Will I Still Be Me On Posting?

Hi,

My husband got his first posting and we are moving to Nairobi this summer! I have a master's in environmental policy and worked for a consultancy for several years. I know there are UN agencies and environmental NGOs. I have a list and a plan, and I feel ready to go.

But I started waking up at 3 AM and I cannot sleep. My doctor says its stress. And I do wonder if I get there and I can’t find a job or my degree doesn’t match? What if I turn into a housewife who waits for her husband to come home? What if I stop being the person I was?

I have not told him any of this. He is so happy about the posting and I do not want to be the one who puts doubt into something he has worked so hard for. So I keep my fear to myself. But how do I make sure I do not disappear?

A Spouse

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Dear Spouse,

The fact that you are asking this question well before the move puts you ahead of most people who enter this life. Many spouses do not ask how to not disappear. They discover they have disappeared and then try to find their way back, or just stay there and get used to it.

Your plan is great. But it is not all there is

Your list of organisations is a great start. Nairobi has a strong presence in your field and your qualifications are relevant. I am not going to tell you that finding work is impossible, because it is not. But the path from “I have a plan” to “I have meaningful work (or career)” on a diplomatic posting is longer and more frustrating than anything you have experienced in your career so far.

You may apply and hear nothing. You may hear that your visa status makes hiring complicated. You may be offered something beneath your qualifications because the system sees you as an accompanying spouse first and a professional second. You may find something excellent, but it may take months. And in those months, the gap between who you know yourself to be and who your daily life tells you that you are will widen.

So your instinct is right: disappearing may be just a matter of time. But not for the reasons you think. You are entering a system that was not built with your career in mind. So whatever happens to you professionally in the first months will smell like disappearing, even if it will have very little to do with your competence or your worth.

The job is not really the question, or not the whole question

Disappearing is incremental. It is putting your job search on pause for a week because the house needs setting up. It is saying yes to organising one more dinner because no one else will do it. It is introducing yourself as his wife at a reception and noticing that no one asks what you do. It is realising a few months in that you have not had a conversation about your own work for a very long time. Each of these moments is small. Together, they reshape you.

The women I work with who lost themselves on posting are not women who lacked ambition or qualifications. They are women exactly like you: educated, driven, with plans and lists and every intention of keeping their professional identity alive. What they did not have was someone telling them that the system is designed to absorb them into a support role, and that resisting this requires conscious, daily effort. Keeping your own life and supporting your partner, what a balancing act.

And the performance you describe is the first act of disappearing

You hide your fear from your husband because you do not want to ruin his happiness. I understand why. It comes from love and loyalty. But I need you to understand what this performance may cost you.

When you hide your real feelings from the person closest to you, you begin training yourself to shrink. You learn that your worry is a burden, that your real feelings are inconvenient and the appropriate version of you is the one who supports without complicating. Your husband is not asking you to do this. But the diplomatic system will. And as you can see, the training starts before you even board the plane.

The couples who navigate this well are the ones where both partners can say ‘I am excited and I am terrified’ in the same conversation. If you cannot say that now, while you still have emotional ground beneath you, it will be harder six months into posting when the distance between what you feel and what you show has become a habit.

So tell him. Not as a complaint, not as a problem for him to solve, but as the truth of what you are carrying. He needs to know that you are doing something big for this partnership and that you need him to see it.

And know that the job search, as important as it is, is only one piece of what is coming. Your sense of who you are will be tested when the things that used to define you are no longer there. Your independence will feel different when you are no longer earning your own money. Your relationship will likely change when one of you has a career and the other does not. These are things to think about and talk about now, before you move, not once you are already inside them.

If you want help working through this, you know where to find me.

Photo by Somia DCosta on Unsplash