This milestone has been coming for a while, but it's finally upon me: as of Christmas, it'll be 10 years since I moved back to the US after spending most of my 20s in the UK. The moment it truly hit me was a week or so ago, when Facebook sent me one of its periodic reminders of old posts. In this case it was harking back 10 years to the day I posted I'd just bought my last monthly travelcard for the Tube.
That got me thinking about how I've spent that time, and whether it's been a good decision. While it may be a mixed bag, I would say that overall moving here was the right choice.
So what's the good, and what's the bad from this last decade? To answer that I have to separate out the things in my own life from what's been happening to the world more widely. I also have to present a picture of what life was like in London at the time that I made the decision to come back here.
The first thing to say about London in 2013 is that things were a mixed bag there, too. I finally had a good job, that I was doing well at and getting recognized for, which I think has eluded me ever since. I was also in the world's greatest city for publishing, and in that final year that I lived there, I got to experience some of it for myself by going to publishing events and the World Fantasy Con in Brighton, which remains one of the high points of my life. More generally, I also loved being in a city that had so much culture, and access to the rest of Europe and the rest of the world.
On the negative side, life was getting more expensive. I'd spent several years living in East London but when the 2012 Olympics came I found myself priced out and having to take increasingly grim accommodations with increasingly grim flatmates. This was partly my doing, because I insisted on living in Zone 2, but that wasn't an unthinking choice: the farther out I lived, the longer and more complicated my commute would be. Personally as well, my social life was withering a bit as my friends got married, had kids and moved out of London to increasingly remote suburbs. At the same time, there was a feeling of not finding someone to be with there in London, which also hastened my desire to come back here.
By contrast, California, and the Bay Area in particular, looked like it had all the stuff I wanted. Good weather, good food, my family, and a large core group of friends, as well as the sense of being more of an adult: in London, my life was bounded by the city, which meant anything I wanted to do outside of it meant figuring out public transportation. If I wanted to go someplace that public transit didn't reach, then I didn't go there. Whereas I reasoned that here in the US, I'd have a car and I'd be able to go pretty much wherever I wanted.
My timing was also good. When I started a new job in July of 2011, I met a sales rep who lived out here and who expressed a desire to have an analyst based in California to take advantage of the tech scene here. I bided my time, doing good work, and in 2013 resolved that this would be the year I moved back, so I put it to my company, and worked with our head of research to make it work. By the end of the year, another part of our company was setting up an outpost in the Bay Area, just 20 minutes from my house, and so the writing was on the wall.
Of course, there was a big adjustment coming to live here permanently again. I always described myself as never having been a grownup here in the US, and this past decade has been eye-opening in terms of learning how to navigate life in this country. Company benefits, especially healthcare, have been a never-ending source of frustration, but at least I feel like I've figured them out; same for taxes, though I still miss the simplicity of the UK system, where I got a P60 every April that told me how much tax I'd paid, and that was it.
On the work front, there have been ups and downs. I stayed with the company that transferred me here for four years before being laid off and having to take a three-month contract job back in London. I then found myself at State Farm for almost three years, before landing at my current gig. Once I got out of my old company, my pay jumped to levels I'd never even considered, which has made life so much better - I currently make more than twice as much as I did before getting laid off, and probably three or four times more than what I earned in London.
Dating has been generally better here, though it took a while to really take off. I did find myself going on more first dates than I had in London, but I went on way fewer second or third dates. That changed over a few years, but finally in 2019 I met someone for the first time who I really liked, and equally importantly, who liked me. That came to an end thanks to the pressures of the pandemic, but it was good while it lasted, so I'm grateful that she came into my life when she did. It also feels like I've had a little more dating luck since then, so hopefully I'll have more good news to report here soon...
My friend group has stayed pretty constant in this past decade, even despite them all getting married and having kids. I even managed one of those most difficult achievements, and made a new friend in my 30s. I also have a couple of good friends (one a former London flatmate) whom I see when I'm doing in Southern California, so it's nice to have someone else to hang out with down there.
The one aspect of my life that hasn't been as good has been health. I've gained so much weight in the years I've been here, compared with London, and it's only recently that I've been properly tackling it. I've already lamented the food culture here, but a thought I had in Munich back in September was telling: everybody smoked there, but their life expectancy is still higher than here, both because of the wider availability of healthcare and the fact that the Germans, despite eating a sausage and potato-based diet, don't cram themselves with the worst foods in huge quantities all the time.
My writing has also taken a bit of a hit, but that's not because of my distance from the world of London publishing (or not only). I suffered lulls there too, but at least here, I've learned to schedule my writing time and guard it jealously. Still, it'd be nice to be able to encounter SFF writers at the pub randomly, like I used to in London.
On the other hand, my dream of getting out into nature and areas not served by public transit has come true. I have my own car, so I can leave town pretty much whenever I want without worrying about train or bus timetables. I also have a built-in road trip partner in the form of my dad, with whom I've gone to the mountains here in California almost every summer since I moved back. Those have been some great trips, and of course it's a privilege to be able to spend time with him as he gets older.
At the macro-level, i.e. federal and global politics, it feels generally clear that I made the right decision to move here, but it hasn't been a bed of roses, by any means. When I arrived at the end of 2013, the shooting of Trayvon Martin had happened, as had the Sandy Hook massacre and the Citizens United decision at the US Supreme Court. But the Black Lives Matter movement came to prominence in 2014, after the Michael Brown shooting and various other police/state crimes against Black people, and in response the right wing has gone increasingly crazy, to the point of electing Donald Trump as president in 2016.
I spent most of the George W Bush years abroad, so maybe I haven't internalized how grim it was here, but the Trump years and the craziness since have been on another level entirely. I've talked about the parallels with Ancient Rome, but it's depressing that I'm fully expecting a Viktor Orban style illiberal "democracy" to be instituted here in my lifetime. I don't know what I'll do if that happens, or where I'll go, because the far right has coordinated itself everywhere, including back in Britain.
The thing that makes me most grateful to have moved here was, of course, the Covid-19 pandemic. Hearing my sister's experiences in London, and contrasting them with my isolated but mostly okay existence here, I honestly think I might not have survived it if I'd stayed there. At the very least, I'd expect to have caught it once prior to the vaccines being available, which would have been pretty serious. The UK and US both botched their responses, but at least here in California I was in a place that took it seriously, and lived separately enough from others that I was able to isolate, including working from home. Working from my increasingly tiny and grim flats in London during a global pandemic, with flatmates, and with stricter restrictions than any we had here in the US, doesn't bear thinking about.
So overall, yes, I'd say the move here was a good thing. Unlike when I left the UK at the end of 2004, to go to grad school, I don't feel like I missed out on as much by leaving in 2013. Indeed, that time I was back in the UK in less than two years, whereas now, Brexit notwithstanding (and an abiding regret is that I didn't pick up a British passport when I could have) I haven't felt a particular pull to move back permanently, other than wanting to see my friends and visit the cultural spots in Britain.
In the final summation, London never felt like home. There were, and are, many things I liked about the rhythms of living there, but I feel like my existence is so much better here, that going back would involve too many compromises that I no longer want to make. I hope my days of traveling and living abroad aren't over, but overall I'm happy to say that coming back to California was the right choice.
Now, let's see how the next 10 years go.
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