There’s a particular kind of loneliness nobody warns you about.
It doesn’t arrive the day you land. It waits. It shows up months later, on some random Tuesday, when everyone around you is speaking a language that isn’t the one you dream in, and you realize the version of you they know is just a translation of who you actually are.
I know this loneliness from the inside. I moved from Argentina to Barcelona in my early thirties, convinced a new country would change how I felt. It didn’t. What I was carrying came with me, and it took me a while to understand what it was made of.
The move that changes everything except what you expected
You came for reasons that made sense. Work, love, studies, freedom, safety, adventure. Maybe all of them at once.
And in many ways it worked. You built a life. You learned the streets, the bureaucracy, the impossible task of finding good coffee.
But there’s a part of you that stayed suspended somewhere over the Atlantic. The part that knows how to be fully you only in your own accent, your own humor, your own way of touching someone’s arm when you talk.
Europe tends to read that warmth as too much. And little by little, without deciding to, you start shrinking it.
Longing isn’t just missing a place
We reduce it to homesickness: the food, the family, the light. And yes, all of that hurts.
But the deeper longing is for a version of yourself. The one who didn’t have to explain herself, didn’t have to soften himself, who belonged without effort.
Here you’re always, quietly, doing extra work: translating, adapting, reading codes other people absorbed as kids. It’s exhausting in a way that’s hard to name, because from the outside your life looks fine. Enviable, even, maybe.
That gap — between how your life looks and how it feels — is where a lot of us get stuck.
The guilt nobody talks about
And then there’s the guilt.
Guilt for the ones who stayed. Guilt when things are going well, because how dare you suffer if you “chose” this. Guilt when they’re going badly, because you can’t even complain: you left, remember?
So you carry it quietly. You tell your family everything’s great. You tell yourself you should be grateful. And the more you act like you’re fine, the further you get from what you actually feel.
Gratitude and grief can live in the same body. You’re allowed to feel both.
Why I work with this from the inside
I’m not writing this from a textbook.
I made the crossing. I felt the specific weight of rebuilding an identity in a place that never quite sees it fully. I sat with the comparison, the self-doubt, the feeling of being a stranger even in places I’d been to a hundred times. It was Gestalt therapy that helped me understand what that weight was made of, and why I’d carried it for so long.
That experience shapes how I work. When you sit down with me, you don’t have to explain what it means to live between two worlds. I already know that terrain. We can skip the translation and go straight to what matters.
We work in Spanish or English, whichever holds you better on a given day. Sometimes the most honest things only come out in your mother tongue. Sometimes the distance from it helps. You choose.
If you’re specifically an expat in Barcelona, this might also interest you: living abroad and not finding yourself.
This might be for you if…
You feel successful on paper and strangely adrift inside. You miss a home that maybe doesn’t even exist the way you remember it. You’re tired of being the “resilient immigrant” and would like, for once, to just be a person with feelings. You want to build a life here without amputating the part of you that comes from there.
The first step is a conversation
You don’t need to arrive with everything figured out.
You just need to know that something inside you is asking to be looked at, and that you’d rather not keep doing it alone.
Message me, in Spanish or English, to talk about where you’re at and whether it makes sense for us to work together.
Gestalt Therapy and Family Constellations, in Spanish and English. Online for all of Europe, and in person in Barcelona (Pl. d’Urquinaona). From someone who made the same journey.
You can read more about how I work in Gestalt therapy in Barcelona and online.