Transplants, Time, and the Stranger Within

When we first wrote about living abroad, we described the experience as a kind of transplanting: uprooting from familiar soil and learning to grow in a new cultural ground. We also noted similarities between transplanting and aging. Both migration and aging confront us with the loss of taken-for-granted fluency. In a new country, even ordering coffee or catching a joke requires conscious effort. With aging, the body and social roles we once inhabited without thought begin to demand renegotiation.

Alfred Schutz, in his essay The Stranger, discusses how outsiders must explicitly learn what insiders assume. Later theorists of sociocultural models (TSCM) describe this as the accumulation of cultural “recipes” — scripts for how to act, speak, and belong. Massie and Staude, in their phenomenology of ageing, show that growing old is also an accumulation: of biological rhythms, personal narratives, and historical time. Both processes force us to confront our own strangeness in the world. We wrote Transplants: Notes on Aging and Living Abroad before discovering these references and were delighted to find our observations mapped onto a much larger conversation.

Living abroad, we find ourselves caught between languages and identities, neither fully at home nor fully foreign. Aging, too, places us in a liminal space: still ourselves, but transformed, negotiating continuity and change. To be a transplant is to be a stranger; to age is to become a stranger to oneself. In both cases, the task is not to erase difference but to learn how to live meaningfully within that strangeness.

Learning to Laugh Again

One of the first signs of being a stranger abroad is missing the punchline. Humor depends on shared references, rhythms, and cultural cues. In Italy, we’ve often found ourselves smiling politely while others laugh, only later realizing the joke hinged on a pun or gesture we hadn’t yet absorbed. Schutz would say that insiders rely on “recipes,” while the stranger must consciously accumulate them. Each missed joke becomes a tiny research project, a reminder that belonging requires deliberate learning.

Aging works in a similar way. Massie and Staude describe aging as the intertwining of biological, narrative, and historical time. Just as the migrant must relearn cultural cues, the aging person must relearn bodily ones. A staircase once climbed without thought now requires calculation. A word once recalled instantly now hovers just out of reach. The fluency of youth — cultural or physical — gives way to slower, more deliberate accumulation.

Visibility and Invisibility

Living abroad, our accent marks us as visible. Even when we blend in with clothing or gestures, a single phrase betrays us. At the same time, there are moments of invisibility: when locals dismiss us as not quite part of the conversation, or when our cultural references simply don’t register. Schutz’s stranger is caught in this paradox, both hyper-visible and overlooked.

Aging carries a similar paradox. Wrinkles, slower movement, and retirement make one visible as “old,” yet at the same time older people are rendered invisible in social life. Massie and Staude call this a form of “social death,” where retirement or frailty shifts identity from agent to dependent. In both migration and aging, visibility and invisibility are intertwined experiences of being marked as other.

Negotiating Identity

In our earlier blog we wrote of being “neither fish nor fowl,” caught between American and Italian identities. Aging, too, produces hybrid identities. We remain ourselves, but transformed. Looking at an old photograph, we see someone who is both us and not us. We are looking at stranger we once were. Schutz’s phenomenology of the stranger and Massie and Staude’s analysis of aging converge here: identity is not a fixed essence but a negotiation across time and culture.

The Strange Shape of Time

Living abroad has made us aware of all sorts of unfamiliar rhythms — how people speak, joke, gesture, or structure conversations. But aging brings its own unexpected rhythm, one that doesn’t have much to do with culture and everything to do with time itself.

We came across a study from Yorkshire (Degnen) that stayed with us. The older adults in it didn’t tell stories in neat, chronological order. Their conversations wandered comfortably between decades, past and present sitting side by side as if they had always belonged together. Details that younger listeners might dismiss as “irrelevant” carried their own meaning — a kind of shorthand built from a lifetime of associations. And sometimes the pace of these stories drifted free of what others expected, unfolding in their own logic.

