Confidence Does Not Mean Everyone Will Like You. It Took Me Fifteen Years Abroad to Believe That.

I have been living abroad since 2010 and it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand something that sounds obvious until you actually have to live it.

Confidence does not mean everyone will like you. It means you will be okay if they do not.

Jay Shetty put it that way and it got me thinking.

For most of those years I was doing the same thing. I was trying to fit in verbally and physically to every new place I landed. Adjusting my clothes, my references, my volume, my accent, the jokes I made and the ones I held back. Not because anyone asked me to. Because I had absorbed the idea that belonging was something you earned by becoming acceptable to the people around you. That if you worked hard enough at fitting in, you would be accepted. Warmly, completely, and without reservation.

That is not how belonging works and it took me longer than I would like to admit to stop expecting it to.

The Thing Nobody Tells You About Moving Countries

When you move abroad you carry an invisible assumption that the new place will recognise your effort. That learning the language will make you local. That understanding the customs will make you one of them. That if you just do enough of the right things the belonging will arrive and stay.

Some of it does arrive. The belonging that comes from showing up, from learning, from trying, from building relationships one at a time over years, that is real and it matters. But universal acceptance, being liked by everyone in every room you enter, that does not arrive. It was never going to arrive. Not because you were not doing enough but because that is not how belonging works for anyone, anywhere, in any country.

People do not universally like each other in their home countries either. The difference is that when you are in your home country and someone does not like you, you do not usually interpret it as evidence that you do not belong. When you are abroad and someone does not like you, it is very easy to interpret it as confirmation that you are permanently outside. That you have not done enough. That you will never quite make it.

What Confidence Actually Is

I used to think confidence was the feeling of being liked, the room that opens when you walk in, the conversation that flows.

That is not confidence but approval. And approval is something other people give you, which means it can also be withheld, and if your stability depends on whether it is given or withheld you will spend a very long time waiting for permission to feel okay.

Confidence is something else. Nobody is going to like you universally. Not here, not anywhere. The question is what you do with that information. Whether you keep adjusting yourself trying to change it or whether you eventually notice that you were okay before they liked you and you will be okay after.

That knowledge is not something you are born with or something that arrives because someone tells you to have it. It is something you build slowly, over years of finding out that the things you thought would break you did not break you, and gradually updating your prediction of what you can survive.

The Expat Version of This

Living abroad accelerates that process in ways that are uncomfortable while they are happening and useful in retrospect.

You get rejected by rooms and misread situations and make jokes that land wrong and say the right words in the wrong register and try too hard in ways that are visible while simultaneously not trying hard enough in ways that are equally visible. You spend years adjusting and readjusting and sometimes you get it right and sometimes you do not.

And at some point, if you are paying attention, you start to notice that the not getting it right did not actually break anything. That the room that did not open up was just a room and the person who did not like you was just a person. That your peace was never really in their hands.

I am not saying it does not sting. It stings. The belonging you wanted and did not get still costs something when you notice its absence.

But the sting is not the same as not being okay.

What I Know Now

The inherited scorecard I carried told me that fitting in was the goal and universal acceptance was the measure of success. It took me a while to notice that the scorecard was measuring the wrong thing, that it was designed for a world where belonging is something you achieve rather than something you build slowly in specific relationships over time.

Confidence is not the absence of rejection but the knowledge that rejection is survivable. And that your belonging was never really in someone else's hands to give or take.

Fifteen years abroad taught me that and I am still learning it on the hard days.

If you want to go deeper into what the inherited scorecard costs and where it comes from, Parenting Unpacked is where that conversation lives. The first forty pages are free. 💛

Jessica Gabrielzyk