Misaligned in Time
May's Letter
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It starts quietly. A friend sends a meme. I laugh, but something tightens. The image carries the humor of a context I’ve since stepped out of. It’s not that I don’t understand—it’s that I understand too much, and too late. I’m transported: back to a city I left, a version of myself I shed, conversations that felt permanent at the time. They’re texting from the past. I’m answering from somewhere else entirely—not just another place, but a different version of myself. Then, I realize I haven't spoken to anyone from "back home" in weeks.
It sneaks up in moments that don’t look like grief. A text from someone who still assumes I’m just a short drive away. A calendar reminder for something that no longer applies. A message asking, “Still loving it over there?”—as if “over there” were a temporary glitch. A passing smell reactivates an entire former version of myself. Or the realization that a tradition I once took part in—Easter lunch, graduation season, cherry blossoms—is unfolding somewhere else, without me. Cities change mayors, landscapes, policies. I was not there to vote, or grieve, or celebrate. The news cycle of my native country begins to feel like a story I’m supposed to care about—but only abstractly. Small reminders that time has moved on without consensus.
And maybe the oddest part: home doesn’t stand still. It grows without me.
Sometimes it’s sentimental. Sometimes it’s just exhausting.
There's a kind of grief embedded in this, though it’s not dramatic enough to name. I miss versions of myself that only existed in a different context—selves I shed not with ceremony, but through the erosion of habits.
This isn't homesickness, not exactly. It’s something stranger. A subtle, ongoing misalignment between where I am and when I am.
I sometimes wonder if part of the restlessness isn’t about place at all, but about chronology. I miss certain people not because I would call them now, but because I called them then. The versions of us that knew how to reach each other no longer pick up the phone.
Living abroad dislodges you from time
Not in the sci-fi sense, but in the soft, relentless way your present stops matching the rhythm of the people you once knew. And so there is grief—not only for the place you left, but for the version of yourself that belonged to it. I wake up and feel I’ve landed in a life someone else was supposed to live. Not unhappily—but strangely. Like I’ve arrived mid-sentence, inheriting a rhythm I didn’t write. As if my past self and present self are running parallel but asynchronous, like two browser tabs buffering different versions of the same memory. I look at my hands making coffee in a kitchen where everything is familiar yet recent, and I wonder: which version of me thought this was the next logical chapter?
Anyone who’s moved countries, changed lives midstream, or walked away from the familiar knows this feeling. Temporal dislocation is a psychological term for the disconnect between the time your body occupies and the time your psyche believes you're in. It’s been studied in soldiers, immigrants, the bereaved. When context shifts profoundly, we often fail to update the internal maps that tell us where—and when—we are. Your body moves faster than your identity can keep up. So much adaptation is asynchronous. You become a different person before you realize it, and by the time you try to explain yourself to the people who used to understand you, they no longer share the reference points.
Time becomes layered. This layered temporality distorts your sense of progress. Milestones become hard to measure. You can’t compare yourself to peers back home, because their context is no longer yours. You can’t compare yourself to locals either, because their reference points are entirely different. And so you float—between calendars, between expectations, between selves.
You forget which version of yourself last saw a friend. Was it the one who still believed in five-year plans?
As an expat, you carry versions of time that coexist but don’t cooperate. There’s the timeline you left—friends whose children have grown in fast-forward, family rituals reassembled without you, a political landscape you stopped understanding. Then there’s the emergent timeline here: the slow, stuttered rhythm of building something new, measured in firsts and near-misses. The gap between those timelines is rarely neutral. It carries a quiet ache.
There’s also the future to contend with—the one I thought I’d be living by now. When you change countries, careers, or relationships, you often abandon the timeline you were tracking toward. And yet the expectations linger. Like outdated software, they run in the background: Weren’t you supposed to have figured this out by now?
This, too, is a kind of displacement—not from a place, but from a narrative.
But perhaps the gift—if we can call it that—of temporal displacement is that it softens linear thinking. We stop asking, “Am I behind?” and start wondering, “What if I’m just… elsewhere?”
I expected to struggle with nostalgia, bureaucracy, cultural quirks. I didn’t expect to feel temporally misplaced. Like I was living in a different season—not just meteorologically, but emotionally. My friends back home were building lives to a shared tempo. I had veered off. I wasn’t ahead or behind. I was simply elsewhere.
Elsewhere can be fertile
Elsewhere holds the freedom to re-story your life without the urgency of catching up. It makes room for reinvention that doesn’t begin with ambition, but with orientation. Where am I, really? Not on a map. Not on a timeline. But here—hovering, halting, human.
Time moves—and not always with you. The person you were when you left—ambitious, maybe naive—still loops through the corridors of your old life. There are texts you leave unanswered—not because you’ve forgotten, but because replying would mean re-entering a version of yourself you no longer know how to embody. Meanwhile, the person you are now is navigating systems that weren’t made with you in mind, building friendships in odd increments.
Sociologists have touched on this in discussions of cultural lag—how the psychological or social self struggles to catch up with technological or geographic shifts. I feel it more intimately as identity lag: the person I’ve become here often feels unfamiliar to the people who once knew me best. And the version of me that once made sense in that old context? She’d barely recognize this life.
There’s an old version of me still lingering in the city I left. She probably thinks I’m returning soon. I don’t know how to tell her I’ve moved on—without fully arriving anywhere. You don’t just leave places. You leave timelines. You ghost your own expectations.
Many of us who live elsewhere move through time differently. Not ahead, not behind. Just… askew. Disorientation doesn’t come only from relocation, but from temporal slippage. You visit home and realize people have gotten used to your absence. Even your language sounds oddly formal in your mouth. And in your new home, you’re always a few steps behind.
Still, some days, I long for synchrony. For the kind of belonging that doesn't need to be explained or defended. For the feeling that my version of the year is not private. I don’t know if I will ever feel fully “caught up”—or if that’s even the point anymore. Sometimes the most honest self is the one that can admit: I’m here, but I’m still catching up.
I used to think of reinvention as a kind of bravery—starting over, becoming someone new. Lately, it feels closer to disappearance. You don’t choose to let go of the life you thought you were building; you simply stop being able to return to it. The language atrophies. The expectations fade. Even nostalgia gets blurry around the edges.
But maybe that's the real work of selfhood: not locking in an identity, but finding a way to live through continual misalignment.
I don’t have a clean ending to this. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe part of the work is learning to live with temporal dissonance. To make peace with the fact that not every version of you will coexist comfortably. To accept that sometimes we build a life not in spite of this displacement, but because of it.
Related Letters
This letter continues the exploration of themes introduced in previous pieces, where the concept of temporal misalignment intersects with our shifting identities.
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If you are in the mood for some self-discovery time and inspiring exchange, head to this month’s thought provoking questions. You can keep the answers for your introspective self or share them with others looking for solace in relating.
On Displacement, Synchronicity, and Selfhood
May’s Gathering
If you’re in the mood for good company and a journaling practice from the comfort of your armchair, join us for this month’s Clarity Pages:
Wednesday, May 21
9.30 - 11.00 CET
Online
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