My name is Irina Pravet and I’m a language and cultural transitions coach. I help people tap into their inborn ability to learn Finnish, and feel at home in their lives abroad.

My work brings together the threads that have run deep throughout my life: transitions, adaptation and belonging (between languages and cultures).

Why does this matter so much to me and why do I believe this work is essential? Well to answer this question, I’d have to start at the beginning…

This year, two themes have stood out for me as we head into the fall: 1) fall is the best season for a new perspective and 2) it’s a time to intentionally slow down. Symbolically, fall has long been celebrated as a time to reflect on: balance (between night and day), impending darkness, change and transformation (and how foliage reminds us of the beauty, alongside the death, of transitions)…

This post is the first of its kind! It’s a book-club type discussion on Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown. I believe when we live abroad, we look out into the expanse of the wilderness – the complete unknown – on a daily basis. We find ways to cope and minimize our risks, but we also hold ourselves back from living fully out of fear. I felt so much of what Brené Brown discusses in her book Braving the Wilderness is incredibly pertinent to those of us living abroad. Themes include…

Kris Broholm and I sat down to talk about identity, finding home and learning Finnish. We’d met at the Polyglot Gathering in Berlin back in 2014 but it was only this year that the idea of doing an episode of Actual Fluency came up. We carved out time in our schedules over Easter and had a great conversation! Kris was living in Budapest at the time and learning Hungarian, and though we didn’t plan for it, we found a lot of common ground about the weather. Kris runs the Actual Fluency Podcast and regularly interviews multilingual and multicultural people to further his own quest to speak 10 language, which you can read more about it here.

Foreigner, immigrant, resident, alien, newcomer, stranger, non-Finn, [insert your nationality here], visitor, tourist, expat, minority, migrant, settler, floater, exchange student, finnophile, English speaker, international student, asylum seeker, refugee, outsider, gypsy, wanderer, outlander, nomad, new kid on the block: all words for people who don’t belong.

But what happens when none of these words seem to fit quite right?

Where you lay your head at night. Where your family is. Where you grew up. Where most of your friends are. Where you work. Where you love to be. Where you feel at home…

The concept of home is ever-fleeting, especially for those of us who may have several homes, or even no exact place to call our own. What makes it even more confusing is that home means different things to different people.