Arriving
Everything takes three times as long at first, and that is arithmetic
The exhaustion of the first weeks abroad is not a character failing but the predictable cost of doing ordinary things without any of the automatic knowledge that made them ordinary.
By Dev Chatterjee3 min read
Competence at home is mostly stored knowledge
A person going about a normal day at home makes hundreds of small decisions without noticing, because the answers are already stored. Which shop sells that, which queue is faster, what this sign means, whether this price is reasonable, how loudly one speaks in this room, which form matters. None of that is intelligence. It is accumulated local data.
Move country and the store empties. The intelligence is unchanged and the data is gone, so every one of those decisions has to be computed from scratch, and computation is slow and tiring in a way that recall is not.
This is why capable adults arrive somewhere new and find themselves defeated by a supermarket. It is not a comment on them. It is what happens when a lifetime of caching is deleted in a single flight.
The costs are small individually and enormous in aggregate
Any single unfamiliar task is trivially manageable. Reading a label carefully, working out which counter to join, translating a letter, asking a question in a language you half know — none of these is hard, and each takes a few minutes and a measurable amount of attention.
The problem is that a first month contains hundreds of them, arriving continuously, with no gaps of automatic behaviour in between. The tiredness people report at six in the evening is real and it is the sum of a very large number of very small charges.
It also explains why the exhaustion is worst in the second and third weeks rather than the first. Novelty supplies energy at the start, and when it runs out the underlying effort is unchanged and suddenly has to be paid for out of ordinary reserves. The work has not increased. The subsidy that was quietly covering it has stopped.
Language raises the price of everything, including silence
Operating in a language you are still learning applies a multiplier to the whole of the above. Listening is effortful, so a conversation you would have had while thinking about something else now occupies everything you have. Speaking is worse, because you are composing rather than talking.
The subtler cost is the loss of ambient information. At home you absorb a great deal without attending to it: overheard conversation, announcements, signs read in passing, the radio in a shop. Abroad that channel closes, and the information it carried now has to be sought deliberately.
None of this is permanent and all of it improves. The improvement is not linear and it is not fast, and the first months are where the price is highest.
Plan a smaller day than you think you can manage
The practical response is scheduling rather than effort. Two administrative errands in a day is a full day in the first month, and treating it as such prevents the specific failure where a third errand is attempted badly, goes wrong and has to be repeated.
It helps to alternate hard days with recovery, and to protect one part of the day as familiar: cooking something you know how to cook, a form of exercise you already had, an hour in your own language. These are not indulgences. They are the only automatic behaviour available to you, and they restore a little of what the rest of the day spends.
Sleep deserves particular protection, partly because it is doing consolidation work on everything you learned that day, and partly because tiredness makes an unfamiliar language distinctly harder. The two effects compound in an unhelpful direction.
The curve turns, and it turns without announcement
What people describe, fairly consistently, is that somewhere between the second and the sixth month the ordinary day stops costing what it did. You notice that you took a bus without rehearsing the route, or bought something without translating the label, or answered a question without preparing the sentence.
The cache has begun to refill. It does so unevenly, and it fills first in whatever you do most often, which is why someone can be fluent about groceries and helpless in a bank. That unevenness is normal and is a poor measure of overall progress.
The useful thing to know at the start is simply that the curve exists. A great many people conclude in week three that they have made a serious mistake, and they are reading a temporary cost as a permanent condition.
Common questions
Is it normal to feel stupid for the first month?
It is close to universal, and it is a measure of how much unnoticed local knowledge ordinary competence depends on. The feeling fades roughly in step with the accumulation of routine, which is why it eases fastest for whatever you do daily.
How many errands should I attempt in a day at the start?
Fewer than you would at home, because each one carries an overhead of working out how it is done here. Two is a realistic figure for the first weeks, and treating a single difficult appointment as a whole day is not excessive.
Does this happen again if I move a second time?
It happens again and it is generally milder, because some of what you learned is about how to be new rather than about a specific country. People who have done it before tend to recognise the pattern and to schedule for it, which removes much of the sting.
Senior writer, Globetrotter Talks
Dev has written about arriving, visas & paperwork, money abroad for most of the last decade and reads the small print so you do not have to.
