I’ll never forget the first time a complete stranger picked up my stroller, baby and all, and carried it up an entire flight of subway stairs without breaking stride.
I was jet-lagged, overwhelmed, clutching a paper map the size of a tablecloth, and trying not to cry in the middle of Manhattan. My eleven-month-old was screaming. My arms were full of bags. And suddenly there was a man in a Carhartt jacket lifting the whole thing like it weighed nothing, nodding once, and disappearing into the crowd before I could even say thank you.
That single moment began to unravel everything I thought I knew about this country.
The Myth I Brought With Me
Growing up in Sydney, America was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. We devoured the movies, wore the brands, listened to the music, but the people themselves? They were cartoon characters: loud, brash, convinced the world revolved around them.
At art school the critique was constant and casual. “Americans think they invented freedom.” “They’re so self-important.” “They have no irony.” It wasn’t mean-spirited, exactly. It was just the water we swam in. Nobody questioned it.
When I told friends I was moving to New York in 2010, more than one gave me that half-joking warning: “Just don’t come back… American.” As if patriotism were a contagious disease.
I laughed it off. I was only going for a couple of years. How much could change?
The First Crack in the Story
It started with directions.
I’d be twisting that giant map in circles at some intersection and, every single time, someone would stop. Not creepily. Not expecting anything. Just: “You headed to Brooklyn? Keep going straight, hang a left at the Duane Reade, you’re good.” And then they were gone.
In Sydney, people are friendly, sure, but there’s an unspoken rule: if you look lost, you’ll figure it out. Independence is practically a national sport. Here, the default seemed to be: if someone needs help, you give it. No fuss, no lecture, no lingering for applause.
Then came the stroller years, and the difference became impossible to ignore.
The Subway Test Nobody Talks About
There’s a particular circle of hell reserved for parents trying to navigate the New York subway with a stroller before most stations had elevators. I lived it daily.
And yet, not once, not a single time, did I have to carry that thing up or down stairs alone. Someone always appeared. Sometimes two or three people coordinating like they’d rehearsed it. A businessman in a $3,000 suit grabbing one end, a teenager with headphones grabbing the other. Zero hesitation.
I started testing it, almost scientifically. I’d pause dramatically at the top of the stairs, pretending to brace myself. Within seconds, help arrived. Every time.
It wasn’t charity with a capital C. It was reflex. Like saying “bless you” when someone sneezes.
I began to realize this wasn’t politeness. It was muscle memory of a culture that still believes we’re in this together.
The Poster That Made Me Cry in a School Hallway
A few years later I was walking through my kids’ public school when I saw it: a long poster listing every U.S. president with the biggest mistake or failure of their administration printed in bold underneath their name.
Lincoln: Allowed the country to fracture into civil war.
FDR: Internment camps.
Kennedy: Bay of Pigs.
No sugarcoating. No hero worship. Just the truth: everyone fails, everyone gets back up, keep going.
I stood there longer than I care to admit, tears in my eyes in an empty hallway. In Australia we have “tall poppy syndrome”, cut anyone down who dares stand out. Here was a country hanging its dirty laundry in a school corridor to teach kids that falling is mandatory, quitting is optional.
I snapped a photo and sent it to friends back home. Most didn’t get it. One wrote back: “That’s so American, glorifying failure.” I didn’t even know how to explain that it wasn’t glorification. It was oxygen.
Thanksgiving Crept Up on Me
I didn’t grow up with it, so the first few years it felt like background noise, another excuse for supermarkets to sell turkey-shaped cookies.
Then we got invited to a real one. Not a magazine version with perfect centerpieces, just a chaotic apartment filled with friends, neighbors, a couple of international students who had nowhere else to go, and a turkey that was definitely overcooked.
Before we ate, the host asked if anyone wanted to say what they were thankful for. I braced myself for awkward silence or performative piety.
Instead, people just… spoke. Quietly. Honestly. A guy thankful his mom beat cancer. A woman grateful her brother made it home from deployment. Someone thankful for the view from their window. Me, I mumbled something about my kids being healthy and immediately felt like an idiot because it was true and enormous and impossible to say elegantly.
Nobody was showing off. Nobody was competing. It was the opposite of the cynicism I’d been marinated in my whole life.
I left that night feeling strangely light, like I’d been carrying a weight I didn’t know was there.
Gratitude as National Infrastructure
Most countries bond over shared history or blood or triumph or victimhood. America, this sprawling mess of a nation, chose gratitude as its glue.
Think about that. Once a year, everyone, from recent arrivals who barely speak English to Mayflower descendants, stops and says thank you. Not to a king. Not to an ideology. Just… thank you. For being here. For the chance.
It sounds corny until you realize how powerful it is. Gratitude kills resentment. It softens tribalism. It reminds you that tomorrow can be better if you work for it.
I’ve now spent Thanksgivings in eight different states. I’ve eaten turkey cooked by a Texan grill master and by a vegan in Vermont who used a tofu bird. I’ve seen tables with Sikhs, Somalis, Salvadorans, and old-school Italians all passing the mashed potatoes. The accents change. The gratitude doesn’t.
The Quiet Strength Nobody Exports
Americans, bless them, are terrible at explaining this part of themselves to the world. They export the loud stuff, the politics, the brands, the wars, but they keep the everyday decency at home like it’s too ordinary to mention.
Which is why so much of the planet thinks they’re arrogant when, in person, they’re the ones who’ll give you the shirt off their back and then apologize for the ketchup stain.
I’ve driven across huge chunks of this country now. I’ve been helped by farmers in Iowa, bartenders in New Orleans, park rangers in Utah. The political yard signs change every ten miles, but the instinct to help a stranger doesn’t.
Maybe that’s the real American exceptionalism, not the military or the GDP or the movies. Just the quiet, stubborn belief that your neighbor’s struggle is your business too.
Fifteen Years Later
I didn’t come here planning to stay. I definitely didn’t come for a holiday about pilgrims and pie.
But every fourth Thursday in November, I set the table a little earlier now. I overbuy cranberries. I text friends who are far from family and tell them the door’s open. And when we go around saying what we’re thankful for, my answer is always some version of the same thing:
I’m thankful I got it wrong.
I’m thankful for the world told me one story and then I lived another.
And I’m thankful, deeply, ridiculously thankful, that my children are growing up in a place that teaches them, in a million small ways every day, that kindness is normal, failure is survivable, and gratitude is the strongest force we have.
That’s the American spirit I never saw coming.
And it feels a lot like home.
