British expats living in Belgium attend a small gathering of anti-Brexit protesters | Sean Gallup/Getty Images Brussels Brits’ Brexit blues For UK citizens in the EU capital, the mood is of uncertainty and anxiety.

In the weeks leading up to Britain’s original exit date from the EU, March 29, something strange happened at Brussels’ biggest English-language bookshop: It became a Brexit confessional for a worried clientele, who came to voice their anxieties and search for answers.

“Everyone is asking us about Brexit,” said Genevieve Morgan, a bookseller at Waterstones. “They just want to chat and want to know what the latest information is — which is really difficult to answer, of course, because we don’t know.”

As uncertainty around the date and terms of the U.K.’s departure deepens, Brits who have made a home in the Belgian capital find themselves in a sort of limbo.

The day-to-day practicalities haven’t changed: Their right to work and live in the Belgian capital is as yet unaltered. Or they have made contingency plans, securing new jobs, a second passport, or Belgian citizenship. Most want to stay.

And yet everything feels different. The unanswered questions over their status and prospects after Brexit means most are still waiting for the shoe to drop. The prevailing mood is one of uncertainty and anxiety, even melancholy.

“The bottom fell out of our world. We had always thought we’d be able to live and work wherever we wanted in Europe and still access our roots” — Denise Baines, an English teacher in Brussels

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For British staff at the European Parliament, the last few weeks have been the “last days of Rome,” said one British MEP’s assistant.

Parliament’s British staffers go drinking most nights, celebrating colleagues who’ve found other, less precarious jobs in Brussels that will allow them to stay after Brexit day. Those left behind are fitting in medical checkups before their generous health care plans run out.

“People are doing their jobs, but they’re refreshing their newsfeed constantly, and have Sky News on all day in the background,” the assistant said. “There’s a lot of gallows humor.”

For the U.K.’s 73 MEPs, the British commissioner, Julian King, and their staff, Brexit day — whenever it happens — will mean the termination of their contracts.

The majority of Brits, however, aren’t in danger of losing their jobs overnight.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker last year guaranteed full-time British civil servants at the Commission will be able to stay in their posts after Brexit. But that leaves those working under temporary or fixed-term contracts, or in other EU institutions, in a less certain position.

It also raises the question of whether — in an environment where career prospects are tied to your country of origin and its influence within the EU — their work will be valued, or if they can be promoted into more senior roles once Britain is no longer a member of the bloc.

Applying for Belgian citizenship is particularly difficult for long-time British civil servants, whose semi-diplomatic status means they haven’t been paying Belgian taxes and have relied on special IDs.

Brits working outside the institutions, too, are worried about Britain’s potential loss of influence in the bubble.

For Rosa Balfour, a British-Italian citizen who spent her childhood “crisscrossing Europe” and has lived in Belgium for 11 years, Brexit has already taken a toll on her professional life.

Balfour, thanks to her Italian passport, is shielded from the more practical uncertainty that is sending others to their local commune to fill out reams of paperwork. Still, the uncertainty around Britain’s exit has leached into her work as an expert on European politics and EU foreign policy, and thrown into doubt her belief in the project’s value.

“Since the British referendum, I’ve started to imagine Europe without Britain,” said Balfour, who is a senior fellow on the German Marshall Fund’s Europe Program in Brussels. “It’s a pretty barren and depressing place.”

“My interest in the EU as an actor that has managed to build peace on the Continent is jeopardized by the British decision to leave,” she said. “The purpose of my professional life has been put into question.”

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Brexit anxiety is palpable among those who attend church services at Holy Trinity, said Bishop Robert Innes, chief pastor of the Diocese of Europe. About a quarter of the Anglican church’s congregation is of British origin.

“Frankly, many of us are deeply ashamed of our country,” he said. “So, we’ve got to the point where we feel, is this a country that I identify with as strongly as I used to?"

“We’re so appalled by the way our country seems to have engaged with this process that we feel very ambivalent about it,” he said. “That does something deep to our sense of identity and belonging,” he added.

The feeling resonates among many of the EU capital’s 25,000-strong British expat community.

For Denise Baines, an English teacher at the European School of Laeken who came to Brussels in the early 1980s, the Brexit vote “felt like a bereavement,” she recalled. “The bottom fell out of our world. We had always thought we’d be able to live and work wherever we wanted in Europe and still access our roots.”

Applying for Belgian citizenship was a no-brainer, she said, adding she would have given up her British passport if that had been required. She and her husband became Belgian in order to buy property in Austria, where they plan to retire next year and which doesn’t allow non-EU citizens to become homeowners. Their children are Belgian.

“Almost everybody,” she added, is either applying for Belgian citizenship or already has it.

“We just feel like we belong here [in Europe],” she said. “We wouldn’t fit very well back in the U.K. anymore. It’s a case of how do you fit back into a society where there’s this attitude of blaming Europe for everything … I can’t live there.”

Among British friends and colleagues — many of whom, she said, “have given their whole career to building Europe” — “there’s this sense of despair and disbelief that we’re in this position where we’re running into stupidity and suicide when we didn’t need to,” she said.

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With a large number of British expats looking to find ways to stay in Belgium, rather than head back to the U.K., businesses built around catering to their needs aren’t too worried in a drop in clientele after Brexit.

For Roger George, who runs the British specialty store Stonemanor — which has been around for close to 40 years — British businesses like his have become part of the Brussels landscape.

His clientele may be mostly of U.K. origin, but the greatest increase in customers has been among Belgians. “Everyone loves British food,” he said. “It is still a good brand.”

“I’m not too worried about my customer base, because it’s pretty mixed,” said Julia Craig-McQuaide, who runs Wesley’s Butcher Shop near the EU institutions in Schaerbeek. “I don’t think people will disappear overnight.”

“It would just be nice to know [what will happen], but nobody knows. How am I supposed to run a business like that?” — Roger George, who runs a British specialty store

Her shop, like other British-run businesses in town, has also become an airing ground for Brexit anxieties, she said. “I’d say every day I have a couple of customers who bring up Brexit and share their stories of Belgian bureaucracy,” she said.

She herself is trying to become Belgian — a process made difficult by the fact that her parents both worked for the Commission and she only had a special ID, not a Belgian residency card, as a result.

The greater risks to her business — which relies on access to Irish meat, transported via the U.K. — are potential tariffs, extra controls and transit time for her products.

The same is true for George, whose store stocks over 20,000 lines of British products.

His business is “100 percent reliant on being able to get our products in,” he said. The imposition of tariffs on British goods entering Europe or delays at British or European ports could sink it.

“It would just be nice to know [what will happen],” he said. "But nobody knows. How am I supposed to run a business like that?”