Will You Regret Becoming an Expat?

Or; There and Back Again: Returning to Mexico from the United States

Every trip back to the United States proves to be emotionally fraught, but our most recent junket, which took place over the course of three and a half weeks and only saw us safely back in Oaxaca this past Monday, was the hardest yet.

If you’re thinking about leaving your home country to become an expat, you’re probably asking yourself, and, really, should ask yourself, if you’ll regret it. After all, the expat experience—which is to say, the privileged immigrant experience—is one of trade-offs. For people who flee their countries because their lives are in danger or because it’s so impossible to earn a living that it creates actual suffering, you take what you can get when it comes to relocation. But for people like ourselves who left because we wanted to, not because we were forced to, the calculus is really one of comfort. That includes material comforts such as being able to buy the things you like and eat the food you love and also what one could describe as spiritual comforts, such as spending time with friends and family or simply being in a place that is so familiar that you don’t have to think about syncing yourself to its rhythms.

This trip back to the United States was to introduce our now six-month-old son, Leo, to the friends and family who haven’t met him yet. He got to see my parents, meet my grandmother, see Andrea’s mom and meet Andrea’s father and girlfriend for the first time, and meet all of our friends in New York. We traveled during a period of exceptionally good weather, visited places loaded with nostalgia, and celebrated and were welcomed by many of the people who are the most important to us. We feasted heavily, drank more than we normally do, and other than being repeatedly screwed and victimized by the United States air travel system, we had a great time.

Sometimes the line between homesickness and heartbreak is so thin it almost ceases to exist. If you’re thinking about becoming an expat, this is what you need to be most concerned about. Loss of community, of family, and of place are the greatest sacrifices you will make when you leave your home country. Unless you move to a place that is truly xenophobic, such as Japan or, let’s face it, the United States, adaptation is simply a matter of time. You can become accustomed to all sorts of things with enough time. You can adjust to a different climate, get used to new noises and smells, embrace new cuisines, and learn to love new holidays. But if you’re reading this, you’re probably old enough to have spent a considerable amount of your life poaching in the broth of your home culture, and you’ll feel the absence of that in your new home. The far more intractable problem, though, is the loss of family and friends. New people, no matter how dear they may become to you, cannot, will not, make up for those you left behind.

Becoming an expat isn’t exclusively a tale of tragedy, though. We’ve made wonderful friends in Mexico, and we don’t value them any less than those in the United States. Friends and family can come visit, and if you pick a place to live that’s particularly desirable, you may have a very hard time keeping them away. Participating in such a huge undertaking also provides both a great adventure and a seemingly unlimited set of new and novel experiences. If you’re someone who needs a degree of thrill in your life, and if you’re delighted by new people and places, a big relocation will delight you.

If you are economically successful enough to able to change countries, and even if the reason for the transition is to make you more economically stable, and if you’ve done your homework about the true costs of where you’re moving to, you’ll find a life that will likely be far more comfortable than you were used to. In New York, we stayed in my parents’ beautiful but small 1-bedroom apartment (they were not in town that week), and I kept thinking to myself, “We could do this again!” But after we returned to our four-bedroom Oaxacan home, complete with pool, walled courtyard with fountain, and various gardens, for which our mortgage is almost two thousand dollars less than our NYC rent, my certainty dimmed. Certainly, our medical and dental care has been better, and ludicrously less expensive, than what we typically received in the United States.

A lot of my life has been configured, both deliberately and by instinctual inclination, to minimize regret. When we talked about the possibility of leaving New York, a place we were deeply frustrated by but still loved, what drove us was the feeling that if we didn’t make the change then, at that moment, we might never have the opportunity again. So if now, more than a year and a half after moving, when I think about whether I regret leaving the U.S., the answer is that yes, sometimes I do. That’s especially true now that we have Leo and we’re so far from family and friends. But as we drove into our village on the night we got back, I felt both relief to be home and lucky to be able to live in such a beautiful place.

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