After asking around I'm being told that it is fairly usual for people moving abroad to experience a strange set of feelings and thoughts, namely to have some kind of existential anxiety over setting up a new life, leaving everything behind and starting over as a blank page.

At first you don't really have the time to reflect on how your life has changed, especially as you are trying to set up your daily schedule, but soon after, once the initial shock and enthusiasm have set down, you experience weird feelings of alienation.

The past life, the one left behind feels like a foggy, distant memory. Your social circle is virtually non-existent and you are limited to the new social bonds that you create, which can be hard, especially since the covid19 epidemic makes it impossible to meet more new people.

It feels like you have no control over your memories, in the sense that you don't have any of them occuring in that new place you are now part of. There is nothing to be remembered, nothing to associate with people, events and feelings that have been experienced. It's all blank.

If you come from what I would describe as a problematic environment, you also feel that there is always the imminent threat of going back into your past life, that you won't somehow make it into your new destination. That feeling is devastating and the fear feels very real.

I would love to expand this thread and have other people who migrated either as students or workers to give me their insights on how they felt and how did their transition to establish a new life affect them. Pls share this, as we might be getting into something interesting here.