🇧🇪 Brussels

Something newcomers to Brussels work out late: a large part of the city runs on multi-year contracts. People arrive, stay three or five years, and go.

That produces a particular social pattern. Meeting people is remarkably easy — everyone is new, everyone is looking for new people. Friendships then fail to reach the depth you expect, because both sides know at some level that the relationship is temporary. You do not fully invest in somebody who will be in another city next year.

After a few rounds of goodbyes many people stop starting, without ever deciding to. This is not depression and it is not withdrawal; it is a reasonable protection that turns into isolation over time. And because it looks from outside like a busy social life, nobody notices.

Brussels is officially bilingual: French and Dutch. In practice you hear mostly French, English in international settings, and schools or administration may want Dutch.

For a migrant that means choosing. Which second language do you take? And whichever you take, half the city is still somewhere else. People who have lived here for years often say they belong to neither language community — comfortable in the international English bubble and outside Belgium itself.

Fluency does not resolve that feeling, because the issue is not language. It is membership.

In Belgium joining a health insurance fund is compulsory and most costs come back through it. For some years there has been a network of conventioned psychologists whose sessions are largely covered, with a small patient contribution.

It has two real limits. The number of sessions is capped, and both the cap and the contribution have been revised more than once — ask your own fund for the current figures. And a Farsi-speaking conventioned psychologist effectively does not exist.

Outside that network, private practice costs more and reimbursement varies by fund and by any top-up insurance you hold.