It struck us because it felt familiar. Living abroad has its own version of nonlinear time — moments when the past intrudes unexpectedly, when old habits collide with new contexts, when identity refuses to stay in sequence. Aging just makes this temporal looseness more visible. Perhaps both experiences reveal that time is less of a straight line and more of a shape we grow into. We are invited to embrace nonlinearity.

When Time Stops

We were thinking about this recently as we finished Book Three of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. Its protagonist, Tara, becomes a stranger not because she relocates, but because time itself stops for her. She wakes each day into the same date while the world continues around her in ways she can sense but not join. Tara must relearn the “recipes” of this new condition — how to navigate relationships, routines, memory, and meaning when chronology refuses to cooperate.

Reading her while thinking about migration and aging, we realized that strangeness is not only spatial or bodily. It can also be temporal: a sudden shift in the rules by which life proceeds. Tara’s halted time echoed something we were already feeling — that belonging, at any age, is partly the work of adapting to a world that will not stay still, or in her case, will not move forward.

Toward a Philosophy of Transplants

To live abroad is to transplant oneself into new soil. To age is to discover that the soil itself shifts beneath us. Both experiences demand humility, patience, and creativity. They remind us that cultural or bodily fluency is never permanent. We are always accumulating, relearning, renegotiating. Migration and aging, then, are variations on a theme: becoming a stranger and learning how to inhabit that strangeness.

Living Meaningfully Within Strangeness

To migrate is to discover that the familiar world has become foreign. To age is to discover that the familiar self has become foreign. In both cases, we are transplants — uprooted from the soil of fluency and asked to grow again in uncertain ground. Schutz’s stranger reminds us that belonging requires conscious accumulation of models. Massie and Staude remind us that aging reshapes time itself, expanding the past and narrowing the future. Our own experience abroad reminds us that these processes are not failures but invitations: to relearn, to renegotiate, to live deliberately.

A line from that Yorkshire study keeps echoing for us: older adults aren’t “lost in the past” at all — the past simply moves more freely through their stories, another thread in the weave of lived experience. What can look nonlinear or “irrelevant” from the outside is often just a different way of stitching moments together. That image stays with us. It suggests that strangeness, whether cultural or temporal, isn’t a deficit but another kind of knowing, a rhythm shaped by the layers a person has lived through.

Perhaps this is the gift hidden in strangeness. Migration and aging strip away the illusion of permanence. They reveal identity as a rhythm of continuity and change. To be a transplant is to accept that roots can grow in new soil. To age is to accept that roots deepen even as branches bend. In both, the task is not to recover lost fluency but to cultivate meaning in the midst of difference.

Transplants: Notes on Aging and Living Abroad

Overview ~ Accent ~ Cultural cues ~ Looked at and overlooked ~

Né pesce né pollame ~ Places act like time ~ In closing - for now

We’re coming up on ten years in Italy—a decade of new words, new rituals, and new ways of being. In that time, we’ve learned how to navigate the health care system, decode the mysteries of Italian bureaucracy, and even order a coffee without causing a scene.

And yet, disorientation still finds us. We are not quite Italian, but slowly less American. Not quite fluent in Italian yet sometimes reaching for English words we’ve forgotten. We live in the in‑between, and we love it. That middle ground keeps us curious, keeps us younger, and helps us approach situations with fresh eyes.

Over the years, we’ve realized that living abroad has more than a few parallels with getting older. Both involve a slow shedding of certainty, a recalibration of identity, and a humbling encounter with the limits of your own understanding. Both ask you to be patient with yourself, to laugh when you miss the joke, and to keep showing up even when you’re not sure how.

This post is about those parallels—how moving abroad and getting older mirror each other. But before we begin, we want to acknowledge that our story is one of privilege. We chose Italy, supported by passports, savings, and the safety of knowing we could always return. For many, migration is not a choice but a necessity—an act of survival rather than curiosity. Our reflections are not meant to equate the two, but simply to share what we’ve learned from our own, far easier journey.

