I used to be very good at finding my people.
When I first landed on Koh Phangan, I threw myself into building a community, all guns blazing. Then people left, as people on islands tend to do. A few friendships thinned out. Life got full. At some point, I stopped trying without noticing I’d stopped.
That’s still one of my biggest regrets.
Hello, fellow humans who assumed friendship would happen naturally once the boxes were unpacked. Today I’m taking you inside the cosiest corner I’ve just built for our Home Abroad Circle — The Hearth.
If you’d like a room like this in your inbox, subscribe and come in. Shoes off, tabs closed, phones aside.
Come in, I’ve saved you a chair.
You can do everything right.
You can read every Substack going, the ones with the tax tables and the ones with the terracotta rooftops. You can do the language app every morning until the little owl trusts you. You can hire the immigration lawyer, the tax adviser, the relocation consultant who answers emails in under an hour. You can build the spreadsheet with the residency permits, the income thresholds, the health service waiting times, the shipping quotes from three companies. You can know which town has the hospital and which has the train line.
And you can still arrive on the other side of it feeling like you’ve been dropped into your own life by parachute.
Because here’s the thing nobody puts on the checklist. After 20 years of living abroad, and after watching a lot of people try it, I’ve come to believe the single biggest difference between moving abroad and moving abroad well isn’t the paperwork, the language or the budget.
It’s whether you have real support from people in the same boat.
Not more information about the move. Support through it. Human company from people who are living the same thing you’re living, who don’t need any of it explained, and who won’t tell you you’re either brave or running away.
That’s the part no service can sell you and no search bar can return. And when I say support, I don’t mean an audience, or a following, or a Facebook group with 40,000 members. I mean a small number of like-minded people who know where you’re at, who remember what you said last month, and who would notice if you went missing.
Information was never the thing that was missing
Most people planning a move abroad are not short on information. They’re drowning in it.
Every person I’ve sat with on this path has been a formidable researcher. Between them they could recite the income thresholds for four different residency permits, the waiting time on Irish citizenship by descent, which countries let you register with the health service on arrival and which make you wait six months. One of them has 41 tabs open on a slow day.
And yet none of that produces a decision. It produces a very well-informed stall. You read for 9 months, close the laptop, and the real question is still sitting there, because the real question was never what is the D7 income requirement.
The actual questions are the ones you can’t post anywhere.
My partner isn’t sure.
I feel guilty about leaving my mom.
Who am I without the work that has named me for 35 years?
I turned down a house-sit because I’m tired of house-sitting and I want an actual home.
What if I go all that way and still don’t find my people?
Why don’t I feel freer than this?
You can’t put those in a group of 40,000 strangers, half of them bots and the other half telling you to take the leap. Reddit will hand you excellent data and leave you lonelier than it found you. And the friends who love you at home have usually split into two camps: the ones who think you’re brave and the ones who think you’re running away. Neither is much use on a Tuesday afternoon.
It doesn’t mean you’re bad at this. It doesn’t mean you’re indecisive, or ungrateful, or not cut out for it. It means you’ve been given information when what you needed was scaffolding.
Why a group does what a guide can’t
A good group does about four things no amount of reading can do.
It makes you normal again. Sitting with people feeling the same tangle of excitement, fear, confusion and wonder is the fastest way to stop believing something is wrong with you. The doubt isn’t a red flag. It’s the weather of a big life change.
It right-sizes your next step. On your own, a step you didn’t take looks like a character flaw. In a group, someone spots that the step wasn’t too hard, it was simply the wrong size, and hands you a smaller one you’ll actually do.
It remembers. You say the thing out loud, and a fortnight later somebody asks how it went. That’s it. That’s the whole mechanism, and it’s the reason things move.
It shows you the people are out there. This is the quiet proof I didn’t expect. Community rarely arrives as a grand friendship. It sneaks in through the ordinary thing you show up to, next to the same faces, until one day they’re your people. A group like this is that in miniature, months before you land.
And if you’re doing this alone, by choice or otherwise, all of that stops being a nice-to-have. When there’s no partner across the kitchen table to think out loud with, the thinking has nowhere to go. It just loops. A group gives it somewhere to land, and it gives you witnesses to your own life at a point when nobody around you can picture where you’re going.
So I built a room instead of another guide
That’s what the Home Abroad Circle is. A small room, once a month, on Google Meet, for people somewhere on the path of moving abroad. Some are years out. Some leave this autumn. One has already landed and sends word back from the other side.
I should say: the invitation went out to everyone, and it isn’t closed to anyone. It’s simply that, month after month, the people who actually turn up have been women. Whatever it is that makes someone willing to say the unfinished, unflattering, still-being-worked-out thing to a screen full of near-strangers, women seem to reach for it first. Men are genuinely welcome, and I suspect the ones who came would find exactly the same relief.
