There is a certain kind of person who says “expat” with great ease.

I am suspicious of this person.

Not because they are always wrong, exactly. Technically, an expatriate is just someone who lives outside their country of origin. Technically, a lot of things are true. Technically, a convenience store egg sandwich is not a religious experience, and yet anyone who has grabbed the last one available at 12 a.m. after a night out knows better.

The problem with “expat” is not the dictionary definition. The problem is the little suitcase of meaning it carries behind it. It suggests lightness, the mobility of a person with options. Someone who has gone abroad but not necessarily moved abroad. Someone who is living elsewhere, but only in pencil.

I do not feel like I live in Japan in pencil anymore.

When I first arrived with the JET Program, I probably would have accepted almost any label handed to me. ALT. Foreigner. American. New arrival. Cultural ambassador. Person who cannot understand the morning meeting but can sense, spiritually, when they have missed something important. I was too overwhelmed to object. I had a residence card, a hanko, a school desk, and a confusing garbage chart that seemed to imply I had joined a secret society devoted to plastic sorting.

Everything was new, which is another way of saying that everything was exhausting.

At first, Japan existed for me in fragments: the drive to school (that I needed a GPS for, even though it was only 3 minutes away), the announcements at the train station, the smell of kerosene heaters, the careful choreography of staffroom greetings, the mountains doing something dramatic in the background while I tried to remember whether today was plastics trash day (only every other week). I was not yet living in a country. I was living in a series of small tests.

I was still working towards my graduate degree then. So, I fell into books to distract me from these tests. I found a lot of comfort in my literary philosophy books (ha, nerd!) and tried to apply them to my own life. I still carry this with me. For example, Benedict Anderson described nations as “imagined communities.” Not imaginary, not fake, but imagined: held together by shared stories, symbols, rituals, languages, habits, and assumptions. Most members of a nation will never meet each other, and yet they can feel bound together by something larger than personal acquaintance. A nation is, in a sense, a story that enough people agree to keep telling.

Living abroad makes you notice stories.

You notice the story your home country told you about itself. You notice the story your host country tells about itself. You notice the story other people tell about you before you have even opened your mouth. You notice, with some embarrassment, the story you were telling about yourself. And you notice how all these stories rub together.

For a long time, I thought living in Japan would make me more worldly. This was a nice, flattering idea. Very attractive. Very Instagrammable. I imagined growth would arrive in elegant forms: language acquisition, cultural understanding, perhaps a tasteful amount of inner peace.

Instead, growth has mostly arrived through humiliation.

I have grown because I have misunderstood instructions. Because I have nodded at the wrong time. Because I have overprepared for classes that flopped and underprepared for classes that somehow became everyone’s favorite. Because I have stood in public places wondering whether I was allowed to be there, whether I was doing the right thing, whether I was being perceived as rude, strange, loud, helpless, American, or all of the above.

This is not the glamorous version of life abroad that one posts to the ‘gram. It is the truer one.

The word “expat” often feels too clean for this. It turns the messy business of living somewhere into a lifestyle category. It can make a person sound temporarily displaced but fundamentally unchanged, as if the host country is scenery rather than a place making demands on them. Worse, it is not a neutral word. Some people who cross borders are called expats. Others are called immigrants. Others are called migrants. The differences between these words are not only about passports. They are about race, money, power, and who gets imagined as adventurous rather than desperate.

That is why the word bothers me. Not because I need a perfect label. I do not. But because labels are never only labels. They are tiny theories about the world.

Sara Ahmed writes about orientation: what we face, what becomes reachable, what paths are made easier because others have walked them before us. I think about that often as an ALT in Japan. My life here has been shaped by the paths available to me: the JET Program, the school system, the expectations attached to being a native English speaker, the particular kind of foreignness I carry as an American. I did not arrive as a blank slate. No one does. We arrive already oriented by history. And then, slowly, daily life reorients us.

The drive to school stops being “the drive to school” and becomes my drive to school. The mountains become not a beautiful backdrop but a weather report, a mood, a calendar. Students who were first-years become third-years. The teacher who once intimidated you becomes the person who saves you an extra oyaki from lunch because he knows they’re your favorite. The village that once felt impossible to read becomes full of small, legible kindnesses.

This is not belonging in the grand, cinematic sense. No swelling music. No sudden transformation. Just repetition. Just showing up. Just being corrected by reality until your life takes a new shape.

The Stoics had a word I love: cosmopolitan. Citizen of the world. It is a beautiful idea, and like many beautiful ideas, it becomes dangerous when it is too easy. “Citizen of the world” can sound generous, expansive, enlightened. It can also become a way of belonging everywhere in theory and nowhere in practice.

It is much easier to love humanity than to read the garbage calendar.

It is much easier to say “we are all connected” than to learn how your presence affects a workplace, a classroom, a neighborhood, a town. Actual belonging is inconvenient. It has paperwork. It has seasonal allergies. It has meetings you only half understand. It has obligations.

Simone Weil wrote about the need for roots, and I understand that better now than I did before Japan. Roots are not the same as ownership. They are not a claim. They do not mean, “This place is mine.” They mean, perhaps, “This place has changed me, and I am responsible for how I live in it.”

That responsibility feels important as I continue living here after JET. Because I am not simply finishing an adventure and returning to my “real life.” This is real life. My life is not waiting for me somewhere else, perfectly preserved in a storage unit labeled America. It is here too: in classrooms, lesson plans, train rides, grocery store aisles, awkward conversations, small victories, and the deep spiritual mystery of why every official form needs my hanko stamped in three different places.

I am still foreign. That has not disappeared. I do not want to pretend that time alone dissolves difference. I am not Japanese. I still miss things. I still misunderstand. I still carry America with me in ways I notice and ways I probably do not. But I am also not merely passing through.

Maybe belonging is not a status, maybe it is a practice.

Maybe it is something we do badly before we do it better. Maybe it is less about being accepted into an imagined community and more about becoming careful with the communities we imagine. Maybe it begins when we stop treating a place as an experience we are having and start recognizing it as a life we are participating in.

So no, I do not love the word “expat.”

It feels too airy for the weight of what living here has meant. It does not hold enough of the confusion, gratitude, comedy, loneliness, attachment, responsibility, and ordinary love that have accumulated over five years. It does not hold the version of me who arrived. It does not quite hold the version of me who stayed.

I do not know what word I prefer. Immigrant is more honest in some ways, though it comes with its own histories and assumptions. Foreign resident is accurate but sounds like something printed on a laminated card. ALT is true professionally but not existentially, despite what my inbox may suggest.

Maybe, for now, I do not need a perfect word.

I just live here.