The Story Behind Good Space

It was a cold and rainy early February when I decided to file my first motion to continue my studies abroad. At that time everything seemed perfectly simple. A dream place to live. A good curriculum at my chosen uni. A language and culture I was already enchanted by. A relationship with a local.

What could possibly go wrong when you’re 21 and the world is an open gate? Seemed like the time of my life was just about to begin! And it was, oh it was.

I moved at the end of June, but you could say it was already full-on summer there. Nature was still in bloom, and so was I. Have you ever cried because you could not believe your dreams were coming true?

I got accepted by the university and won the long battle with my home institution to let me go. So I packed my tiny car and hit the road. Dear Budapest here I come!

Two weeks later, I had a decent flat with good connections to my uni. I instantly began to pick up the language I had previously been learning only from books, and suddenly found myself immersed in the big-city life I had once dreamed of.

With no one from my home country around.

And it was great at first. I was surrounded by locals. Discovered their culture and ways of being. I was enchanted. Challenged. Busy.

I knew I had to adapt to the new reality, new place, new people. The issue was that I wanted it so badly to succeed, I missed my own needs in the process. Everyone around me (other expats) would say “Oh, you’re so much like a local,” because I could order a latte in the local language, knew where to find the best bakery nearby, and could tell you the history of that famous building on the corner of X and Y. And I was proud of that. But underneath it all, there was also a sense of detachment I couldn’t quite name. That was my first real taste of ambiguity.

You know that feeling when you’ve grown familiar with a place, you know your surroundings, you begin to have a favorite grocery shop and a go-to comfort food place? One day, you’re sitting at your favorite café, having a pretty good macchiato with a bagel, and then it hits you.

“Oh, it tastes almost like at home!”

At home?

You’ve already been living here for a couple of months, you have a couch and curtains you bought for your apartment, social security like a regular citizen and a public transport app. You’ve got it all figured out. But when you think of the word “home”, somehow your mind takes you nowhere near this place. And you feel longing. And loneliness.

That’s where I was.

Years later, I learned that there’s actually a science behind all this ambiguity. Searle and Ward (1990) showed that adjusting to life in a new country is not a single, linear process. We may do great at sociocultural adjustment — becoming increasingly comfortable navigating the language, social norms, and everyday life. But when it comes to psychological adjustment, our emotional wellbeing and sense of belonging may follow a very different path.

It doesn’t mean you’ve done something wrong or failed to adapt. It simply shows how multidimensional living abroad can be — and captures the strange ambiguity of being, and not being, at home at the same time.

Looking back, I realized that what I had needed back then was not someone to tell me how to adapt better. I needed space to understand what was happening to me.

Space for ambiguity.

Space for conflicting emotions.

Space for the old and the new identity.

Space for belonging without having to choose one place over another.

A Good Space.

And years later, this is the kind of space I hope to create for others finding their own way between cultures, identities and places.