The first six weeks in London were, if I am honest, a bit of a rush. There was the novelty of the Tube, the thrill of a new ward, the sheer density of things to do and places to be. My flatmates were lovely. I was exhausted in the good way. I video-called home and said, with complete sincerity, that I was absolutely fine. And I was – for a while.
It was around the five or six month mark that something quietly came apart. The novelty had worn smooth. I knew my commute well enough to do it on autopilot. I had stopped photographing things. And one Sunday afternoon in November, I was sitting in my room in Earl’s Court listening to the rain against the window – which is, in London, not an unusual meteorological event – and I felt the specific, hollow weight of missing home in a way I had not felt once in those first frantic weeks. Not missing Christchurch exactly. Missing the feeling of being known. Of existing in a place that had some memory of you.
If you are a Kiwi nurse in London and you are somewhere around that five or six month point and things feel heavier than you expected, this article is for you. Not because I have a tidy solution, but because understanding why this happens – and when – made it considerably easier for me to navigate.
Why the Timeline Catches You Off Guard
The Honeymoon Curve Is Real, and It Has a Predictable Drop
There is a well-documented psychological pattern in expatriate and international worker research that is sometimes called the cultural adjustment curve or, more informally, the W-curve of cultural adjustment. The basic shape goes like this: initial excitement and novelty, followed by a dip into frustration and disorientation, followed – eventually – by gradual adaptation and a new kind of equilibrium. Most people who move abroad have heard of something like this. What fewer people realise is that the first dip tends not to arrive immediately. It arrives after the adrenaline has worn off.
In those first weeks, your nervous system is genuinely occupied. Everything is new information. You are learning a ward, a neighbourhood, a transport system, a set of social cues that are familiar enough to seem navigable but different enough to require constant low-level processing. There is no bandwidth for grief, because your brain is busy. It is only once things become routine – once the newness stops doing its job of filling all available space – that the absence of home can actually make itself felt. By the time homesickness arrives properly, most people have already told everyone back home that they are fine. Admitting that the feeling has shifted feels, somehow, like a failure of nerve.
Why Nurses Are Particularly Vulnerable at This Stage
Working in mental health nursing adds its own layer to this. The emotional demands of the ward do not leave you at the door when you clock off. You carry things home – not always consciously, but they accumulate. In the early months, the intensity of the clinical environment actually functions as a kind of insulation against homesickness, because you are so thoroughly absorbed by the work. But that same intensity means that when you do step back and feel the weight of distance from home, you are already running on a depleted emotional reserve. The homesickness does not arrive in a vacuum. It arrives in the gap between a difficult shift and a quiet Sunday, and it can feel disproportionately large.
I spoke to four other Kiwi nurses working in London while I was writing this piece. All four said some version of the same thing: the first few weeks were fine, even exciting, and then somewhere between four and eight months in, something shifted. One described it as suddenly noticing that she had no one in London who had known her before she was a nurse. Everyone here knows her as competent, professional, capable. No one here remembers the version of her that was uncertain, or young, or just herself outside of a work context. That observation stopped me in my tracks, because it named something I had felt but had not managed to articulate.
What Made It Worse – And What I Had to Unlearn
The Productivity Trap
London has a particular talent for making you feel that any moment not spent experiencing something is a moment wasted. There are always exhibitions, markets, gigs, day trips, social events on the periphery of your awareness. For the first few months, this is genuinely wonderful. Somewhere around month five, it can start to feel like pressure. I noticed I was filling my days off with activity not because I wanted to but because staying in felt like defeat – like I was not making the most of being here.
This is, I have come to think, one of the more insidious features of expat life in a city like London. The implicit social contract of having moved somewhere exciting is that you should be visibly thriving. You should be posting photographs and having adventures and building a life that justifies the distance from everything you left behind. When you are instead lying on your bed at three in the afternoon feeling flat and far from home, the gap between that reality and the expected narrative can make the homesickness feel like shame on top of sadness.
The thing that helped me most with this was simply giving myself permission to have unproductive days without interpreting them as evidence that something had gone wrong. Staying in. Watching something familiar. Cooking a meal I would have cooked at home. These are not failures of the expat experience. They are ordinary human maintenance.
The Trap of Constant Contact
WhatsApp with home is a gift and, in the wrong doses, a complication. I was talking to my family and friends in Christchurch almost every day in those early months, which felt connecting and reassuring in the short term. What I did not fully appreciate until later was that constant contact with home also kept me, in some sense, anchored there. Every conversation was a small re-immersion in a life I was not living. It made it harder to be fully present in London because part of my attention was perpetually directed across eleven time zones.
I am not suggesting you stop calling home. I am suggesting it is worth noticing whether your communication patterns are helping you feel grounded in the place you are actually living, or whether they are functioning as a way of avoiding the work of putting down roots here. There is a balance – and it is genuinely hard to find – between maintaining the relationships that matter and giving yourself enough uncontracted space to build something real in London.
What Actually Helped
Building Micro-Familiarity in One Neighbourhood
One of the most useful things I did – and I stumbled into it rather than planned it – was to stop trying to know all of London and instead get to know one small part of it very well. I walk the same streets around Earl’s Court and Brompton Cemetery most mornings before a shift. I go to the same coffee place. I know which newsagent opens earliest and which dry cleaner is closed on Mondays. This sounds mundane, and it is – deliberately so. The accumulation of small, repeated, ordinary interactions with a consistent set of places is what gradually replaces novelty with something that actually feels like belonging. London does not become home all at once. It becomes home in one street at a time.
Finding People Who Were Also in the Process of Belonging
This sounds obvious, but it took me longer than it should have. The Kiwi expat community in London is large and warm and very easy to find – and I am glad I found it – but what helped me more, ultimately, was finding people who were navigating the same specific kind of in-between-ness. Nurses from South Africa, from the Philippines, from Ireland, from Australia – all of us in that particular position of having built a competent professional life in London while still working out what home meant here. There is a solidarity in that shared condition that I have not found described anywhere but that is, in my experience, one of the most genuinely sustaining things available to you in the middle period of expat life.
Letting the Homesickness Be Information Rather Than a Problem
The shift that helped me most was not a practical one but a perceptual one. I stopped treating homesickness as a signal that something had gone wrong – that I had made a mistake, or was not cut out for this, or should reassess the whole decision – and started treating it as information. It told me what I valued. It told me which relationships mattered enough to invest in maintaining properly. It told me what kind of life I actually wanted to be building here, rather than the version of expat life I had imagined before I arrived.
Homesickness, at its most useful, is a compass. It does not tell you to go back. It tells you what to bring forward.
A Final Thought
The six month mark is not a crisis. It is a transition – from the performance of settling in to the actual, slower, quieter work of it. If you are in it right now, I want you to know that the difficulty of this particular period does not mean you made the wrong choice. It means you are human, you are far from home, and you are doing something genuinely hard. The people who get through it are not the ones who never feel it. They are the ones who feel it and stay anyway – and find, eventually, that London has quietly and without fanfare become somewhere they belong.
