The day after I arrived in the UK, I set out to walk to Huddersfield train station.
It wasn’t far — just a few streets from where I was staying. But thirty minutes later, I was still walking in circles. My phone battery had died, and without Google Maps, every street looked the same. Eventually, a kind stranger noticed I was lost and gave me a lift home.
For years, I thought this was simply a story about getting lost.
It wasn’t.
The day before, I had been in Nigeria. I knew the roads, the rhythm of daily life, and I rarely questioned my place in it. Twenty-four hours later, none of those mental maps worked anymore.
I wasn’t just looking for a train station.
I was trying to understand a new world.
That afternoon stayed with me. Not because I got lost, but because it quietly raised a question, I didn’t yet have words for:
What happens when yesterday’s map no longer explains today’s world?
For years, I thought that afternoon belonged only to me.
Then I started hearing echoes of it in other people’s stories.
A researcher whose own experience inspired the questions she pursued.
Conversations with immigrants beginning life again in a new country.
Employees trying to understand what Generative AI means for their work.
Different lives.
Different circumstances.
But the same human question:
How do we make sense of a world that no longer looks like yesterday?
A few years after arriving in the UK, I created a survey and asked immigrants a simple question:
“What challenge(s) did you face when you got to the UK?”
Figure 1: Survey responses from immigrants on challenges faced after arriving in the UK.
Looking at those responses today, I smile.
Not because they were wrong.
Employment mattered.
Housing mattered.
Culture mattered.
Belonging mattered.
What surprises me now is not the answers.
It is the question I never asked.
I never asked:
How did you make sense of all this?
Behind finding a job was someone rebuilding confidence.
Behind finding accommodation was someone searching for security.
Behind learning a new culture was someone discovering who they were becoming.
I had collected practical answers.
Years later, I became fascinated by the invisible journeys beneath them.
Perhaps this is not only an immigration story.
Perhaps all of us experience moments when the world changes faster than our understanding of it.
Sometimes it is migration.
Sometimes it is a new technology.
Sometimes it is a new role.
Sometimes it is personal loss.
Sometimes it is an unexpected opportunity.
Maybe we spend much of our lives believing we are searching for directions.
Perhaps we are really searching for a new way to understand the world.
Maybe that is what a map has always been.
Not just something that tells us where to go, but something that helps us understand where we are.
And when yesterday’s map no longer works, we are forced to do more than find a new direction.
We have to rebuild meaning.
That is the question I keep returning to in my writing, my research and my own life:
How do people make sense of change when the world they knew begins to shift?
This Week’s Reflection
This week reminded me that change is not only something we experience; it is something we interpret. I am learning to pay attention to the meanings people create when life, work or technology shifts.
That is where my research, writing and becoming continue to meet.
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