In 2003, I went on my first international trip, visiting Paris in depths of a dreary winter while my then-partner attended to event gigs with a local company. Frankly, Paris made no great impression on me – I twisted my ankle on the steps of Notre Dame and spent a shameful portion of the visit in the hotel with a Parisian brand of ennui. And yet, I was still enchanted by travel abroad, complete with the disorientation, boredom, and anxiety. A foreign place was full of intriguing differences and sameness to my routine life.

Traveling globally is a change of context, offering new perspective on my mundane. I’m fortunate to have been able to visit many other countries since that gloomy winter as well as host people from abroad in cultural exchange. And as my career has progressed, I’ve gotten the chance to be colleagues and friends with people around the world who live these other perspectives as their own mundane. The achievements of technology and connectedness of our global society continue to evolve, creating both more access and more responsibility to one another.

For me personally, the vision of leaving the US has been forming for probably half my adult life – first as a way to retire a bit earlier and live a bit more quietly, then as a way to further enrich my perspective. And then in 2016, new motivations and urgency arose. Watching the country elect Donald Trump at first left me in panic and disbelief, and I feared the grandiose unpredictability more than the conservative basis he represented. By 2024’s second wave, I have found myself numb. This presidency isn’t a novelty – he really does represent the country’s direction on a philosophical level. All the greed, dishonesty, ignorance, selfishness, racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and transphobia that Americans have mostly covered up in recent decades can now flourish in the full light of day, validated by leaders who tell people that these are American virtues. If my fear in 2016 was of the unpredictable and shocking, my fear in 2024 turned to how predictable America’s direction becomes from here. Just as we reached a point where we could have been tackling really interesting opportunities in globalization and the meaning of humanity, we are changing course to become the meanest version of our society.

By most measures, I’m not in much personal danger from the rise of the new America. Aside from being a woman with a career and variably colored hair, I’m largely inoffensive to conservative values and am so thoroughly white-colonial in my ancestry that I ought to bleed apple pie filling. But I feel like I belong here today about as much as I think my pilgrim ancestors belonged on Native lands. Unlike my pilgrim predecessors, I feel compelled to answer the question, “by being here, can I be of positive value or at least be harmless?” I’m far from certain, but my doubts have grown immensely since the latest election.

Perhaps the biggest motivation to accelerate my expatriation plans has been how directly American culture has now oriented toward authoritarianism in my view. It may seem far fetched to suggest that Americans are increasingly ready to hand over total power to government, even as a supposedly “conservative” political mandate rallies, but these are not opposite ends of a spectrum from what I’ve observed. American politics is now fueled mainly by the tension between those we trust and those we don’t. Conspiracy theories thrive on lack of evidence, and reality gets blamed on “them,” whether it’s immigrants, liberals, or subterranean lizard people. I don’t believe it takes much at all to tip such a situation into the grounds for centralizing power against perceived threats and sources of suffering. In many a current dictatorship you encounter in the world, the people who lived through the regime’s rise to power will downplay the news of a few kidnapped journalists, just a little light state propaganda, just a handful of internment camps, just a bit of martial law. After all, at least now we can afford eggs.

I do grapple with the question of whether “stay and fight” is a viable investment for me, as opposed to flouncing my liberal values away to somewhere more welcoming. While I don’t have a solid answer, I do know that I don’t weather conflict particularly well. If the only level of rebellion I’m realistically going to be able to muster without losing too much sleep is incessant arguing with people on Reddit, I may as well treat leaving the US as a real possibility. And besides, maybe there is some small bit of good I can do in the act of settling elsewhere – which is the motivation for writing any of this down in the first place. There’s a disappointing shortage of evidence that my Reddit arguments do any amount of good.

Writing about moving, settling, and connecting in a new place, even if only conceptually, is intended to help me clarify my thinking as well as share anything I learn for others who may want to do similar. I’m no expert in any of this, but I’m fairly persistent and resourceful. And if I have any form of hope at this point, it’s for other places in the world where people are moving more toward compassion, uplifting one another, and preserving the future.