I Can Close a Deal in Mandarin. I Can't Tell a Doctor Where It Hurts.

I once negotiated a seven-figure equipment contract in a language I couldn't have used to order a plaster for a cut finger. This isn't a boast. It's closer to a confession, because it took me years afterward to properly notice how strange that actually was — that I could hold my own, competently and at length, in the one specific dialect of a place that involved cargo, delivery schedules, and politely worded threats about penalty clauses, while remaining functionally speechless about almost everything else that mattered in an ordinary human life there.

I've thought about this a great deal since people started asking whether I fancy retiring somewhere warm, on the assumption that a man who's worked across four continents must find the whole business of moving abroad entirely unremarkable. What nobody quite accounts for is that the fluency you build for work is a strange, narrow little tool, sharpened for one job and one job only. I could close a deal. I could not have told a doctor where it hurt, or a landlord that the boiler was making a noise it categorically shouldn't be making, or explained to anyone at all why I was upset, assuming I'd ever have admitted to being upset in the first place, which in three of the four countries in question I would not have.

There's a particular loneliness in this that the glossy retire-abroad guides never quite get to, tucked as they are somewhere below the paragraph praising the exchange rate. It's the loneliness of being extremely capable in exactly one narrow lane and helpless everywhere else, and discovering that the helplessness doesn't announce itself until precisely the moment you need the fluent version of yourself and only the useless one turns up. I once needed a hospital in a country where I could negotiate a shipping delay standing on my head and could not, when it actually mattered, make myself understood about something considerably simpler.

Here's my tea-spitting observation on the whole retire-abroad conversation, delivered as someone who's actually done the "abroad" part professionally rather than aspirationally: fluency for a contract and fluency for a life are not points on the same scale. One gets you paid. The other gets you looked after, understood, and properly known by the people around you, and no amount of proficiency in the first automatically buys you any of the second. I've watched clever, capable people mistake the two for years, myself included, right up until the moment it stopped being a theoretical distinction and became an urgent, practical one.

I don't have a neat conclusion here, because I'm still not sure which category most of what I actually know falls into. I can order equipment fluently in places most people couldn't find on an unlabelled map. I still don't reliably know how to say, in any of those languages, that I'm not entirely all right, which strikes me as a rather more useful sentence to have banked than most of the vocabulary I actually spent decades acquiring.

Every one of the retire-abroad guides currently doing the rounds treats language as a box to be ticked before departure — a course, an app, a phrase book by the door. None of them mention that the useful fluency and the necessary fluency can be two entirely different vocabularies, learned at two entirely different speeds, and that you generally only discover which one you're missing at the exact moment it stops being theoretical.

The full story — Angola, a generator part, and exactly what four countries and no verandas actually taught me about the current retire-abroad rush — is live now at The Old Grey Thinker on Substack: https://theoldgreythinker.substack.com/p/i-worked-abroad-for-years-retiring

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