Why I’m Leaving the U.S.

A Personal, Political, and Practical Case for Leaving America

If you haven’t read my first post, Why I’m Leaving the U.S.: The Prequel, you can do so here.

I’m not leaving because I think somewhere else will be perfect. I’m not chasing a fantasy. I’m not expecting perfection. I just no longer believe this country is safe or sane.

I don’t know if my destination will feel like home. I make no assumptions.

I’m looking forward to discovering what is true, letting a new life unfold, and staying nimble and open enough to pivot, if I need or choose to, based on new information.

1. A Master Class in Impermanence

I contracted mono when I was 16 and have not been healthy since. I have a word-and-acronym salad of diagnoses, all of which are in the autoimmune, “we kinda know what this is but we don’t really know what to do about it” camp.

My body is loud and wants me to know it has feelings, pretty much all the time. Which is to say, I don’t have the luxury of taking my health for granted.

Living with chronic illness is a master class in impermanence. It is a reminder that we are ants blithely crawling along a piece of driftwood in the middle of the sea.

I have the physical ability to travel now, so I will. So I must.

2. Empty Nest

At the end of my last post I was describing driving across the country from California to New York to drop my daughter off at college and spend a year living in New York again, after 14 years away.

I moved into a new apartment directly on the Hudson River. I have an amazing view and huge windows.

But the river could not fill the hole in my heart. Empty Nest is real. It’s an earthquake I knew was coming but it keeps rocking me anyway.

For years as I was raising my daughter, I imagined the time when she goes off to college as my well-earned freedom to go full-nomad. I had been researching European cities for ages.

As close as I am with her, I was so excited to again be geographically free.

But boy did I underestimate this transition.

Empty nest is not just about having a suddenly quiet home and more time to yourself. It’s about the need to decenter your child from the nucleus of your life.

For me, it means unwinding what I’ve been doing for the past 20 years, which has been making my daughter the priority of every decision, big and small.

This has been more gut-wrenching than any breakup I’ve ever experienced. I am adrift and unsure of my purpose.

I’m writing about this here because it is the backdrop of my decision to leave the country at this time. Parenting a college-age kid is tricky stuff:

Am I, and to what degree, still responsible for maintaining a home for her? Do I now get to make choices based on what I want or should her needs still come first?

What We Leave Behind

In my mind, this was yesterday. Except it was 18 years ago and now she’s become, like, an adult or something? Very surreal.

I feel some shame about not being the kind of mom who stays in one place forever, so that my daughter always has the same home to return to.

I fear missing out on time with her or being unavailable if she needs me for any reason, like, g-d forbid, a medical emergency.

I’ve read other Substackers who’ve written about the guilt of leaving loved ones. I don’t know how to reconcile this. I don’t know that it can be reconciled.

I don’t know how long I’ll stay abroad. I can always come home. I travel light. I own very little that matters to me that can’t be packed in a suitcase.

But the one thing that matters more than anything in the world—my kid—went and turned into an adult, so I can’t scoop her up and bring her with me. Right now she cares about college, friends, her boyfriend. As it should be.

But am I abandoning her? Am I a bad mother? Will the future of the U.S. look like one of those flashbacks from A Handmaid’s Tale?

What if things get really bad, the borders close, and I can’t get to her? These are the questions that haunt me and I haven’t even left yet.

3. Dystopia: Made in the U.S.A.

I grew up with Holocaust ghosts. Nightmares. A feeling that danger could knock at the door at any moment.

My grandparents fled Eastern Europe during the war. My daughter’s grandfather survived a concentration camp. I married a Jewish New Yorker. This history lives in my bones.

When I was a child all the way through high school, I used to have nightmares that SS officers were at the door to take my family and me away to the camps.

The Holocaust was an ever-present pall that hung above my otherwise safe, suburban New Jersey childhood.

As an adult I have lived with a quiet directive in my mind: Watch for signs that it’s 1930’s Germany again. Be vigilant.

Know when it’s time to go.

Until now, I’ve had the privilege of writing this off as a generational-trauma remnant that was not relevant to my life.

But every day now, I read about people being disappeared off the streets, sent to foreign countries or held without trial, and I fear that moment is already here.

But they’re targeting people who aren’t U.S. citizens, I’ve heard people say. Not you.

Oh really? So I shouldn’t care, then?

It doesn’t matter that I’m not the “target.” If one person can be taken, we’re all at risk.

The line between safety and persecution is thinner than people think. Especially when outrage is reserved only for those who look like us.

This morning I spoke with a friend who said, “We’re definitely the frogs in the pot, but I’m hoping it doesn’t get to boiling.”

Isn’t is already boiling? Isn’t that exactly what the frog would say before he boiled to death?

