Heathrow Airport, March 2001

I can still picture the boarding gate at Heathrow, holding a tuna baguette from Pret and a MiniDisc player loaded with Stereophonics and Coldplay’s Parachutes. One suitcase, one company transfer, one slightly inflated sense of adventure.

I was twenty-something, single, and heading to Princeton, New Jersey, to help Photosound, a small communications British agency, expand into its first US office. Two years, they said. Just a professional detour and I’d return to Europe soon. My parents were encouraging, maybe a little relieved. I was mostly curious. None of us knew it’d become more than fifteen years.

Expectation meets reality

Like many who’d grown up on a diet of American films, TV and pop lyrics, I thought I knew exactly what I was stepping into. The land of confidence, convenience and possibility. The end of the Clinton years, the height of optimism. The internet was still dial-up, but America was where the future lived. Or so I thought.

The reality was less cinematic. Princeton was lovely, but it wasn’t the set of Friends. There wasn’t any real public transport, people still paid bills by cheque, and the streets were cluttered with overhead cables that made everything look half-finished. Getting a doctor felt like solving a bureaucratic puzzle. I’d arrived expecting to glimpse the future and instead found a country that was both dazzling and oddly dated.

Still, it was hard not to be drawn in. Everything felt bigger. The roads, the food, the personalities. But I was also struck by how interchangeable everything looked. There was so little sense of culture, history or deep roots. My team were bright, ambitious and astonishingly sure of themselves. Some wanted promotions before I’d learned their surnames. I admired their confidence even when it wore me out.

A country that changed overnight

Then the world changed. I’d barely unpacked when 9/11 happened, followed by the anthrax scare that touched my corner of New Jersey. The national mood shifted from exuberance to anxiety almost overnight. Autumn arrived with pumpkin-spice candles, Halloween greetings from strangers and a heavy quiet in the air. Dial-up meant family calls were short and rare. The early excitement faded into a slower rhythm of work, solitude and adjustment.

Managing Americans became a crash course in cultural nuance. They thrived on clarity, caffeine and praise. I learned diplomacy the hard way when a colleague accidentally emailed a client calling them “a pain in my ass.” The client phoned me in tears. The colleague resigned the next morning. I discovered that leadership abroad often means carrying everyone’s emotions, including your own, in a language that’s not quite yours.

After a few years in this role, and with my visa very much tying me to this job and this job only, I realised it was time to seek the security of a green card. Around then, Jack Morton approached me and, once the green card came through, we spoke properly and I ended up working for them in Princeton and New York.

After two years there, I came close to moving back to Europe. Instead, I asked for a transfer to Boston, which felt like it might bring me a little closer to home. It was only forty-five minutes shorter on a flight to London, but at the time that felt symbolic.

I stayed ten years, changed career paths and ended up working for a company I genuinely liked. Boston had its own rhythm and I tried my best to love it, to fit into it, but never quite did. I grew tired of the constant political division, the bad public transport, the school shootings which were just accepted, and the gloomy weather.

Life in the US was harder than I’d imagined, and harder than anything I’d grown up with. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t as good as I’d experienced elsewhere, and not somewhere I pictured bringing up children, but it did turn out to be where I met my wife, so there was a silver lining.

And yet, in all those years, no one ever called me an expat. I was simply “a Brit.” The word never came up. In America, you’re an immigrant, a foreigner, or just someone with an accent. It made me realise how “expat” is a privilege of distance, a word used by people who plan to leave again.

What those years really taught me

Looking back, I wish I’d been more deliberate about those early years. I arrived full of energy but with no plan for how long I’d stay or what home might eventually mean. I bought two different apartments and lived in both, yet neither ever felt like anything more than stopovers. And on several trips out west I realised that the version of America I’d imagined was basically California all along, not the suburban East Coast life I found myself in. The two-year posting blurred into a decade, then another, through new jobs, a green card and finally that long Boston chapter, which, in its own strange way, nudged me closer to Europe again.

If there’s a moral to those years, it’s this. When you’re young, free and single, don’t let fear talk you out of something new. You only live once, and it’s usually worth saying yes. Just keep your expectations in check and be ready for the moment when you must decide whether to stay or to move on.

I’m glad I took the chance. I built a life, learned more than I could’ve imagined, and solidified the fact that Europe is where I belong. And I left on my own terms. But I also know that America will now only ever be a holiday or business-trip destination for me. I need the diversity, the culture, the history, the small surprises and the peace that Europe brings into my life, and the US offered me none of that. The adventure was the point, and it did its job.

Even now, when autumn arrives and the air smells faintly of cinnamon and petrol, I’m back there for a moment, driving through suburban New Jersey with White Ladder on the stereo. Young, hopeful, half-terrified, and beginning to learn what it means to leave home before you’ve truly made one.