, I don’t really have a boss. So yeah, I see what they mean.

But when it comes to one’s personal life, things can be challenging for an expatriate. And with apologies to all the lucky students who go on foreign exchange programs, I'm not talking about a semester spent studying abroad. Because while these are highly beneficial and expanding in many ways, the challenge of striking out on one's own is largely taken out of the equation when one deals with two cooperating institutions that take care of housing, living permits, classes, excursions, etc. Hell, sometimes they even feed you.

Instead, the challenge I'm talking about here is day-to-day LIFE abroad. The daily grind, but with that added foreign twist. We have friends, for example, who are also expatriates and have a year-old baby. The mother has had to maneuver through the complexities of child care in a foreign context for the last year and a half. Can you imagine your baby having a fever and during a hospital visit you only understand maybe ¾ of what the doctor is telling you? How’s that for stress?

Indeed, if you’re looking for a courageous undertaking, try working your way through a foreign bureaucracy to secure a living permit. You’re looking for adventure? Try finding a decent, affordable place to live in a foreign city.

But I don’t mean to bitch. I chose this lifestyle and I very much enjoy it. I merely want to illustrate that life can get stressful no matter where you may be.

Case in point: we are going to move from Germany to Spain this October, and of course both my wife and I are deeply excited about it. We’ve been speaking about virtually nothing else since she was offered the job there, and we are beginning to realize just how complicated a move between foreign countries is actually going to be.

A partial list of stressors that will feature heavily for us in the near future:

Learning a new foreign language.
Both of us changing jobs, only I don’t have one lined up yet.
Selling our car.
Having to vacate our apartment and paint it.
Either unloading all of our stuff, or driving a rental van, with all our stuff in it, the roughly 2,000 miles to Seville. And then back.
Finding an apartment in Seville.
And lastly, we have to get our living and working permits sorted out, which spells hours and hours of sitting in shabby waiting rooms for the privilege of being condescended to by surly paper-pushers with veto power over your future.

Sigh.

All of this naturally begs the question: is it really worth it? I mean, one only undertakes such a move to improve one’s lot in life, and we’re fundamentally happy where we are. In the five years that we’ve lived here in D-land, we’ve jumped through all the hoops and now it’s just a matter of coasting along as if we were normalized citizens, even if I’ll always speak pidgin Deutsch.

Anyway, to apply some external criteria to the question of whether or not expatriates suffer from stress, I Googled the The Holmes-Rahe Scale, a sociological instrument based on the premise that “good and bad events in one's life can increase stress levels and make one more susceptible to illness and mental health problems.” The two scientists came up with their scoring system nearly 40 years ago to test the observation that their patients tended to have experienced several life events in the months before the onset of illness.

Moving to a foreign country wasn’t on the list of choices, though I imagine it would have put me well above my final score of 294 points, just five shy of the major stress threshold of 300.

When we first considered moving to Spain, I reckoned that the dry, warm climate there would be good for our health. But the way the Holmes-Rahe Scale sees it, I should be in the hospital pretty much anyday now.