Who Am I After Moving Abroad?

Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

I have just finished writing Parenting Unpacked: Parenting Through the Loss of Self. An entire book. About identity. About who you become after you move abroad and have a child and stop recognising the person in the mirror.

And I sat back after finishing it and thought: so. Who am I now?

Genuinely asking. Because after years of moving, adapting, translating myself for new countries and new contexts and new versions of what my life was supposed to look like, I know more than I did when I started. That is the whole point of writing anything.

Let me try anyway.

Photo of Jessica Gabrielzyk

📋 WHO I AM, IN CURRENT WORKING ORDER

  • 🇧🇷 Brazilian. Always. Non-negotiable. Even when I forget the words for things in Portuguese and have to look them up, which happens more than I would like to admit.

  • 🇨🇭 Swiss resident. Still surprised by this on some mornings. Still slightly confused by the bin schedule.

  • 📚 Author of three books. Two published. One launching June 24th. Writing a fourth one in my head while pretending I am resting.

  • 📣 One woman marketing department. No Avengers. Still operating.

  • 👩 Mother. In a language that is not my first, in a country that is not my birthplace, figuring it out the same way everyone figures it out. Badly, then better, then badly again.

  • ❓Still answering the question. Apparently that is allowed.

I wrote a whole book about losing yourself and finding yourself again. The finding yourself part does not arrive in a chapter. It arrives in small moments you almost miss. The book helps you recognise them.

Here is what I know for certain. I am not the person who left Brazil. I am not the person who arrived in Australia with a suitcase and no plan. I am not the person who moved to Portugal, then Ireland, then Portugal again, then Switzerland, each time carrying slightly less certainty and slightly more understanding of why the certainty was never the point.

I am whoever I am now. Brazilian-Swiss-Australian-Portuguese-Irish by lived experience. An author who started a publishing house because nobody was going to do it for her. A mother who is still figuring out what kind of mother she is, which she suspects is the only honest answer anyone ever has to that question.

And apparently someone who writes books about identity loss and then sits down after finishing them and asks herself the same question all over again. The question does not have an ending. The book gives you the language to keep going.

I do not have a single name for what I am. Because I am all of it. Author, publisher, mother, marketing department, person still figuring out the bin schedule. All of it at once. And I am genuinely happy about that. It took a while to get here but I am here.

If you read this and thought "that is me" at any point — the person who moved, who adapted, who lost something along the way and has not quite found the right words for it yet — I wrote Parenting Unpacked: Parenting Through the Loss of Self for you.

It comes out June 24th on Amazon. That is very soon.

Still figuring it out. That is the whole point.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

✦ WHO AM I AFTER MOVING ABROAD · IDENTITY LOSS · PARENTING UNPACKED · JUNE 24TH ✦

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.

Next

There Is a Book in My Head That I Am Not Ready to Write Yet.