Cultural Identity When Living Abroad: Rediscovering Parts of Yourself Overseas
- Locus of Life
- Jan 23
- 5 min read
Have you ever found yourself living in another country
and suddenly noticing parts of yourself you had never really thought about before?
Perhaps it happens during a small conversation with your partner.
Perhaps it is in the way you respond to family expectations.
Or perhaps it is in a quiet moment when you realise that something
which has always felt completely natural to you is not seen
in the same way by the people around you.
Before I moved to the UK through an international marriage,
I never really thought about being Japanese.
In Japan, it simply felt normal. It was the air I had grown up breathing.
But once I began living abroad, that sense of normality slowly started to shift.
Each time I encountered a cultural difference, I found myself thinking:
"I am more Japanese than I ever realised."
Small Moments That Made Me Notice the Difference
This awareness did not arrive through one dramatic event.
It grew quietly through small, everyday moments.
One day, I was walking with my husband at the time. Someone was coming towards us, so,
as I naturally would, I stepped slightly to one side to make room.
He looked puzzled and said,
"Why do you keep moving left and right? Just keep walking straight.
It makes it easier for the other person to navigate around you."
I remember feeling surprised.
To me, stepping aside slightly so someone else could pass comfortably simply
felt like the natural thing to do.
On another occasion, we were having a family meal when I casually shared a childhood memory.
I said that when I was growing up, I had always been told not to leave even a single grain of rice because the farmers had worked so hard to grow it.
He smiled and replied,
"But people work just as hard to grow potatoes and carrots. Why is rice so special?"
I laughed.
He had a point.
It was never about who was right or wrong.
It was simply one of those moments when I realised that something deeply familiar to me
carried a completely different meaning in another culture.
Little by little, I began to understand that what had always felt ordinary to me
was not ordinary everywhere.
When Adapting Becomes Automatic
When I first started living in the UK, I genuinely wanted to adapt.
I wanted to understand the culture.
I wanted to build good relationships with my partner's family.
I wanted to find my place.
There is nothing wrong with that.
Whenever we live in another country, openness and flexibility matter.
Wanting to understand the people and culture around us
is an important part of building a life there.
But over time, something else quietly began to happen.
I became used to adjusting.
I put other people's thoughts before my own.
I told myself,
"This is simply how things are here."
Gradually, I spent less time asking myself how I truly felt
and more time wondering how I ought to behave.
Without realising it, my own inner sense became harder to hear.
Looking back, I don't think it happened all at once.
It happened little by little, almost without me noticing.
Cultural Identity When Living Abroad
Living overseas helped me see just how deeply my upbringing had shaped
the way I experienced the world.
Sensing the unspoken atmosphere.
Trying not to inconvenience other people.
Valuing harmony.
Hoping that some things could be understood without needing to be said.
Before moving abroad, I had never thought of these qualities as being particularly "Japanese".
They were simply part of who I was.
It was only through living in another culture that I began to recognise
where many of those instincts had come from.
Cultural identity when living abroad is not always something we think about consciously.
Sometimes we only begin to notice it when another culture gently reflects it back to us.
It Is Natural for Identity to Shift
Living abroad often means holding two worlds within you.
One quietly says,
"This is how I have always known things."
The other says,
"People see things differently here."
You may return to your home country and hear,
"You've changed."
Yet in the country where you now live, you may still be seen as an outsider.
There can be a strange feeling of not fully belonging anywhere.
Many people who build their lives outside their home country experience this at some point.
From a counselling perspective, this does not mean you are losing yourself.
Quite the opposite.
It can be a very natural part of understanding yourself more deeply
within a new cultural environment.
Identity is not fixed.
It evolves throughout our lives, shaped by the people we meet,
the places we live and the experiences we carry with us.
You are not necessarily becoming someone different.
You may simply be discovering parts of yourself that were always there,
but had never needed to be seen before.
Not Erasing Yourself, but Finding a New Shape
Looking back now, I do not believe I was losing the Japanese part of myself.
If anything, living abroad helped me discover parts of myself that I had never fully noticed before.
That awareness, however, was not always comfortable.
For a long time, I saw some of my Japanese ways of being almost as weaknesses.
The tendency to adapt.
The difficulty of expressing disagreement directly.
The habit of sensing the unspoken atmosphere while quietly placing my own feelings to one side.
I believed these were things I needed to change if I wanted to live successfully in another country.
Today, I see them rather differently.
Some of these patterns certainly made life harder.
At times, they led me to silence my own needs.
But they also reflected qualities I have come to value deeply.
Sensitivity.
Thoughtfulness.
Respect for others.
A genuine desire to live in harmony with the people around me.
The problem was not my cultural background itself.
The problem was that I had sometimes mistaken self-sacrifice for kindness.
In trying so hard to care for others, I had forgotten that I needed care too.
Living abroad did not require me to reject who I was.
It invited me to understand myself more deeply.
Not to abandon my cultural identity.
Not to cling to it unquestioningly.
But to allow it to take on a new shape.
One that honoured where I came from without asking me to lose myself in the process.
In many ways, it also became an opportunity to understand
that part of myself with greater kindness and honesty.
Living abroad is a journey of discovering another culture.
But it is equally a journey of discovering yourself.
I am still on that journey.
Yet there is one thing I can say with far more clarity now.
It was only by living abroad that I came to discover the "Japan" within me.
And that discovery led me to a deeper question.
What kind of person do I want to be from this point onwards?
🌿 A Small Step for You: Free 30-Minute Online Session
Living abroad can sometimes leave you wondering whether you have changed,
whether you still recognise yourself, or whether your feelings make sense in the culture around you.
If any part of this article resonated with you,
please know that you do not have to have everything figured out before talking to someone.
You do not need to explain your thoughts perfectly.
It does not have to be a major crisis.
Many people living abroad carry these quiet questions alone for years.
I offer a calm, confidential and pressure-free space where you can gently explore your thoughts, relationships, identity and emotional wellbeing while living overseas.
Sometimes it is enough simply to have somewhere you can speak freely, in your own time,
without feeling that you have to justify how you feel.
If that feels like something you might need, you are very welcome.
[🔽 Book your free 30-minute online session here]
If you would simply like to get a sense of the space first, that is absolutely okay too.
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