I’ve lived in London for 25 years now, and whenever I return to the US – I always feel like I’m walking into a movie. America is big and friendly and bright and everything looks like a shiny film set from The Truman Show (albeit one that might collapse at any moment). In the UK, everything is rougher around the edges, what you see is what you get – and if it was going to collapse it did so centuries ago.

I spent my formative years in America, and always expect to feel at home instantly. I love that no one questions my Colorado accent, I understand the rules of the road, and I can expect unlimited coffee refills wherever I go. But once I’m past this initial phase, I lapse into cultural shock. Americans are loud, TV screens are everywhere (in wine bars! in elevators! even in taxis!), people carry guns, and I’m expected to tip 20-25% approximately every five minutes even for something as small as buying a packet of gum over the counter.

Everything is big in America. The cars, the supermarkets, the coffee cups – even the smiles. While in England, I’d learned to read subtlety, but Americans speak in exclamation points! And after decades immersed in British understatement, I find the US just as jarring as I do endearing.

“The Atlantic may separate two cultures, but it also gave me room to stretch across both.”

American friends always ask me why I say sorry all the time (another polite British habit) and when asked how my writing career is going, I usually mumble something only to be admonished for not bragging more. In America, self-promotion is practically a civic duty – but after so many years abroad I’m not good at it.

It took me a while to realize that some of my culture shock isn’t really about America at all – but about me. I had turned British in ways I hadn’t fully noticed – making me seem foreign in the very country where I was born.

For better or worse, being an expat has rewired who I am, and there is no “reset” button. The British part of me still craves sarcasm, understatement, royal history, rainy dog walks and Earl Grey tea. But the American in me still craves the optimism and openness I left behind.

Will I ever be able to blend the two? Or must I go through life feeling like two puzzle pieces that don’t quite fit together?

This is the price of being an expat; the price we pay for calling two places home. I’m not the same person who left the US those years ago, and that’s the point. The Atlantic may separate two cultures, but it also gave me room to stretch across both.

So yes, I still drink tea every day at 4 pm – but I drink it out of a giant American mug. And I guess that’s who I am now: a thoroughly caffeinated citizen of both worlds.