Gangal has struggled to find full-time work in the US. Courtesy of Ashwini Gangal In 2022, Ashwini Gangal decided to uproot her life in India and move to the US for love. Her husband was in the US on an H-1B employment visa, allowing her to relocate on an H-4 visa. Gangal felt like a "trailing spouse" and had to rebuild her professional identity in a new country. My husband and I met on a dating app in 2021. He had moved to the US in 2009 and was in Mumbai, where I lived, to visit family. His trip marked the start of our whirlwind intercontinental romance. In April 2022, after nearly a year of long-distance dating between the US and India, we got married in Mumbai, where I had spent all 36 years of my life. Nearly six months after the wedding, I moved from high-octane Mumbai to Sunnyvale, a sleepy suburb in San Francisco's Bay Area, leaving my job as the managing editor of an online business publication and bidding my friends and family goodbye. At the time, my husband worked in tech on an H-1B employment visa, which meant I could move to the US on an H-4 dependent spouse visa. When I got to the US, the heady joy of marital bliss was soon eclipsed by a crisis of identity. While I was glad to have found the man of my dreams à la Bollywood, I felt bitter about being a "trailing spouse," moving to a new country for love, at the cost of professional stability. The busy editor who led a team of reporters in Mumbai quickly became an alter ego from a past life. Plus, I was incredibly lonely. It was only after roughly three years in the States that I began to think of Sunnyvale as home. I felt like I was having a breakdown in slow motion As a well-traveled Anglophone, I felt no culture shock when I arrived in America, with the exception of the "do-it-yourself" culture common to the Western world. I was a Bombay brat who always had house help to cook and clean for me. In the US, I tortured my gut bacteria with junk food for months before grudgingly learning my way around the kitchen. In my head, I thought I'd only take a short break from work following my relocation. It took around six months after landing in the States to get my work authorization, known as the EAD, and then, I was all set to pick up my pen and notepad and return to work as a journalist. But I found landing full-time work extremely difficult. Every day, I searched online job portals for journalism roles to apply to, but I was either ghosted or rejected every time. Isolation made these rejections harder to handle. Friendless "visa brides," as I sometimes call immigrants of my ilk, have no one to share their burdens with. Gangal has found the Bay Area isolating. Courtesy of Ashwini Gangal Although I did make friends over time, it was extremely difficult to connect with people initially, because loneliness is baked into suburban Californian life. In contrast to the throbbing metropolis of Mumbai, the Bay Area is quiet and boring, with vast distances between any two places of interest. It's not unusual to have to take multiple freeways to get to a grocery store or restaurant. Some roads don't even have footpaths for you to walk on. Public transport is a joke, so in these soulless suburbs, your car becomes a detachable extension of your body. A few months into my life in the Bay, I knew I was experiencing something that went beyond homesickness. I cried frequently, sometimes breaking down in public places. I slept badly, worried constantly, and lost my confidence. It felt like I was having a breakdown in slow motion. Gradually, I've gained more financial freedom Learning how to drive, and getting my license in February 2023, was a big part of my emotional recovery. I'd always been afraid of driving, but now I've overcome it, I'm no longer dependent on my husband for transport. I have at long last befriended the asphalt. One of my first long-distance drives was to a town called Turlock, nearly 100 miles from my place, where I did a live poetry reading. Financially, I had to depend on my husband while I struggled to find work. But over the past three years, I've picked up some freelance writing assignments, which have granted me some financial freedom, and I've been able to lease my own car, a gorgeous black Tesla. Gangal in her Tesla. Courtesy of Ashwini Gangal Writing has been the refuge that's helped me rebuild my identity I'm not the first "visa wife," nor will I be the last. My story is the story of many women who've put oceans between themselves and their family, friends, and work, to move for love. My experience with immigration has taught me that when you move countries, your skills come with you, and if you believe in yourself, they can help you rebuild your professional identity. I'm proud to have strengthened my identity as a writer during this difficult time. I've written news articles for local outlets, works of fiction and poetry, and non-fiction essays based on my experience as an immigrant. For me, "home" is a place where people know my name, and building up professional recognition in the US has given me a greater sense of belonging. That said, even though I've picked up temporary work, like contract jobs and freelance gigs, full-time employment remains elusive. I'm still actively looking for jobs, but I've come to believe that the struggle has less to do with my own abilities than imperfect algorithms on job portals, a volatile job market, and a general skew in the Bay Area toward software and technological skills, which makes me feel less in demand as a writer. I don't write code. I write stories. In "Alf layla wa Layla," an ancient West Asian collection of folk tales, popularly known as "The Arabian Nights," it takes princess Scheherazade a thousand nights to find the path to survival through storytelling. I fancy myself a modern-day Scheherazade in Sunnyvale, and, having lived as a writer in Silicon Valley for over a thousand days now, I think I'll survive too. Do you have a story to share about being on an H-4 or another dependent visa? Contact the editor, Charissa Cheong, at ccheong@businessinsider.com Read the original article on Business Insider