is exactly where my country is going. bush’s newest supreme court nominee is a fucking nutter, we’re cranking up the volume on iran, and people just keep dying 24/7 in a war we should never have fought.
the us looks more and more like a country of freakish blind zealots, and I am more and more distraught every day by the realisation that much of this damage just cannot be undone. i fear so much for the future of women in the states and i fear for our safety as we go upsetting another applecart in the middle-east. i fear the repercussions of the things we do now, which we will reap for generations to come. i’m pretty sure i’m no longer making sense, but this spiraling fear becomes like a poison that i can’t seem to get out of my system.
i’ve spent so much emotion and energy on trying to express the profound depths of sorrow and fear that i sometimes feel at the state of my nation, and yet i still can’t touch it. there is no bottom, and that’s the scariest bit. a little part of me panics every day, and i know that probably seems highly overwrought, but i’m at the point where i actively avoid the news, because sometimes i don’t know whether to scream or cry, wanting to do both simultaneously, though neither makes an iota of difference anyway. how do you turn this off? i can’t seem to find the switch.
i am watching my country self-destruct, and i am powerless to stop it. and if i dwell on that for more than a few minutes a day… well, i wouldn’t like to speculate on my mental status. i am incapable of detached objectivity. and being here, in the middle of it all, feels like being being inside some giant tank or machine, which just carries everyone noisily, menacingly along with just a peephole through which to watch the outside world go past.
i’m an ordinary optimist, but a political pessimist and sometimes the tension between the two just gets to be a bit much.
and yet, here i am, “home” for all intents and purposes. and much as i hate it, and as angry as i am, there’s something inexplicably comforting about being here. slipping seamlessly back into being part of the American collective unconscious. it’s a place where i don’t have to think about how i do what i do, or say what i say. being an expat means always having this omnipresent awareness that you are an outsider. and if i live in the uk every day for the rest of my life, i will never be british. there will always be cultural references i don’t get. i will always sound different. i will always have to adapt. you *do* get used to it – after nearly 3 years, it’s honestly not something i even think about anymore. but the awareness is always there, at the back of your skull, like a hum, or background noise which you’ve tuned out. when i was with my ex-husband and we’d spend time with his whole extended family over the holidays, i’d always forget i was the only white person in an all black room, until after we left. that’s the kind of feeling i mean. you can get comfortable with always being the “different” one – but you’re still always different.
yet, it’s still such a strange mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar, a balance which seems to shift further towards the strange every time i visit. i am becoming a stranger here. i no longer have any illusions about coming back to live in the u.s. – i am disconcertingly stateless. i’ve threatened many times to renounce my citizenship, yet it seems to be happening almost through atrophy. a progressive deteriotation, excommunication through inattention. i can call it “my” country by default… but it really isn’t anymore.
the erosion of ties through time. if only that meant i stopped caring.
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