In January 2015, I hopped on a plane to Bangkok and went travelling in Southeast Asia. What was intended to be two months of travelling quickly turned into two years of living in Vietnam. And, for the vast part of that time, I believed I was a better person just for simply being there.
Friends and family congratulated me on my bravery to move away. Others voiced their jealousy of my ‘exotic’ life. Those who visited me told me how incredible it was that I had managed to set myself up in a new country. Without really realising, I quickly gained a certain amount of arrogance about my new-found identity as an ‘expat’, which brings me to the first way that living abroad made me a worse person…