Hey friend,

How are you? I hope life has been kind since we last spoke, or at least manageable, which is sometimes the more honest thing to wish for.

I’ve been thinking about villages lately. Not the romantic kind. The real kind. The one you actually need when a child is sick and you’re running on three hours of sleep and your closest people are four countries away.

This one took me a while to write. I hope it finds you at a good moment.

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There’s a specific kind of loneliness that doesn’t have a name yet. It’s not sadness, exactly. It’s more like reaching for something that used to be there and finding air.

I came across a carousel on Instagram the other day. “Catch-up culture is ruining your friendships,” it said. The argument was simple: we’ve replaced the small, frequent, unremarkable moments of friendship with scheduled, pressurized life summits, three hours, every few months, where we try to compress everything we’ve missed into one sitting. And then we wonder why we still feel lonely after.

I read it and thought: yes, and also, it’s more complicated than that when your people are scattered.

Because the catch-up culture they’re describing? For many of us, that’s not a bad habit. That’s just geography. My closest people are spread across Europe, different cities, different countries, different time zones. A call isn’t a casual thing, it’s an event. It carries the weight of distance and all the ordinary days neither of us witnessed. There’s no single place I could fly to and find them all in one room. The village was never in one place to begin with. Of course every conversation turns into a three-hour life update. What else would it be?

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The carousel talks about building a village through small moments: proximity, shared routines, a Sunday walk, a coffee before work, showing up for the boring stuff. And I understand that. I believe it, actually. That’s how connection really works. But when I read it, something in me quietly noted: that requires people nearby. And nearby is the exact thing many of us gave up, whether by choice, by love, by circumstance, or by some complicated mix of all three.

I don’t regret moving to Portugal. That’s not what this is. But I think there’s a particular experience that doesn’t get talked about enough: the one where you build a life somewhere new, you love it, you choose it every day, and you still carry this low hum of missing. Not missing home exactly. Missing the ease of being known. The kind of friendship that doesn’t need context, because the context is twenty years long.

There’s a specific quality to that ease that’s hard to replace. With your far people, you share history. With your nearby people, you share life as it’s actually happening. And those are different things.

The need to be witnessed in your ordinary days, not the curated update you send across a time zone, but the Tuesday, the bad week, the small win nobody else noticed. The need for spontaneity, for someone you can call at six in the evening with no plan and no agenda. And something I didn’t expect to matter as much as it does: the need to be rooted in a place through other people. To have someone to process the local news with, to complain about the same things, to understand the cultural mood you’re both living inside. Without that, you can find yourself slightly floating above the country you’ve chosen, present in it but not quite of it.

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I’ve been building this village for a while now. It didn’t start today and it isn’t starting from zero. There are people here who know my name, who wave from across the street, who ask about the baby with genuine interest, who have sat at my table. It’s not nothing. It’s actually something I’m quietly proud of, because I know how much effort goes into each of those small connections when you’re doing it in a language and a culture that isn’t the one you were shaped by. The village has its own villagers already. They just don’t know each other yet.

And then you add children into it, and the village metaphor stops being metaphorical. You actually need one. Not as a concept, as a logistical reality. Someone who can pick up your kid when you’re stuck. Someone who notices when you’re not okay. Someone who doesn’t need the three-hour update because they were there for the Tuesday.

Making friends as an adult is already its own strange project. Doing it somewhere that isn’t yours, possibly in a language you’re still inhabiting, with a social culture whose rhythms you’re still learning to read, that’s something else. It’s slower. It asks more of you. And the results are real but different, warmer in some ways, more deliberate, built on choice rather than proximity or shared childhood. That’s not lesser. It’s just harder to feel on the days when you need someone and realize the someone you want is four countries away.

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What I’m learning, slowly, is that the village doesn’t arrive. You build it, imperfectly, out of whoever is nearby and willing. A neighbor who always stops to talk. A parent from school who laughs at the same things you do. A colleague you actually like. You start there. You lower the bar, not because connection doesn’t matter, but because waiting for the deep kind to appear fully formed means waiting forever.

My people, spread across cities and countries, are still my people. That doesn’t change. But I can’t borrow a cup of presence from across a time zone. And life is happening here, now, in the place I chose. So the village has to be here too.

| I’m learning to let it be both. The deep roots far away, and the tender new ones close to home.

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If you want to sit with this a little longer, here’s a question worth asking yourself honestly:

Who are your “far” people, and who are your “nearby” people? And when did you last invest in both, not with a three-hour update, but with something small and unremarkable?

That’s usually where the village is quietly waiting.

With warmth,

Monica

P.S. A small thank you for being here. You showing up to read this, and sometimes writing back, that’s its own kind of village. A scattered one, yes. But aren’t those the ones we know best? This newsletter is my way of tending to it.