Hello everyone! I thought it was about time to do a little reintroduction of myself over here; it’s been around five years since I started this blog and I feel like a lot of you who are new here might not actually know my story or why I started this blog. Also, a lot has changed in my life since I started this blog, and I want to share that with you too. You can always find a little description in the “About” section, but here’s a very ~ self-centered ~ little blog post about me and my life!

First of all, what the heck is an expat?

I never knew what an expat was until I actually became one! It’s such a common phrase in Dubai, but when I moved to DC this year for college I realized that most people don’t actually know what it is. An expat – short for expatriate – is basically someone who has moved away from their home country or culture. Expats have usually moved away from their home countries temporarily for work, either planning to go back home at some point or moving onto a new location. Most of the population of Dubai are expats, which is why it’s such a common word here.

Where it all started out

I was born in 2002 in London, England and I grew up in a typical English suburb. I would say that I had a very British childhood: I had a British accent, spent my summers having picnics, had a ridiculously formal school uniform, and my biggest life goal at that point was getting selected to be a Prefect. Just kidding… but those are very typical British childhood things! All jokes aside, I thoroughly loved my London suburb; almost all of my extended family lived near us, we had a close community of friends (as people hardly ever moved away), and central London was only a short drive/train ride away. My family traveled a lot, so it wasn’t as though I didn’t know anywhere else existed, but I had just never pictured myself actually living anywhere else. I thought I would stay at the same school for my whole life, go to university in London, and settle down around there.

When I was twelve (which sounds crazy to say now, it seems so young!) my parents announced that we would be moving to Dubai. I still remember where I was when they told us it was confirmed: we were waiting for our takeaway from a Turkish restaurant. I remember being angry because my friend was having a big birthday party in a few months that I wouldn’t be able to go to anymore – it seems so funny that was my biggest concern at the time! But after thinking about my past trips to Dubai and hearing about the exciting things that people who lived in Dubai did (like riding camels, going up the world’s tallest building, and eating at fancy restaurants… or so I thought), I was pretty excited about the move! So, a few months later we packed up, said goodbye, and got on a plane to Dubai!

The move

A few months before the move we had gone out to Dubai to take entrance tests for schools and to look at potential houses, so I thought I kind of knew what to expect. But I was so wrong! I guess I had always taken for granted everything else that was part of the life we had in London. I soon realized that just because I had my family, we had a house, and we had a school in Dubai, it did not mean we had a “life” there yet. We didn’t have any family over here and we didn’t have any friends at that point either. I remember wondering what to do on the weekends when we first moved here; in London they would automatically get filled up with school activities, extra-curriculars, family, and friends, but in Dubai we seemed to not have anything to do?! I feel like that’s one of the things that people don’t expect when they become expats: just because you have the basic things it takes to build a life in a new place (a house/apartment and a job/school) it doesn’t mean you’ll actually have built a “life” for yourself yet – it takes time.

I remember also finding settling into my new school really difficult. In my school in London, it was so rare to have a new student, that when we did, everyone was eager to show them around and make them feel welcome. At the first school I attended in Dubai I remember being left to kind of work everything out on my own on the first day which was so scary! I remember trying really hard to feel settled in that school, but as the year went on I remember thinking that I just did not “vibe” with the school – and I really tried hard to make it work! I’m quite a nerd, and I just found that the students and the teachers at that school just didn’t care about learning and teaching that much; I found it hard to make friends with the same character and priorities as me! Moving to a new country and already feeling lonely, and then going to a school where I felt as though I didn’t fit in was just so difficult! Now I look back, I feel bad for my parents, seeing how miserable and lonely me and my sisters were. Looking back now, all I see is growth and how far I’ve come, but those first months were some of the most difficult I’ve been through.

The turning point

Okay, that was a pretty miserable description of my first year in Dubai (it was accurate, what can I say?) but it definitely wasn’t how my whole seven years in Dubai ended up. After the first year of settling, I moved to the school I stayed at until I graduated. This in itself was I think exactly what I needed to feel settled: a close community, people with the same priorities as me, and a space to really find out who I was as a person. With the happiness and structure from this school, came a new life in Dubai. There would be sports tournaments to attend on the weekends, friend’s birthday parties, volunteer events each month – we started to build a “life” in Dubai. I would still say I was going “home for the holidays” when we would travel to London for winter break or during the summer, but Dubai was pretty much starting to feel like home too. Of course, leaving family and friends at the end of a holiday in London was always difficult, and still is difficult to this day, but there had been a shift in my mindset: I had a life to go back to in Dubai now, and it was a life that I very much enjoyed.

One thing that expats don’t often discuss is the feeling of going back to your old home country, but feeling as though you’re a different person with different experiences after living abroad. That was certainly something I was surprised by at first. The first few times we went home to London for school holidays I remember thinking that I would just slot back into my old life, but as the years went on I realized that while life in London had continued just as I expected it to, I had changed. That sounds like such a dramatic movie line, but it was true! I definitely had to come to terms with the fact that I no longer just had one home, Dubai wasn’t a place where I had gone to live for a few years of my life because of my parent’s work, it was a part of my identity.

Decisions, decisions, decisions

As I entered my last year of High School, it came time for me to decide where to go to College. It’s not common to stay in Dubai for college, and my two options were going to the UK or to the US. I decided to apply to both and was lucky to get accepted into good schools in both places. This was a huge decision for me to decide if I should accept a place in the UK, familiar but not the kind of college experience I wanted, or to venture to the US by myself, with no family but to gain the education and experience I wanted. I remember making endless pro-con lists, I even made a rubric to attempt to score each institution to avoid having to make a decision on my own, but in the end, I decided that I would go to America. Even though I had never lived there, have no close family there, and it’s very far away from home, I didn’t want to let fear get in the way a big life decision. So there I went, delayed a year because of the pandemic, off to DC to start the next chapter of my expat journey.

Round two

And so, this is where I currently am in the story! Having just finished my first semester and being back home in Dubai writing this post before I head back to DC this weekend. It has been an experience. There have been so many days where I’ve woken up feeling dreadful, so many moments I’ve felt overwhelmingly homesick, but I don’t regret the decision. I am proud that I took the step to start a new life in a new place, and even though it’s been difficult, one thing I’ve realized is that even though moving across the world is difficult and there are some days you just want to go home, the good days are just so much better. Moments are just so much sweeter when you’ve experienced the harder days that have gotten you to that point. I learned how to look after myself, cheer myself up on a down day, and deal with homesickness (although still got a long way to go here). Even though there are some days when I wish that I, like most of the other students at my University, could just jump on a train home for a long weekend, I really do enjoy the life that I’m continuing to build for myself out in DC.

So, that brings me to this blog and why I choose to write here. Well, the first time around when I moved to Dubai, that was difficult, but at least I had my family with me. The second time around when I moved to DC, I was equipped with some previous experience but it was still difficult! Sometimes as the expat or international student, you can kind of feel lost in a sea of people who already call this place home, and it’s hard to know where to go for advice. This blog started as a place for me to share advice for fellow expats that I had learned through my own move to Dubai. Now, this blog still has the same goal, but I feel like I have a whole new dimension of experience and advice to share with you from my move to DC. So that’s what you’ll find here: lots of advice, stories, and just more about me and my life! So if you found this blog post remotely interesting or just want to stick around to see what happens next, make sure you’re subscribed to my blog by using this link or follow me on Instagram @little.miss.expat

See you next week,