How to Know If Moving Abroad Is the Right Next Step When You Feel Stuck

At 22, my life was going according to plan.

I was a full-time university student taking biochemistry, chemistry, biology, and public health courses while working two jobs. I was trying to keep my GPA above a 3.7 because I planned to go to medical school.

I graduated with a 3.6, so I got pretty close.

I loved helping people. I imagined becoming a doctor, maybe working with Doctors Without Borders, and doing work that mattered somewhere far from the life I knew.

It was not a bad plan. That was part of the problem.

I was working incredibly hard to build a life I was not entirely sure I wanted.

There was another version of me too. I had been reading travel blogs for years, including Nomadic Matt around 2010 or 2011. I read books about people crossing places I could barely imagine. I wanted a backpack. I wanted to see what was out there.

So I was stuck between two real versions of myself. One wanted medical school. The other wanted to go.

I was also burned out. I was succeeding, but I did not feel like I was living very much.

Then I applied for a volunteer program in Thailand. Within about two months, I was gone.

People did not really believe me when I said I was leaving. It seemed abrupt. Honestly, it probably was.

But I was not moving to Thailand because I thought Thailand was the answer.

I was going to see.

First, figure out what “feeling stuck” actually means

Feeling stuck can mean almost anything.

Maybe your career no longer fits. Maybe you hate where you live. Maybe a relationship ended. Maybe everyone around you is settling into lives you do not actually want. Maybe you have done everything you were supposed to do and still keep thinking, Is this it?

Or maybe nothing is terribly wrong. You are simply curious about another way to live.

That was closer to my situation. My life was not falling apart. I was doing well. I was also exhausted and deeply interested in a life I had never tried.

When my volunteer contract ended, I started asking where else I could live. Chiang Mai? Phuket? Krabi? I was not choosing a forever country. I was choosing what I wanted to try next.

If your question is already becoming less Should I move? and more Where would I go?, read my guide to choosing a country to move abroad.

Are you moving toward something, or expecting a country to fix you?

When I was younger, part of me believed travel would transform me.

I thought I would become hotter. Prettier. Smarter. Wiser. More interesting. More confident. Better.

I can be hard on myself. Blame the Virgo in me if you want.

I imagined that somewhere on the other side of the world was a version of me who finally had everything figured out.

There was not.

Did I change? Absolutely. I became more independent. I learned to navigate situations I never would have faced at home. I traveled widely. I experienced more than I had imagined possible.

I also remained me.

My insecurities came with me. My relationship patterns came with me. For years, I thought I had simply been unlucky in love and that maybe the person for me was somewhere else in the world.

It took me until much closer to 30 to realize I had patterns in the people I chose. I had met good people. I did not always recognize them as such.

There were periods abroad when my life looked incredible from the outside and I was miserable. I cried because I felt isolated and misunderstood. I had everything I thought I wanted and somehow still felt like I had nothing.

Moving abroad can give you a different life. It cannot guarantee you a different self.

Distraction and healing are not the same thing

I knew a man who moved to Koh Phangan after a breakup. He was hurting. He drank and partied, and for a while the island gave him somewhere else to put his attention.

Then the drinking created problems. Friendships fell apart. Money disappeared. Eventually, he was still hurting, only now he was sitting alone in a rented room on the other side of the world.

He later died. I still think about him sometimes. He was a good soul, and I do not pretend to know everything he was carrying.

But knowing him reinforced something I have seen in different forms: a new place can occupy you beautifully. Eventually life gets quiet again, and you are still there.

You are also allowed to move abroad just because it sounds fun

I want to complicate everything I just said because not every move needs to become a spiritual quest.

Maybe you want to have fun. That counts too.

One of my friends lived in Thailand at the same time I did. We were both teachers with jobs during the week and school calendars to work around.

I could spend an entire weekend going to the market, riding my motorbike around, and watching Netflix despite living near some of the most beautiful places in Thailand.

She traveled constantly. Weekends became trips. School breaks became bigger trips. She took beautiful photos in beautiful places, and she loved that part of her life.

I do not think she was doing living abroad wrong. Her priorities were different from mine.

I have joked about her in the caption of my Albania solo travel reel because she took “do it for the gram” very seriously. There was one point when nobody could find her, and knowing her, I genuinely wondered whether she had fallen off a viewpoint trying to get a photo.

She had not fallen off a viewpoint.

She was in jail.

That is a different story.