I recently read a post by W.A. Finnegan called “Leaving Wasn’t the Plan” from his Substack Borderless Living that spoke to this quite beautifully and from a position of tremendous first-hand government experience.

I recommend reading it. If, like me, you feel worried about our trajectory, it’s quite validating. He wrote:

We’d know what to call it if it were happening anywhere else.

But because it’s here, we hesitate. We tell ourselves, “It can’t happen in America,” as if geography is immunity. As if the Constitution is self-enforcing. As if good people always win.

4. Empathy: The Personal is Political

This is Substack’s image generator version of Ronald Reagan. Close but not quite.

I grew up with a father who possessed little to no empathy. It is no wonder that, being raised in the 80’s, I also grew up learning from him that President Reagan was a hero.

Reagan’s face was coded in my emotional memory as the face of Good.

I can see now, in hindsight, why he liked Reagan so much and why he was a lifelong Republican. If one does not have the capacity for empathy at the personal level, how can they have it for the nation?

Who cares about the mentally ill? Who cares about the poor and middle class? Who cares about health care for all?

Creating a social safety net and maintaining policies and agencies that support the common good is what a country does when led by sane and empathic leaders.

My father’s lack of empathy communicated to me that I was not worthy of love and that my feelings didn’t matter.

I didn’t, of course, have the words for that as a child, but I had the felt sense of being unsafe with him, and grew up anxious, insecure, and hypervigilant as a result.

Now, even though I’m an adult, the lack of empathy demonstrated by our current leader and those he’s surrounded himself with signal a code red alert inside me.

Without empathy, a leader becomes extremely dangerous. His personal wounding becomes an entire country’s liability.

The damage to one individual can then damage millions.

5. Health Care

Chronic illness has made me no stranger to this system. Of all the issues in the country right now, our supposed health care system provokes my deepest rage.

How dare we call ourselves a first-world country when we treat the right to health care as a privilege only for the rich? And the liability of illness punishable by astronomical medical bills that often lead to bankruptcy?

How can we accept that the goal of health insurance companies is to charge exorbitant premiums and to then try as hard as they can to NOT PAY our medical bills?

I had a UTI a few months ago that turned into a kidney infection that I didn’t recognize until it almost became sepsis. I ended up in the ER. I was there for four hours.

It cost me $3,500, in addition to the $500 monthly premium I already pay for my insurance.

The corruption, greed, and mercilessness in our health care system makes me ashamed of this country.

I don’t want to live in a place that would treat its citizens this way, that values capitalism over human life, over the alleviation of suffering, over the basic human right to receive care when we are sick.

And I have very reason to believe that the subsidy I receive through Obamacare will soon disappear under the current administration, and my monthly premium will be even higher.

6. Gun Violence

Last year, when my daughter was a senior in high school, there were at least five instances in which an active shooter threat was called in or made via social media and text alerts were sent to parents that school was closing and kids needed to be picked up.

In one such case, the kids in her class were not alerted that it was a false alarm for a full hour. So she spent an hour under her desk, hoping it wasn’t real.

Are we going to let our children live like this?

This is the new normal in the U.S.. Active shooter drills in school. Threats to kids’ lives made via Instagram.

As a parent, the only way to continue to function without losing your mind is to send them off to school anyway, sweep it aside, and hope that luck is on your side. But even if it is, it’s not on the side of someone else’s kid.

The worst part isn’t just the fear—it’s the quiet acceptance we’ve all learned to live with.

I don’t know how to reconcile the upside-down value system of this country. The gun lobby over mental health and public safety. The epidemic of loneliness and teenage suicides. Cyber-bullying. Screens over human connection.

It’s not that I think another country will be perfect. But I do think it’s fair to say that countries have different value sets, and some prioritize relationship, connection, family, friendship, quality of life, and safety for their citizens over the unrestrained capitalist agenda that has hijacked this country.

I want to go live in one of those.

7. Retirement

You’re supposed to have money for that, right? Yeah I don’t have any of that. I’ll be working as a couples therapist until I die.

I’ll keel over onto my laptop keyboard one day in the middle of a Zoom therapy session. The couple will wonder if this is a new intervention I’m trying.

When I don’t lift my head up, they’ll then perhaps wonder if there’s a refund policy for therapists who die mid-session.

At age 49 and not big on playing the lottery or marrying for money, I have only one strategy for retirement: I need to move somewhere with a lower cost of living, a better quality of life, and affordable health care.

I joke, but the truth is I’m terrified of getting old in a country that doesn’t care whether I survive.

The Future is Unknown

I don’t know if leaving will fix anything. I only know that staying has become an act of dissonance I can’t sustain. My home was always a person. She grew up. So now I’m learning how to make a life from scratch. One truth, one place, one step at a time.

Click here for my next post about how an ominous letter to my daughter’s college confirmed my plans to leave the U.S.