New York is the worst place in the world, my taxi driver said. Not that night, not to me | Megan Nolan

I looked at Manhattan, trying to work out how a person like me could exist in it. The snow settled on my lashes and I knew I was home

• In our end of year series, writers and public figures remember the place or time when they felt most at home

The winter night I moved to New York, I sat in the back of a cab, two bulging suitcases stuffed into the boot by the driver who rolled his eyes at my excess. When I told him that I was moving here, though, he lit up.

Today?" he asked, You're moving here today?" I nodded, jittery and wild eyed. I was sick with nerves and the lunatic sensation of a thing I had dreamed of in vague cinematic terms for my whole life actually taking place. Now he was pleased, the taxi driver. Now he had something he needed to say.

Megan Nolan is an Irish writer based in London