We spend years building ourselves. The career, the reputation, the personality — the references and the in-jokes and the way we walk into a room. Then some of us pick it all up and move it somewhere else. And discover, sometimes painfully, that none of it travels.
I recently spoke with Brooke Black — American music publicist, podcast host, and what she describes as a reluctant Dane. She accidentally moved to Denmark with her Danish husband and two small children during COVID, and has been figuring out who she is ever since. She hosts What Are You Doing in Denmark?, the biggest podcast for internationals in the country, and she came on with a kind of clear-eyed honesty about expat life that I don’t often hear.
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The self you built doesn’t pack well
Brooke spent her twenties in New York, her thirties in LA. She was the breadwinner, the career woman, the loud, enthusiastic, culturally-fluent person in every room. And then:
“All of the things that I’ve cultivated, my career, my personality, all these little details that I have painstakingly created as part of me that I thought were the great things about me — don’t matter. Because you’re in a brand new country.”
That landed for me. We often talk about moving abroad as an adventure, a fresh start. And it is. But it’s also a kind of quiet dismantling. Your wit relies on shared references. Your confidence relies on being understood. Strip those away and you’re left asking a harder question: what’s actually there?
The invisible weight
One thing Brooke described that I hadn’t heard articulated quite like this before is the sheer cognitive cost of living somewhere not built for you. After five years in Denmark, she still catches herself doing things wrong without realising. Every interaction — the train, the grocery store, the school gate — requires a little extra processing.
“You are void of personality because you’re just trying to follow what’s happening.”
And that drain compounds. What’s left over for your relationships, your kids, your work? She put it simply: you can never expect another place to rise to the expectations you built somewhere else. The adjustment isn’t lowering your standards — it’s recalibrating what matters.
What Denmark gets right (and what the PR leaves out)
Brooke is thoughtful about not selling Denmark as a dream. Yes, the trust is real — laptops left open on trains, babies sleeping outside cafés, an eight-year-old biking herself to school through a gate with no security. Yes, the five weeks of annual leave, the stress leave that carries no stigma, the kids who get to play with real knives and take real risks.
But the winters are dark. The seasonal depression is real. Danes are warm, but slowly — and they will absolutely reach across you in a supermarket rather than say excuse me. It took Brooke two years in Copenhagen to build friendships where she felt she could be herself.
“Loneliness is one of the toughest things to try and solve anytime you move to a new place and try to find your place within it.”
That’s not a Denmark problem. That’s the expat condition. And it’s worth naming honestly.
What the glass-half-full thing is actually about
Near the end of our conversation, we got onto something I’ve felt myself — the American enthusiasm, the pointing at things and going wow, the willingness to talk to strangers. Brooke said she’s started cringing at it after years of toning herself down for Danish sensibilities. But she doesn’t want to lose it entirely.
The happiest countries, she thinks, aren’t happier because they’ve lowered their expectations. It’s more like they’ve adjusted them — to what they actually have, not what they think they should have. There’s something worth sitting with in that.
You can find Brooke on Instagram and TikTok at @brookblackjust and her podcast What Are You Doing in Denmark? is on all platforms. If you’re thinking about moving to Denmark, she genuinely welcomes the DMs.
Now press play. The full conversation is worth your time.
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