You have been in the country a few months and you feel all alone. We have all been there. The novelty of going on holidays and seeing the sights and sounds is one thing, but living here is an entirely different matter altogether. As the honeymoon stage wears off and the sense of progress disappears, you start to feel isolated and alone. Whether you have landed in Bali, Kuala Lumpur, Chiang Mai or Cebu, it tends to arrive at the same point. You have not been here long enough for the place to feel like home, and there is nobody you can call on short notice.
And let us face it, is there much point in speaking about it to many of our friends back home, especially the ones who have never travelled? They simply do not understand and have no experience of it. They are in their own bubble and are unable to understand our perspective, because they have no point of reference.
Was it a good idea to come here?
Why does it feel like business as usual, but you are just somewhere else? The flatness and loneliness can arrive at any time, and some of us will take it as evidence that we have made a mistake and should return “home” to the very place we wanted to leave.
But back home, you were on autopilot and the days flew past in a breeze and nothing really got done or changed. It was boring, flat, meaningless and expensive.
Why everything here takes more effort
Here it is different. One errand could take a whole day to get done and it is all a big effort. There is a lot more thinking involved. The constant crowds and the travelling by motorbike or car just gets tiring, and there may be no regular routine developed yet, which makes life a little more uncomfortable. There are no familiar faces yet from visiting the same café or gym. Or perhaps you are meeting a lot of people, but you rarely ever get to see them twice.
Why the chats back home dry up
The phone, video or social media catch-ups become less frequent, and some of those relationships lose their engine. Lifestyles become vastly different too, and it is almost like you are educating someone about the region before you can even get on with having a conversation.
None of this means it is going badly. It means you have hit the part that everybody hits and nobody photographs. Most of what is being described here is ordinary culture shock, arriving later and quieter than people expect it to.
What actually shifts it
What shifts it is not more socialising or attending some type of meetup. It comes from doing more of the same thing, over and over again. Friendship out here does not come from meeting people. It comes from seeing the same people repeatedly, in our daily routine, without having to force it. So my suggestion is to select two or three locations in the week and go to them whether you feel like it or not. The same café, the same gym, the same beach, the same shopping centre. We are not attempting to make a friend overnight. We are trying to become a familiar face, because most of everything else grows out of that. Say yes early and say yes often, even to opportunities that sound boring. And expect the first few people you get on with to be fairly random, because at this stage it is proximity doing the choosing and not compatibility. That is normal and it does not last. With home, aim lower and more often.
A two minute message about nothing much will do more than a monthly catch-up that you are both quietly dreading. And keep an eye out for the people in your area who already understand the perspective. They exist in every town in the region, and most of them went through the same stretch a year or two before you did.
Give it longer than feels reasonable, too. A place does not usually start feeling like anything at all until somewhere between the one and three year mark, and almost nobody tells us that before we leave.
When it is more than culture shock
There is a point though where this stops being the ordinary version of settling in. If it has been getting steadily flatter for weeks rather than days, if you are sleeping badly or sleeping constantly, if you have stopped going out at all, if bad habits have crept in, or if you have withdrawn from friends back home because it was easier than talking, then it is worth taking seriously rather than distracting ourselves or pretending this is not how we are feeling.
Being alone in a new country does not automatically mean depression. But it does remove the people close to us who would normally notice a change in our mood early — the family member, the old friend, the co-worker who would say you did not seem yourself.
If that sounds like where you are, it may be worth talking about it with someone who has lived this kind of life rather than just read about it. Kota Counselling offers confidential online sessions for expats and travellers across Southeast Asia, including cultural adjustment and isolation. Our counsellors have spent time in Malaysia, the Philippines and Bali themselves. That is the whole reason this practice exists.