Everyone tells you about the logistics of moving abroad. The visa. The school. The health insurance. The forms that require other forms. Nobody gives you a map for what happens to your sense of self along the way. Leave. Adapt. Anchor. Thrive. These are the four stages I lived, watched others live, and eventually found language for.

I asked AI a simple question: recommend a book for expat mothers who feel like they lost their identity. Some of the books that came back were genuinely thoughtful. But what the list revealed more than anything was a gap. Not a gap in quality. A gap in category.

You moved abroad. You adjusted. You learned the language well enough, found the right supermarket, figured out the bin schedule eventually. You built something that looks from the outside like a life. And inside it you feel not unhappy exactly, not broken exactly, just somehow less like yourself than you used to be. Like something went missing in the move and you have been too busy to go back and look for it.

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. My name was first. And my brain's immediate response was: Gemini got it wrong.

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?

I have written two books back to back and launched both under circumstances I did not plan for. A third is launching June 24th. I am, to put it plainly, tired. And somewhere inside all of that tiredness there is an idea that will not leave me alone. It is about Brazil. Not Brazil as a place. Brazil as something else entirely.

I am starting to think the universe has a sense of humour and I am the punchline. I used to work in marketing. Real marketing. With colleagues and someone else whose job it was to worry about the thing I was not worrying about. Now I am an author. Also the marketing department. The Avengers are unavailable.

Two nights in a row I woke up at 2am. My brain just started going through everything I had done and everything I had not done, trying to find the thing I missed.

Someone asked what makes my books different from other writers in the same space. I gave my answer. Then I got curious, went private, opened Gemini, and typed the question in. What came back made me laugh out loud.

Rhoda Bangerter had a salad that, according to the menu, contained super seeds. I do not know what super seeds are exactly but I can tell you this woman does not need more power. She is already operating at a level that suggests the super seeds are purely recreational.

When you grow up inside a culture, most of it becomes invisible. For someone who grew up in the United States, these things are simply life — unremarkable, assumed. For someone who arrived from somewhere else and had to learn them as an adult, none of them are invisible. That is precisely what makes an outsider the right person to write this book. Not someone for whom American childhood is wallpaper, but someone who remembers, clearly, what needed explaining.