Accent

We like to imagine our American accent has softened over the years, but the truth is, it hasn’t. It clings to us, unmistakable, a kind of passport we carry in our very voices. It marks us as outsiders, though not always in a bad way. Aging does something similar: your voice shifts, thins, or weakens, and suddenly people treat you differently, as if volume or clarity were the same as comprehension. In both cases—living abroad or growing older—others may slow their speech, raise their voices, or simplify their words, assuming you can’t quite keep up.

Then there are the gaps. In Italian, we often know exactly what we want to say, but the word slips away at the crucial moment. What comes instead is a pause, a gesture, a workaround. It’s not so different from the lapses of memory that come with age: the name on the tip of your tongue, the phrase that refuses to surface.

At first, we bristled when our “Ciao” was met with a cheerful “Hi.” How could they know, so quickly, that we weren’t Italian? It felt like failure, as if our accent betrayed us before we’d even begun. But over time, we reframed it. Those exchanges became opportunities to help others practice their English, and we discovered that once conversations moved beyond pleasantries, they almost always circled back to Italian. What once felt like a wall became a doorway.

Cultural cues

In Italy, we sometimes miss the joke. Humor is slippery as it depends on shared history, on references you don’t yet have. In a new culture, the punchline can sail past you just as an older person might miss a cultural reference in their own language. Each missed cue becomes a small research project, a chance to learn the context and catch it next time.

We were reminded of this long before moving abroad. On a Christmas road trip from Seattle to San Francisco in 2012, we stopped at a Dutch Bros drive‑thru. The barista asked something perfectly ordinary, but her phrasing and expressions threw us. After a few confused “huhs,” we finally understood. For a moment, we felt like strangers in our own country. From that day, we joked that you could feel foreign anywhere, even at home.

Italy has only deepened that lesson. We’ve had to learn the choreography of greetings, the etiquette of queues, the subtle rules about when to address someone formally and when not to. Aging brings a similar recalibration. The rules you grew up with—about gender, technology, etiquette—shift beneath your feet. You adapt, or you don’t. Either way, you notice. In both cases, you find yourself in new terrain, learning how to belong all over again.

Looked at and overlooked

In a past blog post The Expat Life – Thoughts and Suggestions for Better Terminology, we suggested “transplant” as a better word than expat. No one has taken us up on it yet, but the metaphor still feels right. Living abroad is like a long hike: you've transplanted yourself somewhere else, you’re exploring, awed by what you find, and constantly aware of the terrain beneath your feet.

On that hike, we are sometimes hyper‑visible and sometimes invisible. Hyper‑visible because we’re easy to spot—our pace (always too fast), our clothes, our names, the subtle cues that mark us as not‑quite‑Italian. Cars beep at us on the street, and we turn to each other asking, “Who was that?” They recognize us, but we don’t recognize them. Around here, anonymity is rare; stepping outside almost guarantees at least two encounters before reaching the corner. It can be inconvenient when you’re in a rush, but mostly it’s a joy.

And then there are the moments of invisibility. A driver asks for directions, but as soon as we answer, our accent betrays us and our advice is dismissed. In conversations with new acquaintances, we’re asked the usual questions—why Bergamo, what brought us here—but once the talk turns to politics, sports, or scandals, the thread slips away. Sometimes we jump in to prove we can follow along; other times we let the pleasantries stand. Either way, the message can feel like you don’t quite belong in the deeper layers of the conversation.

Aging carries the same duality. You’re either fussed over or ignored, depending on the moment. You’re visible when people project assumptions onto you, invisible when they assume you have nothing to add.

And like aging, living abroad often requires asking for help with things that once seemed simple—forms, instructions, even the right word at the right time. The lesson in both cases is humility. You learn to ask. You learn to receive. And in that exchange, you discover a different kind of strength.

