You built a life somewhere new, and by most measures you are doing well. But there is a loneliness you cannot always name, a sense of being fully at home in neither place. That is not weakness. It is the real, unspoken cost of living between two worlds.
Why it feels like grief you are not allowed to have
You left for good reasons. Opportunity, safety, a future for the people you love. So when the sadness comes, a part of you says you have no right to it. Look at everything you gained.
But you can gain and grieve at the same time. You grieve the funerals you watched on a screen. The friendships that thinned across time zones. The version of you that would have grown up in one place, among people who did not need the backstory explained.
Diaspora loneliness is a grief with no funeral, so it never gets to end.
Belonging to two places and neither
Back home, you have changed too much to slot back in. Where you live now, you carry an accent, a history, a way of seeing that marks you as from elsewhere. You become fluent in both worlds and fully claimed by neither.
That in-between is exhausting in a way people around you rarely see, because on the outside you are coping beautifully.
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What helps you carry it
Stop measuring your feelings against your gratitude. They are not in competition. You are allowed to be thankful for the move and honest about what it took.
Find the people who do not need translation, others who live between places and understand the specific ache without a lecture. Keep a real thread to home, calls that are more than logistics, so the connection stays alive and not only dutiful.
Name it for what it is: the predictable weight of a heart that lives in two time zones at once, not ingratitude, not a failure to adjust.
You did not fail to settle. You are carrying two homes, and that is heavy for anyone.
If this is the loneliness you recognise, the diaspora mental health workbook Between Two Skies was written for exactly this. You can find it among the workbooks and courses.
Which home are you missing today, and who have you told?
Need someone to talk this through with? https://mindhealer.co.ke/
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Godfrey Mwangi
Consultant Psychologist | Workplace Wellness Coach
The distance nobody talks about
For anyone living between two countries. The grief with no funeral, the weight of being the family hope, and how to carry the distance without treating it as a personal failure.
