While I’m in the early phases of the healing process, I wanted to share my learnings from surviving the loss of a loved one while abroad. This experience can be one of the most stressful events you will ever face. To heal, you must be open to receiving support from friends, family, and trained professionals. You will also need to take care of administrative and legal business, accept the changes in your circumstances, and eventually help someone else.
Step by step, you can remake your home anywhere with the right amount of patience, flexibility, perseverance, and openness to new experiences. Even if it is a temporary move, living and working abroad can open doors to new experiences that you never imagined before. Don’t let the fear of starting over stop you.
While the pandemic tested us in many ways and changed how we approach our professional and personal lives; it is easy to understand why young professionals might feel that expat life is out of reach. Yet, the opposite is true. Research shows that companies still see the importance of expat assignments with the number of all types of international assignments increasing in the future. Furthermore, professionals who are currently abroad are confident that life as they know it will return. If working abroad is something you want to experience, don’t give up on it.
As an expat, day-to-day life isn’t always “la dolce vita.” You’ll often be challenged while you are working abroad. Depending on where you go, you might face a confusing and lengthy immigration process, run into lots of bureaucracy, encounter difficulties when meeting new people, lose touch with family and friends, find that you are no longer a candidate for a work promotion back home, or be overwhelmed by basic obligations such as filing your taxes. In this blog post, I share some of the challenges I have faced while living and working in Italy.