 Hey, welcome back to the channel. Today we're going to talk about homesickness. How to cope with homesickness when you are living abroad. You're not going to want to miss it. Here we go. If you don't know me, I'm Tara Holberg, Kiwi Americans. I have moved my family of six from the U.S. to New Zealand and have been living in New Zealand for the last eight years. You can subscribe to my channel. I share the journey and everything and anything I've ever learned from that. I'm also expanding into a lot of other areas that we're talking about in terms of lifestyle, communication, business, so you're going to want to subscribe. Anyway, so today we're jumping into homesickness. This is a question that I get a lot. A lot of people that are thinking about moving abroad, they're thinking about what if I'm homesick? What if I miss my mom and dad, my grandmother, my friends too much? How am I going to cope with that? Is it going to be unbearable? These are all of the questions that we're going to dive into today, so you're not going to want to miss it. So I'm just going to share with you my personal story. If you don't know my story as we moved here 10 years ago, we were here for two years. I had four kids under 12 and then we moved back for two years and then now we've been here for five years total back in New Zealand. And so homesickness. This is a question I get so much from my clients and let's talk about this a little bit. I was not homesick. I was prepared for being homesick. I had talked a lot about it before I came. So I think that this is a common concern that people have. And when I first moved, I was not homesick. Like I would say I had none. And I think it's because the nucleus of my family was with me. Okay. What that would be for somebody traveling alone or moving alone, someone who's traveling with maybe their spouse, but their kids are living somewhere else, I think that would feel different. Now that I've been here for eight years total and I have two kids at home, one that's finishing university and one that's just starting, it's starting to feel different. I have not had homesickness until probably recently, probably in the last year or so. And I think that that's interesting to think about like when you look at the charts and kind of all the processes people typically go through. And I think that that's because I'm going through transition. I'm changing. My home is changing. I have less kids at home. I have, you know, and so where my kids are are all different places around the world. So that's changing. And then that changes your perspective. And so how do you cope with some of the homesickness? Well, let me just be honest with you. Let me be honest with you. To live abroad in 2023 and beyond is way easier than it used to be. Okay. With the rise of technology, you can communicate with your friends and your family often. And it doesn't matter with the time zones or whatever. Like I communicate a lot with my friends on an app called Marco Polo. If you don't have it, go check it out. Maybe I'll put a link in the description for you. This is actually what I use. This isn't a promotion, although I should promote them because they are really great. Marco Polo is like, I can make a video. I can just push, record at any point. I can be doing the dishes, folding laundry, whatever. And I just record my day and what's going on. And then my friend records back and it's I have it with multiple friends and I use it all the time. I use it with family, you know, and that works for me. You have to, there's technology for anything and everything. So you figure out what technology works for you to communicate with various people. We have WhatsApp family chats. We have, you know, Messenger family chats. We have everything, friend groups and this and that. And I'm telling you, like you actually can stay quite connected. We have made it a priority, the second time we moved here that we would go back every year. If, you know, if at all humanly possible, we would go back. Obviously COVID, we didn't. And then spend, you know, a couple of weeks with family and that feels great because you have like something really close, significant time. Like, if I live like down the road for my family, I think that living across the world and coming and having significant time for three weeks ends up being more as a whole in terms of quality time. But you do miss holidays. You do miss birthdays. You do miss significant events. You do miss deaths of the family. You do miss, you know, illnesses and you can't help and you feel helpless. Like it is real and you do feel that way. And so I'm just being honest with you. Like, there are disadvantages and that is definitely one of them. But technology really helps. When everything's good, technology really helps. You know, it's when things are bad and you can't be there and you can't, you know, I had a close friend has a way, you know, like it's really hard when you're this far away. And it makes it very hard to go back. And so I think that we just need to have some real talk about this. I would love to hear your experience if you've been living abroad and how you kind of cope with home sickness. Have I cope with it really well? Probably not. I feel like I'm right in the middle of figuring out how to cope with it. I think I am going to visit. I'm leaving next week to visit. I'm going traveling around Europe for a bit and then spending some long time in the States because I can kind of work from anywhere. And so I'm excited about that. But then there's also relationships. Let's talk about that. Like, your relationships change. And, you know, you change. And so when you go back and everybody else has been kind of doing the same thing. And to you as the outsider who's changed a lot and it doesn't seem like, you know, they've grown or changed or improved. You're like, huh, like everybody's literally doing the same thing. I could like picture it exactly in my mind how it would work. And so, yeah, that's, that's interesting. But that necessarily true. Like, they could have grown a lot. It's just like when you don't have a lot of time with someone you don't know, but you start to feel that. So after eight years, you start to feel that there's like a whole huge gap of life that you've missed. Their kids have definitely grown up. You've missed that. You've definitely missed the, you know, just the banter, the holidays together, all of that. And so I think that while you can cope with it for with technology a lot and it makes a lot, I would say that my friendships have not diminished at all. The ones that I wanted to keep and I keep talking to have not diminished at all. So like when we see each other, it's like we've never left. And so that's really good. I think family is a little bit different. I think that your parents get older. I think that your, you know, your nieces and nephews grow up. And so this is why we committed to going back every year so that our kids were still connected with family, that we're still connected with family. And, you know, it's, it's not the most ideal, but it's pretty good to be honest. It's pretty good. If I could live in my ideal world, if money didn't matter and kids weren't in school and all these different factors, I would probably live in the States half the year and New Zealand half the year or, you know, a significant portion and then maybe travel for, you know, maybe like a third to third third and do that. Like in my ideal world, I would do that. I think that I would like that. Maybe I wouldn't like that. And if I do do that, I will share that with you. I hope this little insight and my experiences were helpful. Please comment below like your questions and your experiences because I would love to hear them and I would love to connect with you. If you liked this video, please subscribe. Please like the video so that I know that it was helpful. I am leaving next week for Europe for three weeks. I am going to the UK, London, Paris, all around France, Italy, Switzerland. Give me your recommendations. I haven't never been there. And so I love you guys and I know some of you live there. Some of you travel there often. Some of you used to live there. Give me your recommendations. I would love to know and anything you want me to try. I'll do that because I'm going to be making videos as I go along as much as I can. And then I'll be spending like six weeks in the States. And so let me know what you want to see there. If you want me to try certain foods or do certain things, let me know because I'm going to be there for a while and can actually record some things for you there as well. So I would love your tips. Please comment below and I will see you guys next week.