Terre Haute has around 60,000 people, a Walmart Supercenter on the east side, and a Denny’s that has been open since what feels like the Eisenhower administration. When I tell Londoners this, there is a particular kind of pause – not unkind, but effortful, the pause of someone trying to imagine a scale of place they have no reference for. Then they ask what there is to do there. Plenty, I tell them. Just not nine million people’s worth.

I want to be honest in this piece in a way that a lot of relocation content doesn’t manage. The essays I read before I moved to London were almost uniformly written in one of two modes: breathless love letters that treated every inconvenience as charming and every culture shock moment as secretly delightful, or cautionary dispatches that mostly communicated that the author wished they hadn’t come. I did not find many pieces that described the experience as it actually unfolded for me – non-linearly, with genuine difficulty in some places and genuine joy in others, and a lag of several months between arriving and anything resembling settled.

This is my attempt at that piece. The honest version, from someone who came from somewhere small and had to learn, slowly, what it means to inhabit somewhere very large.

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The First Month: When the City Doesn’t Know You Exist

The Particular Loneliness of Anonymity

Nobody prepared me for how non-events my arrival would be. In Terre Haute, when someone is new, people notice. A new nurse at the hospital, a new neighbor on the street – there is a social apparatus for incorporation, however modest, that makes you feel like your presence has registered somewhere. London has no equivalent mechanism. You can move into a flat, start a new job, ride the same Overground train for two weeks straight, and remain entirely invisible to every other person in your immediate vicinity. This is not hostility. It is something more like radical mutual indifference, born of a density of population that makes noticing everyone genuinely impossible.

I found this difficult for the first four or five weeks. Not because I needed to be the center of anything, but because the absence of acknowledgment felt, at a cellular level, like absence of self. I had existed in Terre Haute in a relational web I hadn’t realized I was depending on until I stepped out of it entirely. In London, I had to rebuild something approximating that web from nothing, in a city that was not going to pause to help me do it.

What eventually worked – and this is not romantic, but it is true – was regularity. I went to the same coffee shop on Bethnal Green Road enough times that the person behind the counter started having my order ready. I ran the same loop around Victoria Park until I began to recognize faces. I found a pub near the hospital where nursing staff went after certain shifts, and I showed up, more than once, even when I was tired and would have preferred to go home. Belonging, in a big city, is not given to you. You manufacture it through repetition until it quietly becomes real. That took me longer than I expected, and I wish someone had told me it was a process with a timeline rather than an event with a date.

Learning to Read the City

A city of nine million is also, in practice, a hundred smaller cities layered on top of each other, and learning to navigate the layers is its own education. In my first weeks, London felt monolithic and overwhelming in the way that a syllabus looks overwhelming before you’ve started the course. Once I began to understand it in pieces – this neighborhood has this character, this market happens on this day, this green space is where people actually go and this one is just on the map – it became something I could move through rather than something I was simply lost inside.

The Tube was a confidence milestone I hadn’t expected. The first few times I used it I came out of stations genuinely disoriented, no clear sense of how the underground geography connected to the surface city above it. The day I emerged from Whitechapel station, turned the right direction without checking my phone, and walked to the hospital on autopilot was a small and private triumph that felt, disproportionately, like passing a test.

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What I Missed, What I Found, and What I Eventually Stopped Missing

The Things Nobody Tells You You’ll Miss

I knew I would miss my family. I knew I would miss certain foods – specifically, a particular brand of Indiana-made hot sauce I have since sourced online at a shipping cost that is, frankly, indefensible. I expected the homesickness and it came, dutifully, around week three and again around the holidays.

What I did not expect to miss was space. Not roominess in the apartment sense – I had braced for London housing prices and was not surprised by them. I mean the physical, spatial fact of a place where you can look a long way in any direction without the sightline being interrupted. Indiana is flat and wide and I had always taken that for granted, the way you take for granted the particular quality of light in the place you grew up. London is a city of streets and buildings and compressed perspectives, and there is a specific kind of sky – the broad, unremarkable, enormous Midwestern sky – that I found myself craving in a way that surprised me with its physicality.

Victoria Park helped. Epping Forest helped more. On days off, when the weather was anything short of biblical, I started making a point of getting somewhere green enough that I couldn’t see a building in every direction. The effort of pursuing that turned out to be good for me in ways beyond the walk itself.

I also missed the quiet. Not silence – I live in a flat that backs onto a fairly busy road in Zone 2 and I have made my peace with this – but the particular low-frequency quiet of a small city at 10 p.m., when the activity has settled and genuine stillness is within reach. London never fully quiets. There is always a siren somewhere, always something moving. I have grown to like this, mostly. But there were months when it felt less like the hum of a living city and more like a noise I could not turn off.

What London Gave Me That I Didn’t Know I Needed

Here is where I risk tipping into the breathless-love-letter territory I wanted to avoid, so let me try to be specific rather than lyrical.

London gave me access to the world in a way that Terre Haute, through no fault of its own, simply cannot. Within a few months of arriving, I had eaten food from countries I had never visited, attended a lecture at a hospital I had only read about in journals, and held a conversation at a bus stop with someone whose life was so radically different from mine that we shouldn’t, statistically, have ever occupied the same square meter of earth – and that happened more than once.

I am a different person from the accumulation of those encounters. My sense of what constitutes normal – in medicine, in community, in how people arrange their lives and their values – has been expanded enough that returning to a narrower version would now feel like a reduction. That is not a comment on Terre Haute. It is a comment on what happens to a person when their world gets significantly larger.

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What I Know Now That I Didn’t Know Then

The Comparison Trap

For the first few months, I evaluated everything in London against its equivalent in Terre Haute, and this was a useless exercise in both directions. When London won the comparison – the food, the transport, the sheer density of things to see and do – it produced a guilt I couldn’t quite justify. When Terre Haute won it – the ease, the space, the warmth of a city that had known me for years – it produced a homesickness that wasn’t useful either. The comparison framework itself was the problem. They are not competitors. They are just different places, making different demands and offering different returns, and you cannot fully inhabit one while you are busy measuring it against the other.

The moment I stopped comparing was roughly the moment London started to feel like somewhere I actually lived rather than somewhere I was staying.

Small-Town Skills in a Big City

One thing I want to say, because I don’t think it gets said enough: growing up in a small place is not a disadvantage in a large city. The skills that small communities build – genuine attentiveness to the person in front of you, a comfort with directness, an instinct for community that doesn’t require an institution to organize it – turn out to be useful here in ways that surprised me. London can be impersonal. You can be the person in your immediate circle who isn’t.

I still don’t love this city in the uncomplicated way the breathless essays promised I would. But I have come to love it in the way I love most things that have been genuinely difficult: with clear eyes, a lot of accumulated specific knowledge, and a respect for what it has cost me to get here. Some evenings I walk home from the hospital through streets I now know by feel and think: I live here. I actually live here.

That thought still surprises me slightly. I think that’s probably a good sign.