Making the leap

What I learned from packing up everything and moving abroad

A number of friends have recently decided to pack up shop and pursue a new life far removed from the only place they have ever thought of as home, their comfort zone and families. Their announcements and Leyla Kazim’s request for advice made me reflect on my emigrating to the UK and how different my life would have been if I had relocated at 46 not 22.
And a number of new readers are here from Debora Robertson’s brilliant substack which details her move to Marseillan from London.

At 22, I was offered a job within my NYC company but based in London. I joked that accepting the role for a year would be my paid for study abroad. I had never visited London. The move was within 9 months of 9/11 and my lease was up and roommates were pursuing new jobs and also leaving Manhattan. Sure it was scary, but given how much I loved NYC and had already worked for Analyze This and Law & Order and NBC, I thought London would be exotic and men with accents and easy access to European travel. I didn’t worry if I could handle the move; I was cocky and thought that London would welcome me with open arms and I’d be Emily in Paris decades before Emily in Paris.

I was only given eight hours to decide as the company was in the middle of one of their frequent management shuffles. I stayed up all night reading Accordion Crimes and accepted the role at 8 am EST time.

My last night in NYC with my little sister Katie Mei

My first seven months in London were awful and a lot of the distress was preventable. I underestimated almost every detail. From closing my American bank account and it taking 2 months to get a British account to my belongings being lost at sea, everything that could go wrong did and I didn’t have the support network or maturity to roll with the punches. I was always a massive extrovert and was always arranging bar crawls, never short of male attention and fully assumed that London would be like it is in a Richard Curtis movie and I’d have more social invites than I could imagine.

I believed that all I had to do was be friendly and say yes to everyone and everything and I would have a romantic dream experience. Reader, that did not happen.

All of a sudden, I was in a somewhat hostile work environment, they expected me to be older, more mature and more worldly than I actually was. I was given the biggest sales target in the UK office; and local candidates were not given the opportunity to apply. Obviously there would be resentment and I was oblivious and hurt that everyone was not excited to welcome me in. To say I was naive was an understatement.

I did not have any intention to change my approach or outlook to life in a new country, I thought the only change I would make would be a geographic one. That attitude combined with not knowing how to get invited to the pub or how to make English friends left me with weekends where the only person I spoke to was the owner of a local Vietnamese restaurant. I found myself seeking out the familiar and surrounding myself with other Americans who were as homesick as I was. This was the worst move I could have made as it further isolated me and stopped me from actually pushing myself to create a new life in London.

I am an over enthusiastic golden retriever and can be full on and intense and was not the least bit self aware at 22. I was used to being the baby and constantly being praised and validated. My sense of entitlement, I now know is pretty uniquely American and quite obnoxious. I would not have hung out with the 22 year old me.

If you take my arrogance, volume and expectations combined with not knowing how to get invited to the pub or how to make English friends, it made for a perfect storm. I was too embarrassed to tell everyone at home that I couldn’t hack it and had failed to win London over.

Of the expat Americans I ended up surrounding myself with, there were only two I would have ever spent an evening with if I was in America. It was as if, mutually being excluded from English social circles, it made us compatible. It also pandered to an ugly cycle of missing home, complaining about anything different than home (which at that point in 2002 was almost everything) and putting America on a pedestal based on nostalgia not reality. It would have been okay if I was in that cycle alone, but surrounding myself with others who agreed and reinforced that perspective kept me isolated and miserable.

Almost nothing will be done like it was done in Philly; but Philly was also no longer Philly when I went back.

Constantly comparing fledgling friendships to people that you have known your entire life and know your parents and eccentricities will never allow new relationships to flourish. And who in their right mind wants to hang out with anyone that is disparaging about the place they choose to make home? If you need to rage, and believe me you will, do it to someone at home.

Ask hospitable locals how things are done and then mimic those behaviours out of respect for your new country. Learn the etiquette, respect the queue, and if you want to complain about the local way of doing things– complain to people at home, not your neighbours. You have not earned the right to bad mouth your temporary home.

Activities help with meeting people without just chatting up strangers. After about a year, I ended up joining a softball team which in turn led to an international community of friends, and as a woman with no other plans and a softball glove, constantly being asked to sub on various leagues and attend tournaments. Softball was my social life for almost 10 years.

Once I stopped being absolutely desperate for someone, anyone to talk to me, my shoulders relaxed. I learned to listen and watch and learn. People love telling their stories, sharing their food and often their families with you; if you demonstrate desire to actually see them. Curiosity is crucial as is learning the subtext of communication.

I stopped trying to make London NYC and began to appreciate all of the differences and stopped spending my time with other Americans counting down until they would move home, pair off and become suburbanites. The first year is also filled with incessant visitors, and although it is a huge comfort to be with loved ones who you don’t have to explain anything about yourself to, it also limits your assimilation with new surroundings. If every weekend is either friends from home, or you are home; everything stays transient. You are not actually settling or growing roots, you are basically in the mental equivalence of corporate housing.

In the states, so many people you meet act as though they are going to be your lifelong friends and it is all surface; in London, it takes longer to be welcomed into lives and homes, but once you are in, you are in for life. And once I stopped biding my time with transient Americans, I found my people who have become my family..

For the first two or three years I was here, most of my substantial holiday allowance was used on trying to make it back to the states for every milestone event. It is impossible to have the same level of involvement with your family and friends at home and develop new relationships and enjoy and exploit the offerings of your new home. That isn’t to say that you won’t have deep friendships and relationships with your people at home but they will all be altered. It’s impossible to know what your nieces favourite colour of the week is when they only see you twice a year.