For me the hour starts just before 10pm. I’m normally in bed by then, but once a month I make a tea, open my laptop and wait for the faces to appear: 6pm in Greece, 11am in North Carolina, 8am on Vancouver Island. A friendly hour for everyone else, and somehow still the warmest one of my month.
I thought we’d spend it on the practical scaffolding: visas, banking, shipping quotes. We’ve barely touched them. We start with one sentence each, no context needed. Then we go round on what’s moved, what’s stuck, and what’s taking up the most room in your head. Nobody fixes anybody during that part. That’s the rule, and it’s the part people tell me they didn’t know they needed. Then one theme, together. Then one small, specific thing each of us will do before the next Circle.
What actually fills the hour
On one call, I asked everyone to name the roles the most important people play in their lives, rather than the names. Mine surprised me. I need a grandma: a village-elder type, wise and unbothered. And I need a witch: my most spiritual friend, all Reiki and tarot, the one I go to for something deeper than advice. Once you know the roles you’re looking for, you spot them faster wherever you land.
One woman had already found hers. Before she’s even moved, she has a friend waiting for her abroad, the local woman she’s going to house-sit for. Another told us about a dance class she joined at home, how the group shrank over eight weeks to three women and an instructor who properly clicked, and how her whole plan for the new country is to find the same class the moment she arrives.
And then there’s the waiting. So much of moving abroad is waiting. One of the women has spent years circling the same question of where to land, and says the hardest part is the not-knowing. Another waited 18 months on citizenship papers. On a recent call she told us they’d come through. The whole screen lit up: 18 months of not-knowing, over in a single email, and all of us there to celebrate it.
The surprise is how little of it is logistical. One woman is retiring after 35 years in the same profession and moving countries in the same year. Her fear lives somewhere other than the paperwork: who is she without the role she’s worn like a second skin for three decades? That’s two enormous identity shifts at once, and no relocation guide has a chapter for it.
When it became clear everyone was waiting on something, a sale, a set of papers, a retirement date, a decision, I asked: if your move got pushed back a year, what’s the one thing you’d refuse to keep putting on hold?
I answered first, because you can’t ask people to go somewhere you haven’t gone. For years I pictured an art room in my someday-home in Spain. This month, instead of waiting for the move to hand it to me, I took a small space where I live now and set up my studio. I’m not waiting to begin the life. The making has already started.
By the end of the hour, everyone had one thing they were starting in the meanwhile.
The thing I most regret
Here’s the confession under all of it. When I first landed on my island in Thailand, I threw myself into building community, all guns blazing. Then people drifted off the way island people do, and at some point I stopped trying without really deciding to. Years later, that’s the thing I most regret. Bigger than any visa or money worry. I gave up on my people.
The Circle is partly my way of not doing that again. And watching it, I keep seeing proof that the people are already out there. Three of the women met as names on a screen, all heading towards Portugal. This autumn, they might even meet up in Lisbon in real life. They found each other before a single one of them has moved.
The hour doesn’t have to carry all of it, either. Between calls, The Hearth keeps the thread alive: where everyone’s at, what we talked about last time, the one thing each of us said we’d move, and the tools we’re actually using.
If you want in
The woman nine months into research who can’t work out why more reading isn’t helping. The person already abroad who looks settled from the outside and still has nobody to call on a Tuesday. The one waiting on a sale, a set of papers, a retirement date, a partner who isn’t sure yet. The one blocked by money, or health, or an ageing parent, and tired of advice that assumes none of those exist.
You don’t need a date. You don’t need a plan. Some of the people in the room right now are still deciding whether they’re going at all.
The Circle and The Hearth are part of a paid Home Abroad membership, and it stays intentionally small, because a room where everyone gets three minutes stops working the moment it becomes a webinar.
You’ve been doing this alone in a browser tab for long enough.
There’s a chair here if you want it. Subscribe and DM me to get access.
So, tell me in the comments: what are you waiting on right now?
A set of papers. A house sale. A partner to feel ready. Enough money. Enough courage. Or a sign from the universe delivered in legally binding PDF form.
And what would make the waiting feel a little less lonely?
If someone came to mind while you were reading, send this post to them so we can include them in the Hearth.
Whatever stage you’re at, there’s room for the unfinished version of the plan here.
Maybe I’ll see you in the Circle. Until then, take good care of yourself.
Kaila, when you say you keep the group small intentionally (and I love that) - about how many show up monthly, if I may ask? And if one is thinking and contemplating about an international move in the future (as I am), but nothing definitive yet, is this type monthly group meeting still for me? Thank you!
I have been a professional husband for 10,239 years.
It all comes down to toilet paper.