You can live in Brussels for years and still feel like a visitor

There is a specific kind of frustration that has no good name.

It is not loneliness exactly, because you are not alone. You have colleagues, you have after-work drinks, you have a full enough calendar. But you can see, just past the edge of your daily life, a different version of the city. Real neighborhoods. Real people who grew up here. Conversations that have nothing to do with your institution or your project or your contract end date.

You can see it. You just cannot reach it.

I spent my first years in Brussels in that position. Looking through the glass at something I wanted and not having the tools to get there. And for a long time I thought the problem was Brussels. That the city was closed, that Belgians were reserved, that some people were just lucky.

None of that was true. The problem was that I was not equipped.

What "not equipped" actually means

Let me be specific about what that means, because vague self-criticism is not useful to anyone.

I was terrified of talking to strangers. At events, I would hover at the edge of groups, waiting for someone to approach me, which of course almost never happened. I could not do small talk. I did not know how to ask questions that made people want to keep talking. I did not know that the single most reliable social skill, in Brussels or anywhere, is to ask someone about themselves and then actually listen.

These are learnable things. I know that now because I learned them. But at the time I had no framework for understanding that social confidence is a skill, not a personality trait. I thought some people had it and I didn't. So I waited.

Meanwhile my French was miserable and my Dutch did not exist. Language in Brussels is not just communication. It is access. Without it, you are permanently in the position of the guest, dependent on other people's generosity, unable to go anywhere on your own terms.

And then there was the knowledge gap. Brussels has layers that take years to see. Old shops in the city center that no longer exist but that people of a certain age still reference. Neighborhoods with histories that explain why certain people live where they live. Political dynamics that shape everything from urban planning to which café plays which music. Knowing these things signals something. It tells a Belgian that you have been paying attention. That you are not just passing through.

I had none of this. I was building it, slowly, entirely on my own.

The window that kept closing

The window to do something about it was narrower than I expected.

I arrived in June 2018 as an intern. The first year was consumed by the internship, then by finding a permanent job, which was not easy. By July 2019 I had a job. The European elections that year gave me the first real entry point, the first thread to pull. But then work took over again and I was exhausted and deeply unhappy in ways I was not yet ready to name.

COVID arrived in March 2020 and closed whatever window had been opening.

What COVID gave me, unexpectedly, was time to think. I had a good salary. I had no social life anymore, which stripped away the last illusion that the bubble was actually a life. And I started doing a calculation I had never done before: how much money would I need to spend one year in Brussels without a job?

The answer was reachable. My salary had been good enough that a gap year was possible if I was careful.

That calculation did not tell me what to do. But it removed my last excuse for not asking the real question, which was: what do I actually want?

What I wanted was to stop doing things "just in case." To stop optimizing for safety and start building something real. Five years of playing it safe had left me on the wrong side of the glass, watching a city I lived in but did not belong to.

In late 2020 I told my manager I was leaving. I kept working until March 2021. I wrote about what that cost me, and what it gave me, here.

The parallel life is not your fault

I am telling you this not because my story is unusual. I am telling you because it is extremely common and almost nobody says it clearly.

The parallel life, work life running on one track, social life on another, local life somewhere you have never actually entered, is the default condition for internationals in Brussels. Not because Brussels is hostile. Because the bubble is comfortable enough to stay in indefinitely, and nobody is going to pull you out of it.

The equipment nobody gives you

The equipment you need to get out is real and specific:

Social skills that most people assume you either have or don't. You can train them. Asking questions is a technique. Making someone feel heard is a technique. Showing up to the same place repeatedly until you stop being a stranger is a technique.

Language not as a certificate or an achievement but as the thing that lets you move through Belgian life on your own terms rather than as a permanent guest.

Cultural knowledge that you absorb slowly, through attention and curiosity and time. Knowing the references. Knowing the history. Knowing enough about how this place works that a Belgian feels, talking to you, that you have actually been here.

None of this is fast. But none of it is luck either.

What I wish I had had, in those first years behind the glass, was someone who had already done it. Someone with both perspectives, who knew what it felt like to be a foreigner here and who also understood how Belgian life actually worked. Who could have said: wait, this is how this works, here is what you are missing, here is what to do next.

That is what this newsletter is trying to be.