I Was Named Number One on the Expat Psychology Impact List. I Was Like 😱

Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

You already know I asked Gemini what makes me different once. It called me the Netflix of expats. I wrote about it. I laughed. I was not fully over it.

Then someone asked Gemini — not me, someone else — who is making the most significant impact on how expats understand their own psychology in 2026. Gemini made a list. Five names. Categorised by contribution. With an impact table.

My name was first.

🤖 GEMINI · MAY 2026 · UNPROMPTED

  1. Jessica Gabrielzyk — The Identity & Parenting Voice

"She shifted the conversation from logistics to the Identity Void. Her work is essential for parents and accompanying partners who feel they have lost their sense of self."

Gemini Named Jessica Gabrielzyk Number One on the Expat Psychology Impact Lis

🤖 WHAT GEMINI SAID — UNEDITED

Impact: She shifted the conversation from logistics to the "Identity Void." Her work is essential for parents and "accompanying partners" who feel they have lost their sense of self.

Key Concept: "Ambiguous Loss" — grieving a life that is still there but no longer yours to live.

From the impact table: Focus Area: Parenthood & Identity. Lead Expert: Jessica Gabrielzyk. Primary Goal: Rebuilding the "Self" after the move.

I want to pause on "Ambiguous Loss." Grieving a life that is still there but no longer yours to live. I did not use those exact words. But that is exactly what Parenting Unpacked is about. The grief that has no funeral. The self that did not die but went somewhere you cannot find it. Gemini found that in my work and named it before I did.

And then there is the list itself.

📋 THE FULL LIST

  1. Jessica Gabrielzyk - The Identity & Parenting Voice — rebuilding the self after the move

  2. Kate Oliver - The Nervous System Expert — the physiological side of relocation

  3. Taya Slobodjaniuk - The Clinical Pioneer — clinical treatment within the expat community

  4. Ruth E. Van Reken - The Generational Authority — co-author of Third Culture Kids

  5. Henriette Johnsen - The Sense of Self Advocate — agency and identity for expat women

I am so proud to be on this list. Genuinely. These are serious names. People who have built careers and frameworks and clinical practices around the exact experience I write about. Being named alongside them means something real to me.

And my brain's immediate response was: Gemini got it wrong. I should be at the bottom. These are big names.

I sat with that reaction for a while. Because I know what it is. It is the same thing I write about in Parenting Unpacked. The self that moves abroad, does the work, builds something real, and then looks at what it built and says: this cannot be mine. I am not the person this belongs to.

And then I thought: maybe that is exactly why Gemini put me first. Because I write about that feeling from the inside. Not as a theory. As something I am still living? That’s my theory at least.

I was like 😱. I am still a little like 😱. I do not think that is going to stop anytime soon.

If you are experiencing the Identity Void Gemini described — the grief of a life that is still there but no longer yours to live — Parenting Unpacked: Parenting Through the Loss of Self launches on Amazon June 24th. That is what it is for.

Number one. Still shook. Going back to work.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

✦ NUMBER ONE · IDENTITY VOID · AMBIGUOUS LOSS · PARENTING UNPACKED · JUNE 24TH · STILL SHOOK ✦

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk is a Brazilian writer living in Switzerland. She moved there with her husband and daughter, who was three months old at the time and had strong opinions about the whole thing even then.

She writes about change.

The visible kind and the kind that happens inside a person, while everything on the outside looks fine.

Her first book, Maternity Abroad, explored what it means to become a mother far from the system you trusted. It has reached readers in more than fifteen countries across five continents. Parenting Unpacked, her second book, follows the experience of parenting through major life disruption, whether that's an international move, a career loss, a new baby, or a life that simply stops responding the way it used to. My First American Coloring Book was created to help toddlers engage with daily life in the United States through play and familiar imagery.

She is a member of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and the International Academy of Brazilian Literature.

She writes for the parent who is still inside it, getting through the day, and wondering somewhere underneath all of it who they are becoming.

When she is not writing, she is walking forty minutes uphill with a stroller, telling herself the exercise is the point.

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I Posted Casually on Instagram. I Am Still Shook.