The Smugness of Certainty: What I Got Wrong About Brexit — and Why It Took Living in America to Show Me

I'd been back in Canada for less than a week, and already I felt like a foreigner.

Not in the dramatic sense. Nobody has questioned my passport or told me I don't belong here. It's subtler than that. More disorienting. Like walking through a house you once lived in after all the furniture has been changed. You know where everything should be. You reach for it. It isn't there.

This was my first time back in years. I left Canada in the late nineties, spent twenty-one years in London, and then moved to the U.S. five years ago to build a completely different life. A harder life in many ways. A more meaningful one too.

When I lived in London with my ex-husband, one of our recurring arguments was about Canada. I wanted to move back eventually. He didn't. At the time, Canada existed in my mind as a kind of compass point. Stability. Familiarity. The quiet certainty of home.

But sitting recently in my mum's beautiful house, I felt no connection to the country outside its walls.

Not dislike. Not disappointment. Just absence. Like arriving somewhere you were certain would feel like arrival — and finding only silence where the recognition should be.

The strangest part is that I went back to London last year and felt the same thing in reverse. London still feels emotionally closer to me than Canada ever will now. I lived there for over two decades. I became an adult there. Built a career there. Loved there. Failed there. Married there. Divorced there. I know the smell of the Tube in summer and exactly how the sky looks at 4pm on a November afternoon. Some part of me will probably always belong to London.

And yet, when I returned, it no longer felt like home either.

It felt like visiting the ghost of my own life.

I was born in England, raised in Canada, eventually found my way back to the UK by way of Japan and Australia, and then crossed an ocean again to start over in America. So here I am: English by birth, shaped by Canada and Britain, living in America, and somehow belonging fully to none of them.

I didn't expect that to feel like being untethered. But sometimes, quietly, it does.

*

There's a particular kind of conversation I've become familiar with since moving to the U.S. — the one where someone who doesn't live there explains America back to me.

The politics. The divisions. The disbelief. The moral bewilderment at how a country could be so polarized, so difficult, so loud in its failures. And underneath it all, sometimes unspoken and sometimes not, a sense of superiority. A suggestion that to be elsewhere is to be more civilized. More compassionate. More clear-eyed about what really matters.

I mostly stay silent in those moments. I’ve learned that these conversations tend to be closed ones — opinions delivered to be stated, not explored. Engagement rarely changes anything when the conclusion arrived before the discussion did.

But the silence isn’t only strategic. It’s not that every criticism is wrong. Criticism and honest discourse matter; they keep ideas from hardening unchallenged. What troubles me is something narrower than criticism: certainty. The confidence with which opinions often arrive fully formed, without the friction of actually having lived inside them.

I recognize that certainty because I used to carry it too.

When Brexit happened, I was living in London, surrounded by people who overwhelmingly opposed it. I genuinely could not understand why anyone would vote to leave. To me, the decision felt irrational, regressive, almost incomprehensible. I viewed it almost entirely through a moral and intellectual lens. And if I'm honest, I assumed — without researching, without attempting to understand anyone's lived reality — that it was essentially a racist vote.

That was true for some, no doubt. But it wasn't the whole. There were people voting from genuine economic anxiety, from a deep distrust of institutions that had failed them long before the referendum, from a sense that their lives and communities had been hollowed out and nobody in power had noticed or cared. I didn't ask about any of that. I was certain. And I think now that certainty was a luxury I didn't recognize as one.

Living inside different countries and different economic realities over the years has slowly taken that certainty apart for me. Not replaced it with the opposite certainty. Something more uncomfortable than that. Uncertainty itself.

*

My reality for the past five years has been shaped by California — by running a small business inside it, by watching what economic pressure actually does to ordinary people up close. Though I suspect any state would have done the same thing to me, if I'd been living close enough to the pressure.

When you're running a small business, watching grocery prices climb, worrying about rent, trying to keep employees paid — navigating the relentless financial pressure that many ordinary Americans live under every single day — politics stops looking like a morality play. It starts looking like survival.

And survival changes the way you interpret other people’s choices. Or at least, it did for me.

I’ve come to understand, in a way I didn’t understand in London, that many people vote not because they are ideological extremists but because they are exhausted. Financially cornered. Scared. Hoping something — anything — might shift.

And I am not exempt from this. I wasn’t exempt from it in London either. At the time, my worldview felt entirely rational to me — obvious, even. The way privilege so often does to the person carrying it.

Living across different countries and classes hasn’t made me wise so much as it has made simple categories harder to hold. I’ve met too many people who do not fit the outlines I once would have drawn for them. Kind people who vote differently than I do. Struggling people dismissed as ignorant by those who have never had to choose between ideology and survival. People speaking confidently about entire populations without enough proximity for reality to complicate their certainty.

And you start noticing something else — something that took me longer to see.

*

The people who speak most confidently about other people’s realities are often, I think, doing something that has less to do with those realities than it appears.They are locating themselves. Defining themselves against something. Trying to find solid ground.

I've sat in enough of those conversations now to notice the pattern. The certainty arrives quickly, before the complexity does. Questions about what it’s actually like to live inside those pressures — to feel financially trapped, uncertain about the future, exhausted by pressures that never fully ease — don’t tend to follow. What follows instead is the conclusion, delivered with confidence, as though proximity were unnecessary. As though the headlines were sufficient. I recognise that move. I made it about Brexit for years.

Belonging is not just about place. It’s about tribe, identity, the comfort of knowing which side you’re on and feeling certain it’s the right one. And when your own ground feels unstable — when the world feels faster, harsher, harder to recognize — it helps to have somewhere to point and say: at least not that.

I understand that impulse because I’ve felt it myself.

What I’ve learned more recently is how fragile that kind of certainty becomes once you actually live inside the reality you were defining yourself against.

Because proximity complicates things. People stop fitting cleanly into the categories you built for them. Places stop behaving like symbols. Certainty becomes harder to maintain once real life keeps interrupting it.

And somewhere in that process, I think my understanding of belonging began to shift as well — not disappear, but become harder to separate from circumstance, history, and the unequal freedoms people move through the world with.

*

Maybe that's also why I'd felt so adrift on this trip.

I don't fully recognize Canada anymore. But I don't fully belong to America either. London belongs to another lifetime. My old life — the condo, the travel, the financial ease, the woman who was so certain about Brexit — feels increasingly like someone I used to know.

For a long time I think I interpreted that as loss.

Now I'm less sure.

There's another possibility I haven't fully sat with yet: that perhaps the price of seeing more than one reality clearly is losing the comfort of belonging entirely to any single one. That you cannot move between worlds without having your certainties rearranged. That disorientation is not necessarily a sign that something has gone wrong, but that something may actually be becoming more honest.

I also know this is a question I get to ask from a position of relative safety. Not everyone experiences untethering as philosophical disorientation. For many people, displacement is survival, not reflection. I am white. I have pulled myself up, but I have also moved freely — across seventy countries, between multiple lives — and that freedom is a luxury most people in the world will never have. My version of this comes with a passport that opens doors and a skin colour that doesn't close them. I don't think that invalidates the experience, but I do think it's important to name the difference. The stakes of not belonging are not equal, and I am operating near the more comfortable end of that spectrum.

Maybe home is not a country. Maybe it never was.

Maybe it's the place where your inner life and outer life finally stop contradicting each other. Where you are no longer performing belonging, but actually, quietly, in it.

I don't know yet if I've found that place. Some days it feels close. Other days I'm back in my mum's beautiful house, reaching for furniture that isn't there.

But I'm less frightened of the reaching than I used to be.

And maybe that's where it starts.