In this episode, I am sharing what every expat woman needs to know and what to do when connections you are trying to make abroad simply aren't right for you. Welcome to the Places we call Home podcast, A guide for expat and immigrant women navigating homesickness and cultural differences and the beautiful, complicated work of rebuilding life abroad. If you are carrying the emotional weight of fitting in, feeling lonely, or searching for a sense of belonging, you are in the right place. Today I want to share three clear signs that the connections you are trying to build abroad are not aligned with who you are and what to do about it. Recently I was speaking with a woman by the name of Nisha on another podcast, and she asked me a question that. Stopped me in my tracks. In fact, she asked me quite a few questions that stopped me in my track, I'm going to put her questions in my own words: how do you know when you are barking up the wrong tree with People you are trying to connect with in your new home away from home. So here's my answer, shaped by my experiences and my mistakes and a lot of self-reflection. The first sign is that you start to shrink and shrinking looks like masking and performing. It looks like muting your culture, and it also looks like adjusting yourself to be tolerated. This isn't belonging. For me, I think this is, um, self erasure because when you find yourself a swallowing discomfort and excusing comments that hurt or downplaying the parts of your identity that matters so much to you, that's not connection. You are not making connections. You are in survival mode, and if it's continual, then that begins to drain you. This isn't the same as discomfort where um, you might feel the need to remain in a room that tells you you don't belong here because you want to represent yourself, your culture, and so many parts of you. I'm talking about diminishment that slowly hollows you out where you just don't know who you are anymore. You change the way you dress, you change the way you think just to fit in. The second sign is that you begin to feel unseen and unheard. You know this feeling because you are physically present, but your presence isn't valued. Your input isn't welcome. You are just consistently sidelined or treated as maybe an afterthought. Because when a connection is mutual, you really do know it and you feel it when it's not. You also feel that too. You feel it in your chest. You feel it in your energy, in the way you walk away from that gathering from those particular people. Because if you are walking away feeling smaller than when you arrived, then you know your body's telling you this is not right. These aren't your people. If you are not being treated with the same dignity and curiosity that you offer others, that's information that you really need to pay attention to into The third sign. From my experience is that, um, your emotional wellbeing just starts to take a dip. You start feeling low. You start your, I feel as if your body tells you the truth about what's going on, about what you are feeling before your mind, before your brain catches up. And if spending time with. Certain people leaves you feeling sad and lonely and isolated even when you are sitting beside them, those are not your people. I feel that friendships where you don't have to translate yourself or dilute yourself are not high expectations. That's not unusual. You're not asking too much. That's just the basic bare minimum of humanity. So the question is, what are you gonna do with this information? Let me just take a quick sip of my tea. All right. Let's talk about what you do when you notice these three signs.. In my humble opinion, what I did, you start by belonging to yourself first. Because when I first arrived here in the USA and I started looking to make connections, and I think I may have said this before in a previous solo episode, I found a group of people. And I started hanging out with them, but I noticed that the conversations were just not enriching. It was, um, always surface level and it's like they just didn't know what to do with me. I, so then I had to decide where my line was. And for me that line was simple. The moment I feel diminished, that's when I had to leave, not because I'm fragile and it's not because I'm unwilling to grow, but because I refuse to contort myself to fit somebody else's idea of who I should be and what I should sound like and how I should think and dress and all that sort of stuff, that's the change that I'm talking about. Growth is natural. Force change, the kind that asks you to deny your history or your culture, even your voice, that's not natural. We all mess it up at some point or another, and that's okay because we've gotta give ourselves some grace, right? We've all gone down that alleyway one time or another. We laugh at jokes that hurt us and we might stay in environments with people who drain us. We end up masking because we want to belong. We learn from our mistakes, but we don't stay there. As a little reminder if you are somebody who's going through this, if you notice, you are shrinking. If you notice, you are masking, if you are walking away from gatherings that make you feel lonelier than when you first arrive. I'm encouraging you in my humble opinion, to believe that information. Believe what you are feeling. That's your life. Your brain speaking to you. You do deserve connections that nourish you, not connections that cost you pieces of yourself. There's somebody who's asking for some attention on this topic out there. So share the link oh, and i'm inviting you to connect with the people in this podcast who share their personal stories of trials, overcoming so many of life's problems. So go back to episode one and work your way up to the top. Get to know Camilla, get to know Karen who moved from Honduras. I'm finishing the last sip of my English breakfast. and my rich tea biscuits so that must mean it's time for me to go. Wherever you are. I hope you choose the spaces that let you breathe. That's it for me today. Have a lovely day. Bye-bye..........