moving to the UK

Before I moved to England, I thought grocery shopping would be one of the easy parts. I had done it for years in Canada. I knew what bread, milk, cheese and eggs looked like. Then I found myself in a British supermarket, recognising the food but knowing very little about the brands, quality or prices. A simple shop took much longer than I expected.

That was one of the things I wished someone had warned me about when I looked back in October 2021, approaching my six-year anniversary here. The beginning had been difficult in big ways, including homesickness. It was also difficult in small, ordinary ways that I had barely thought about before arriving.

Knowing the food was not the same as knowing what to buy

In a familiar supermarket, you can head for the aisle and pick up the milk you want without much thought. When I first arrived, I did not have that familiarity. Even something like recognising a milk by its lid colour was information I had not learned yet. I had to read much more of the packaging, and those little decisions made the whole task slower.

By the time I made this video, I could go into my local Tesco and know where things were. I recognised the milk I wanted and my favourite cheese by sight. I knew what the packaging looked like, what I liked the taste of and which things seemed worth paying more for. I had also found products where I preferred the cheaper own-brand option because it tasted just as good to me.

That confidence had come through using the shop enough to know it. At the beginning, I needed to give myself more time. I wish I had expected that, rather than assuming an activity I already knew how to do would take exactly the same amount of time in a new country.

I had travelled, but I had not lived through an English winter

I had visited England quite a lot before moving, but never in winter. I arrived at the end of November and went straight into the Christmas season, which I loved. There were lights and mulled wine, and it felt cosy. Then January arrived. I found it dark, wet, cold and depressing.

At the same time, I was trying to get a job, my homesickness was intense and my anxiety was high. Everything felt difficult and overwhelming. I thought arriving in those winter months made the beginning harder for me. This was my experience of that first January, rather than a claim that everybody should expect the same thing.

I had made a similar mistake in my imagination after a holiday in Copenhagen. I did the touristy things, thought the place was incredibly cool and wanted to move there. I had only seen one side of it, though. I had not experienced the daily routine of actually living there. My earlier trips to England had also left parts of ordinary life unknown to me.

The first months made me question the move

I called the first five months in England my “five months of living hell”. I knew moving abroad would be difficult, but I wished someone had actually sat me down and said it plainly. I would still have moved. I thought that conversation might have helped my expectations.

Homesickness surprised me most. I had already gone away for school and for a job, travelled alone and taken flights alone. This was not my first time away from home. Still, the homesickness at the beginning felt overwhelming and physically painful to me. Combined with how hard everything seemed, it made me question whether I had made the right decision.

That is why I disliked expat content that only showed the good bits. Exciting trips and attractive photos did not show what my first months had been like. I wanted to talk about that part too, because I really had wondered whether moving was a terrible mistake.

What I could tell my earlier self

I wanted to give the move my best shot, so I stayed through those difficult months. By spring, my anxiety and homesickness had become more manageable. I had a job and was beginning to get a routine. I could look back at the hard part and feel that I knew how to handle life here better.

Nearly six years later, things that had felt foreign were becoming second nature. That was what I wanted my earlier self to know. The beginning was hard, but it was not the whole experience. Even the supermarket I had struggled to understand had become somewhere I could find my favourite cheese without studying every packet.

Watch my advice to my earlier self.