"Everything's great, thanks!"

A client once told me about her Sunday video calls with her parents.

Every week, more or less at the same time. She tells them about her week: the beach with friends, the project at work, a restaurant she has discovered. When the light is good, she shows them the view from her balcony. Her mother says she looks well.

What she does not tell them is that she has been sleeping badly for months. That the friends from the beach are pleasant but recent, and she is not sure she could call them if something went wrong. That some evenings, after closing the laptop, she does not speak to anyone until the next day.

"They would only worry," she says. "And they can't do anything from there. Besides, I chose this."

This is something I hear often from international clients, in one form or another. The version of life abroad that travels back home is usually an edited one.

But the editing does not happen for the same reason in every case, and it does not feel the same either.

For some people, like this client, it is about protection. Things are genuinely difficult — with work, with the flat, with building a social life — and they do not want to worry family who are far away and cannot help. They do not want to give arguments to those who doubted the move in the first place, because any difficulty may be answered with "well, you can always come back". Some feel that after choosing to leave, they have lost the right to complain. And when a weekly call is the main contact left with someone, it is natural to want that call to be pleasant.

There are practical reasons too. Explaining a problem here requires a lot of context: how the health system works, what the flat situation is, who this new person is. It is tiring to explain, and by the time everything is explained, the moment has often passed.

For other people, the editing is not really a choice, because the questions have stopped coming. During the first months, everyone asked: about the flat, the job, the city. Then the novelty of the move wore off, and their lives continued. Now it is nearly always the person abroad who calls, who asks, who keeps the contact alive — and when they don't, weeks can pass in silence. It is difficult to feel connected to people who, apparently, can go on without knowing how you are. And it is difficult to say how you really are when nobody has asked. In this case, the difficult parts are not being hidden. They are simply never invited.

And there are people who keep the distance on purpose. Moving abroad gave them some space from their family — from old dynamics, from opinions about their choices — and they want to keep that space. For them, the shorter version of life that travels home is not hiding anything; it is a boundary they need for the relationship to work. Their question is a different one: how to stay in contact without being pulled back into a place they worked hard to leave.

So, for one reason or another, the difficult parts stay out of the conversation.

What can make this heavier is that the honest version often has no other place to go. The relationships here are still new, and nobody wants to be the person who complains too early. Colleagues see the competent version. New friends see the sociable one. Everyone else sees the photographs.

Which means that, between one side and the other, nobody has the complete picture. The people who know you best are missing the present, and the people who share your present do not know you yet.

Over time, this has a cost. The calls themselves can become tiring, because keeping up a version requires attention — or because keeping the contact alive at all depends on you. There may be guilt, when the distance between the life described and the life lived becomes noticeable. And if at some point things get genuinely difficult, it is harder to say so after months of "everything's great" — the longer the edited version has been running, the bigger the step to correct it.

To be clear, editing is not a problem in itself. Everyone chooses what to share, and with whom. A call across the distance cannot hold everything a daily coffee once did, and sometimes a certain distance is exactly what a relationship needs in order to work.

There is a difference between choosing what to share and having nowhere where the full version can be said.

But there is a difference between choosing what to share and having nowhere where the full version can be said.

The question is not whether to tell your family everything. It is whether the complete answer to "how are you?" exists somewhere — said out loud, at least once, to someone.

Reflection 9 of my free workbook, How am I really doing here?, sits exactly there.

Vignettes in these essays are composites, with details changed to protect confidentiality.