The accent and the mirror

Someone asked me, about a year in, "so are you going to stay, or is this just for a while?" I gave the answer I'd been giving since week one — "oh, we'll see how it goes" — and realised on the drive home that I'd been giving that same non-answer for twelve months, long after it had stopped being true. I'd already decided, quietly, that we were staying. I just hadn't updated the answer, because the answer had become a kind of costume — the version of me that was still "visiting," still slightly separate from the place.

The accent as a daily reminder

Every time you speak, in most new countries, the accent marks you as not-from-here. It's rarely hostile — usually it's curiosity, small talk, a follow-up question about where you're "really" from. But it's a constant, low-level reminder that you're read as an outsider, dozens of times a week, in a way people who grew up somewhere never have to think about. That wears on you in ways that are easy to underestimate before you've lived it.

The trap: staying in "visiting" mode

A common response to that constant marking is to lean into it — to keep referring to "back home" as home, to hold the new place at arm's length as temporary even once it's not, to keep performing the old identity because it feels safer than fully inhabiting a place that still marks you as different. This is understandable, and for the first year or so it's probably even useful — you genuinely are still learning the place. But past a certain point, staying in visiting mode becomes a way of avoiding the more vulnerable step of actually claiming the new place as yours, accent and all.

Signs you're still in visiting mode, past the point it's useful

• Still giving the "we'll see how it goes" answer long after you've privately decided.
• Comparing everything unfavourably to "how we did it back home," out loud, often.
• Keeping your social world mostly within other expats from your own country, past the first year.
• Referring to your new country as "here" and your old one as "home," in a way that quietly signals which one you actually consider real.

None of these are wrong to do for a while. They're worth noticing if they're still happening at the two- or three-year mark, because at that point they're less about genuine ongoing adjustment and more about a low-grade refusal to actually arrive.

Inhabiting it rather than performing it

This doesn't mean erasing where you're from — your accent, your references, your instincts are legitimately yours and don't need to disappear. It means shifting from treating the new place as a temporary stage you're performing competence in, to treating it as the actual place you live, with its own logic worth learning on its own terms rather than constantly measured against the old one.

Practically, that can look like: learning local references (sport, politics, slang) not to perform belonging but because you're actually curious now. Answering "where are you from" with an answer that includes the new place, not just the old one, once enough time has passed that it's honestly true. Letting a local habit or preference genuinely change you — a food, a way of speaking, a way of spending a weekend — rather than reflexively defending the old way as better.

Is this home yet

You don't have to answer that fully yet — the next module is entirely about that question. But you can notice, honestly, whether you're still performing "visiting" out of habit or fear, past the point where it's actually true. That noticing, on its own, is most of the work.