And if you don’t holiday like a local, then you are losing a huge part of the joy of your new and chosen home. I went from summering in Wildwood, New Jersey to Camogli near Portofino. And as different as they are, they are both equally mine. We make our little part of the universe our own. We fall in love. We have a regular take out order. We adopt dogs. When it is awful, when inevitably someone has an emergency at home and you feel helpless, remember that relocating was a choice you made for the future version of you.

Note– getting McNulty, my first cavalier king charles spaniel, was the first real sign to everyone in Philly that I was permanently going to be in London. And a dog is the surest way that everyone talks to you. Building community based on similarities but celebrating your weirdness, is the key and not just being defined where you grew up.

That’s not to say you should hide or mask your identity. I am still ridiculously Philly and use it to my advantage to challenge how things are done; but you can only complain about your new country once you have actually made it your own. Otherwise the prevalent attitude will be, if it was so great, why did you come here?

You will enter a limbo where your heart belongs to two places. When you are where you are from, you will miss the independence of your new life and surroundings (this is exacerbated if you only go home at major holidays and end up having the same six sentence conversation with everyone you haven’t seen since the previous Christmas). What I found the hardest bit was wanting to go off and live my exotic and exciting life, but wanted everyone and everything at home to remain on pause. I wanted everyone to be in the exact same place as when I left. I also wanted my coming back for 3 weeks a year to mean everyone dropped everything to make me the main priority, and that is not fair either. When you are at your chosen home and city, you will miss family gatherings, smells, foods, and commonalities.

In the brilliant book Speaking and Being, Kübra Gümüşa defines this sensation.

Being abroad offered me the opportunity to redefine my future, my plans and mostly avoid the expectations that I would end up married with kids outside of Philly. But I also had years of trying to live up to the glamorous life I supposedly had while my mom was dying and I was miserable everywhere.

Immersion is how I finally found my urban family in London. Philly sports in the middle of the night is how I have maintained a semblance of my own version of patriotism. Cooking my mom’s meatballs for English friends can feel like home. Bringing my English partner to America for Ice Hockey, blizzards, American Christmas and making my family mince pies and Yorkshire puddings in the cross section of both cultures worked for me.

I am unapologetically a cross section of London and Philly. I also know that this was by choice, my choice and am forever grateful at the opportunity to make that move. I sought a different existence that includes the Jersey Shore and the Italian Riviera. Having my best friends from America come and meet my best friends here made my heart full. Bringing flat mates and lovers to Philly and NYC combined my two worlds.

And I recognise that because I am a white woman from America in Britain, I am considered an expat not an immigrant and incredibly privileged. My visa was sponsored, I didn’t come here to seek safety from a country where I am not welcome (although I now feel like America is hostile territory.) I get released from the class system and am never who is being discussed when racist xenophobes talk about immigrants stealing their jobs. I moved for work 24 years ago by myself for a job-I am by definition an immigrant.

There is no specific way to adjust and find your own mix of different countries and cultures, but for me experiencing women of all ages and backgrounds, sitting in their kitchens, hearing their stories and eating their food brought me into their families. And in doing so, my global family grew, my perspective expanded and my life was built, one friend at a time, one dish at a time, one dog at a time. I cannot imagine ever moving back to America, and almost my entire adult life has been in London.

If you are considering a big move, it will not be easy or perfect, but it has the potential to be uniquely yours and you can define your future. I could not have been who I am now if I had stayed in Philly. When I made the move, Skype had yet to exist let alone Facebook and Instagram, so communicating with family and friends is a lot easier and cheaper now, but physical absence changes things, even if you speak daily. When you cannot physically see your family, I’d recommend avoiding the pass the phone around at Christmas calls which are dreadful for everyone– and have specific dates or activities that aren’t just recounting your day to day. Make time matter for both of you rather than just obligatory. Focussed time together, speaking or on video or when you are back for a visit rather than the assembly line of, ‘I’m great, work is ticking along, was dating a guy but he was basic. Puppy is amazing. Want to come visit? Not sure when I will be back. Love you bye.’ On repeat. Especially with kids in your life. Play games together, read to them, look up whatever they are obsessed with and use physical post and post cards to your advantage. If you can’t be there (and in many ways don’t want to be there) put in additional effort to listen when they are telling you what’s happening at home. Make them seen and set the standard for conversations higher than when you lived two streets down and saw them regularly.

Fights and disagreements are harder to rebound from when you can’t hug, when you can’t make simple gestures to get back on track. A lot of family, as excited for you as they are, are sad and possibly angry that you had the audacity to leave. Change is hard, and change when you will miss someone can cause resentment. Set boundaries early, watch tone and time zones because crying phone calls on the way back from the pub can really worry your parents and you were just drunk and emotional. They can’t just come and get you, so be conscious of their perspective, and talk about it. It will hurt to find out big family news on social media, it will happen, it’s rarely intentional but it still makes you feel disowned.

When I saw Layla’s announcement, I was struck by how different my move would have been if I did it at 46 instead of 22 and if I would have had the courage to do it now. I was certainly too young to know better when I emigrated, or I might have chickened out. To this day I remain childfree by choice and single– so my experience and decision did not dictate someone else’s choices. I also didn’t have a partner to help with the adjustment and dating apps didn’t exist, or I would have been the queen of tinder just for company that first year.

My advice to Leyla and to all of you: It is as big of a deal as you make it or as natural of a progression as you make it. You’ve been building the blocks of a foundation to understand the balance and challenge you need now. It’s not flighty or risky, it’s determined and gorgeous and hard.

And you can always come home if it isn’t your forever place.