Né pesce né pollame

Neither fish nor fowl, we live with one foot planted in each world. There’s no neat percentage that can measure how Italian or how American we feel. Identity shifts like the weather—on some days we lean into our Americanness, on others we find ourselves moving, speaking, even thinking in ways that feel distinctly Italian.

This in‑between space, far from being a liability, has become an advantage. It forces us to stay flexible, to notice, to adapt.

Sometimes that means starting over with things we thought we’d already mastered—earning a driver’s license again, building a credit history from scratch, learning the rules of a new system. There’s a strange grace in being a beginner twice in one lifetime.

Other times, the parallels are so close to our American life that only small adjustments are needed—a tweak in etiquette, a shift in timing, a new rhythm to familiar routines.

And then there are the discoveries: foods that surprise us, rituals that anchor us, pleasures that remind us why we came. These are the gifts of transplanting yourself to another place. But they are also the gifts of aging—of realizing that change, whether chosen or inevitable, keeps reshaping you long after you thought you were fully formed.

Places act like time

In her 2025 essay “Sky Full of Forests,” part of the collection No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, Rebecca Solnit reflects on the upheaval brought by climate change. She writes: “We are leaving behind our old familiar world whose stability we can remember as a great kindness and entering into a rough new set of circumstances. Like refugees leaving a place, we are leaving a time. What should we carry with us?”

That image—refugees in time—struck us. It captures the disorientation of change that arrives uninvited. You don’t move, but the world around you does. The familiar dissolves, and you find yourself in a new reality without ever packing a bag.

But there’s another kind of shift: when you do move, when you leave your natal country and step into unfamiliar terrain. In that case, you’re not just swept along by change, you initiate it. You choose to disrupt the stability, to trade the known for the unknown.

Both paths lead to transformation. One is passive, the other active. But each raises the same question: what do we carry with us into the new time?

To understand how change shapes us, perhaps we need a metaphor like Einstein’s Twin Paradox. Imagine two twins: Bob and Joe. Bob moves to Italy; Joe stays in their hometown. In physics, the paradox explores time dilation. But here, let’s consider something more personal and let's call it experience dilation: the idea that place, like time, can stretch or compress the way identity evolves.

So, does Bob experience more, less, or the same as Joe, assuming all else is equal? That’s the catch—everything else is never equal. The answer depends entirely on the individuals, their circumstances, and the unpredictable variables of life.

And then there’s the vanity question: does Bob age faster, worn by the stress of adapting to a new culture? Or does he age more slowly, rejuvenated by adventure, lifestyle, the Mediterranean air? Is the living abroad a wrinkle-maker or a wrinkle-smoother?

We ask because we’ve been wondering about our own aging—especially in comparison to friends who never left the country. Has the move helped us age better? We’d like to think so. But without a version of us who stayed behind, there’s no control group to measure against.

At the next reunion, will we look radiant, glowing from a life lived boldly abroad—as one friend calls it, “living the dream”? Or will we show the wear and tear of navigating Italy’s bureaucracies, cultural shifts, and daily challenges? Only time—and perhaps a few candid photos—will tell.

In closing - for now

As we think about how moving abroad has shaped us, we’re also aware that our journey is just one version of migration. As we mentioned in the introduction, others carry heavier burdens, forced to leave homes behind under far harsher conditions. Their courage reframes our own small disorientations. If anything, our experience has taught us to practice humility—for what we don’t yet understand, for what others endure, and for the truth that moving, whether by choice or necessity, reshapes us all.

And so, as we look ahead, we wonder less about whether we are “aging well” and more about whether we are aging openly. Living abroad has taught us that the measure of a life is not in how seamlessly you fit in, but in how willing you are to keep learning, keep laughing, and keep asking for directions when you’re lost.

Perhaps that is the real gift of both transplanting yourself and aging: the chance to be beginners again, to carry humility like a passport, and to discover that belonging is not a fixed destination but a practice renewed each day.