Like more than five million others, I’m an American abroad.

Except for a brief window of post-COVID sanity from 2022 to 2024, for the last ten years, I’ve lived in an emotional space that spans the chasm between gratitude and guilt. 

I know I’m not alone. 

I don’t presume to speak for anyone else. Like every other community, Americans who live outside the nifty-fifty are not a monolith. Some voted for Trump. Some cheer from afar. But I know I’m not the only one who experiences the daily disconnect: relief at not being there, coming into painful contact with shame for feeling that relief.

On occasion, I write something that elicits a negative reaction from my fellow Americans who are living closer to those ribbons of highway. 

I get it. I took an exit ramp. I’m outta Dodge. Who am I to criticize? 

Sometimes the reactions come from strangers, sometimes friends, and sometimes people I thought were friends. 

I can feel their frustration, anger, and resentment through my computer screen. 

How dare I sit on my comfy perch abroad and pass judgment? It must seem that, like Yertle the Turtle, I am sitting atop a wobbly heap of others who are desperate to leave—and plenty who aren’t—dictating my opinions and demands that more be done in Sala-ma-sond. 

I get it. 

This piece is not to placate you; your feelings are valid.

It’s also not written to elicit sympathy or understanding from anyone, nor is it to ask anyone to appease my guilt. I went to therapy for too many years to expect others to do that work for me. 

I wrote this for two reasons. One—to wrangle what I’m feeling and experiencing onto the page. And two, for others who, through choice or circumstance, find themselves on the outside looking in and navigating the complex feelings that arise.

There are a lot of us. Despite sometimes feeling like our identities are less defined because of geographical location, most of us love the place where we come from. 

We love it so much, in fact, that we criticize it relentlessly and question what is happening from afar and wring our hands and lament like a Greek chorus even if we’re living in Berlin and not Athens. 

We still love our country. If we didn’t, it’d be easy to wash our hands of it all. 

After all, we’re here and not there. 

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I’ve lived outside the US for almost two decades now. The month after we moved to Cyprus, Obama was elected president. Eight years later, we got Trump. Perhaps I wasn’t paying enough attention; maybe not being on the ground in the US during those eight years changed both me and my country in ways that made his election shocking. It’s easy to say you think you know what’s happening, but when you’re not there, living it, how can you? 

Though each year I spool further out from my life in the US, I still feel American. It’s written all over me in red, white, and blue Sharpie, obvious as soon as I open my very loud mouth. 

I’ve always considered myself an unofficial ambassador, answering questions and fending off unfair criticism.

The questions used to be cheerful and curious. It feels different this time. Where there used to be excitement, folks sharing their stories of travels or dreams of traveling to the US, now there is something else.

When the Albanian delivery guy asks me where I’m from, I don’t lie. Same with the Egyptian deli guy who laughs at my butchered German. I am proud of my New York City roots.

We’d love to go to New York, they say. 

It’s the greatest city in the world, I tell them. Maybe wait a few years to go. 

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Like so many other Americans abroad, I do what I can. I protest. I call and write to my representatives. I donate money. I write and share things online. I read so many articles about so many things to make sense of it all that my family mocks me. 

Let me guess, they say, you read an article…

None of it feels like enough because it isn’t enough—but short of getting on a plane and leaving my family behind to take up metaphorical arms, it’s what I can do right now. 

That’s the guilt—because who would expect me to do that?

I’m safe, right?

Relief. 

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Despite the murmurings of relinquished citizenship and researching far-flung relatives from distant shores, I haven’t met many who have completely shunned their Americanness. The ones who are in targeted communities—LGBTQ, parents with trans kids, BiPOC families, mixed-culture marriages—feel relief that the option to leave was there. Even they haven’t turned their back on the country that shaped them, despite great swaths of the country turning their back on them.

In group chats, we joke about pretending to be Canadian, but no one does that—we respect Canadians too much.

Those I’ve met are, like me, just searching for ways to navigate the situation we’re in. 

The easiest thing in the world would be to ignore it all and live my life. Those comments aren’t wrong. I’m not there. My immediate community isn’t being torn apart by jacked-up men in masks kidnapping my neighbors. My groceries are affordable. I live in a place that is governed by folks who believe in climate change. 

The day-to-dayness of what is happening in the US doesn’t affect me. Why should I care or do anything? I can just go on my merry way, buy my cheap eggs, and spend more time on the grateful relief side of the chasm. 

Why? Mostly because my heart won’t let me.

Perhaps part of my guilt stems from wondering if the criticism is right, as if by leaving Lady Liberty in the rearview mirror, I gave up the right to have an opinion. I can present my mitigating circumstances as to why I don’t believe that’s true. I can offer a written argument, as if defending a thesis. 

Which, perhaps, at the end, is exactly what this is, an exercise in self-indulgence.

That’s not what I want it to be, though.

What I want is to reassure you that if you’re an American abroad in times like these, trying to figure out how to feel or what to do, or trying to make sense of feeling all sorts of opposite things at the same time? 

You’re not alone. 

I’m here too.

And there.