The point is that you do not need to manufacture a deeper purpose to make your move respectable. Warm weather, weekends in another country, nightlife, beaches, curiosity, or simply wanting an adventure are reasons too.

Before moving abroad, imagine living there after it stops being exciting

For a long time, I lived near places people save for years to visit. Railay. Koh Phi Phi. Beaches and limestone cliffs that appear on travel posters.

Do you know what I did on plenty of weekends?

Went to the market. Rode my motorbike around. Watched Netflix. Stayed home.

I barely went to the beach.

At some point, the landscape became so normal that I stopped properly seeing it. People crossed oceans to stand in front of scenery that had become part of my commute.

That is not sad. That is what happens when somewhere becomes home.

Eventually, the beach becomes background and you still need groceries.

Instead of only asking, Would I love visiting this place?, ask whether you can imagine your ordinary life there. Work. Groceries. Getting sick. Paying bills. Bureaucracy. A rainy Sunday when you do not want to leave the house.

Travel and living abroad are related. They are not the same experience.

What moving abroad gave me, and what it cost

I do not regret going. Not even close.

Moving abroad gave me independence, perspective, and a much higher tolerance for uncertainty. More than anything, it gave me a life that felt like mine.

I think I could have stayed in the same town, gone to medical school, and built a completely respectable life. Somewhere deep down, I would still have wondered about the other version of myself.

There is a specific kind of peace in knowing you actually tried the thing that kept calling you.

My years abroad were not consistently happy. There were nights when things got so bad that I rode my motorbike through the dark screaming into the wind with tears running down my face.

But even then, there was something underneath the difficulty that felt like fulfillment.

It was my life. I had chosen it. I had found out.

It cost me things too.

While I was abroad, friends got married. People bought houses. Careers advanced. Families grew. I was living in a rented house, renewing a visa every year, and earning around $1,500 a month in a country with a very different cost of living.

Friends move on. Family gets older. People build lives without you.

You may come home and discover that the seat you thought was yours at the table does not fit quite the same way anymore. While they learned to live without you, you learned to live without them.

And there is loneliness that comes with being foreign. Thailand became home to me, but I was not Thai. I could build belonging there, but some forms of belonging are inherited by growing up in a place.

If you are thinking about these tradeoffs later in life, I go deeper in Moving Abroad in Your 30s.

Can you handle getting it wrong?

I ran out of money abroad more than once.

I made more. I kept going.

Would I handle my finances the same way now? Absolutely not. I was 22 and bad at budgeting.

The lesson was not that everybody needs one magical savings number. The lesson was that your plan will probably fail somewhere.

Maybe your apartment falls through. Maybe the job is wrong. Maybe you hate the city you were sure you would love. Maybe you misunderstand paperwork, waste money, or embarrass yourself.

Moving abroad asks you to be bad at things for a while.

If you can reassess, ask for help, change the plan, and try again, that skill will carry you farther than perfect planning.

I keep the detailed logistics elsewhere: how much money you may need to move abroad and how to live abroad without being a digital nomad.

You do not have to decide whether you will live abroad forever

I went to Thailand planning for one year.

One became two. Two became five.

I did not know that when I boarded the plane. Thank God.

Your version might be six months, a volunteer placement, a semester, a working holiday, or a one-year teaching contract with permission to reevaluate afterward.

Teaching was one of the ways I built a real life abroad without having a remote job. I wrote about the practical side of that in my guide to teaching in Thailand.

You are allowed to gather information by living. You are also allowed to go home.

Would I tell my 22-year-old self to go?

Immediately.

Go.

I would still tell her to get on the plane.

I would just tell her to understand what she is giving up a little better.

Life will move on. She will move on too. Some people she loves will become more distant. Some people she has not met yet will eventually feel like family.

She will be lonely sometimes. She will fail. She will waste money. She will make bad choices. She will have nights that no tropical beach can make beautiful.

She is also going to build a life she cannot currently imagine.

There is not a prettier, wiser, more lovable woman waiting for you in Thailand. She is already inside you.

Maybe another place will give her room to come out. Maybe distance will make certain things easier to see. Maybe experience will show you what you are capable of.

But no country can become you for you.

So if something about your current life no longer fits, I do not think you need absolute certainty.

Ask what you are hoping to change. Ask what you are willing to lose. Ask whether you want the ordinary life that comes after the adventure wears off. Ask what happens if you fail.

And remember that wanting fun is allowed too.

You do not have to decide your entire life today. You only have to decide what you are willing to explore next.