We investigated expat guilt this week. From the moment we think about leaving a little bit of guilt sneaks in. No matter how excited, how terrified, there’s an inkling. The guilt of disrupting others lives, whether it’s as simple as moving the family dog, or as complicated as the school age child.
If you’re in your 20’s (and you’re ten foot tall and bullet proof with all the time in the world) you may be encouraged to move to further your career and there’s an eternal optimism of coming back. If you have a young family you may be guilt ridden about taking small children away from their grandparents. Whereas if you’re a little bit older you may be feeling guilty about leaving ageing parents behind.
Guilt can also happen when you first arrive. You’ve disrupted everyone’s lives, you could be “the worst parent ever”. All children have ups and downs wherever they are – you are going to have off days even if you’re in your home country.
If you’ve moved to a country where you are witnessing extreme poverty having moved from a very cushy world there’s guilt of why do I have so much when someone else has so little? What can I do to help? This is your chance to change someone’s life. It’s an opportunity. It’s not about giving everyone on the street your small change – it’s about building a relationship with someone and helping them out.
Sarah shared a blog post about the flip side of expat guilt – you can find the post here.
Kirsty’s favourite blog post this week was The Pixel Trade. An amazing journey of one man and his beautiful photographs.
If you’re a blogger based in Doha, why not join us at our monthly #BloggingMEetup event at the Grand Hyatt Doha. You can find out more information here.
Kirsty’s favourite Facebook page this week is Food52 helping people become better, smarter, happier cooks.
The ladies who Kirsty met at the fair who sold her the yoga mat bag are The Seamstesses
It seemed this past Friday, the whole world was talking about #thedress. From an expat point of view, a # that goes viral is a chance to have a sense of community with all your friends and family no matter where in the world they live.
If you want a bit of a laugh check out Jimmy Fallon’s skit with Justin Timberlake #hashtag
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2 Comments
Corinne
I was really lucky that my parents were expats ( I was an expat kid) so there was no guilt whatsoever from them, quite the opposite. My guilt is that my kids aren’t having the same type of education they would have in Australia (I hate the rigid nature of the British curriculum) I keep trying to balance it out with the whole ‘experience of living overseas’ thing.
When are you having a meet-up in Dubai??? I want to meet you both!
Amanda Settle
Hi ladies, I’ve been catching up on your podcasts today and listened to number 8 was looking at what else I’d missed and spotted this… I don’t know now if I saw the title of this and then wrote my blog post or the other way around, I can only apologise and blame my menapausal brain. Hope you’re not too cross 🙁