Although we deliberately chose to live in distant places, on the occasions when we visited our families and friends back home, we always felt an undertow of disapproval from several. My own father frankly said I was wasting my life doing what I did. I finally reminded him that it was my life to waste, if what he said was true, and I would continue until I was satisfied that it was as completely wasted as I could make it by his standard. He was bitter that my life was no longer his to control. It’s a hard thing to hear words like those from loved ones, because deliberately hurting anyone was never one of my reasons for living abroad, but as Tara Westover wrote, ““You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them. You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”
We must follow our own muse, our guiding star, the beat of our own drum no matter how measured or far away. It’s who we are.
This is so interesting! While I never would post the kind of angry retort you describe here, I am guilty of suffering many of the misconceptions you clear up here. Thank you for educating me! It's so sad that the US zeitgeist encourages reactive judgement and admonishment instead of self-examination into our own fear-based impulses. For myself, your choice to move abroad invokes in me fears of the unknown, my own sense of feeling trapped/doomed in a society that doesn't give a shit about people like me and seems to be circling the drain anyway, and yes, I'll admit it - some envy, too, at your successful escape. For both your sake and the sakes of all those who lash out or judge you, I sincerely wish that we, culturally, were better at supporting and encouraging people to examine their own unpleasant emotional responses, and hopefully learn something from them, rather than knee-jerking. I know that I, for one, am humbly learning from both you and myself in this moment, and I thank you for that! 💚
Thank you for the response! I'm really glad that what I wrote has been informative.
The difference between people who feel more comfortable staying in a bad situation because the unknown causes more discomfort and people who would rather take a risk and jump into the unknown to leave a bad situation is such an interesting thing to contemplate. I was married to the kind of person who would stay in a job he hated for years, for example, rather than try to find a new one. One of our kids turned out like me and one turned out like him. And I am so much like my father in that regard it's uncanny! My fiancée is like me. A hell no, I'm out kind. (Side note, ever person I mentioned is autistic, too, so there are two kinds of autistics I guess hahahah. J/k.)
I have a sense that is is, in part at least, yet another facet of neurodiversity (unrelated to autistic/allistic). I believe most of us - IF (and for many of us, that's a big "if") we have access to the resources and emotional support we need to do this learning - are theoretically able to practice finding a balance, wherein we can evaluate situations and choose the response that seems the most fitting, given the circumstance. But... living in a culture that strongly discourages self-inquiry and growth, and encourages consumerism and denial as the best methods for coping with unpleasant thoughts and feelings, most of us tend to default to our hard-wired fight/flight strategies to deal with both immediate and chronic threats to our well-being. You and your partner, maybe, tend towards a fight/flight strategy. For myself, I tend towards a freeze/fawn response. It's of course not that simple, but I have a feeling that our hard-wired threat response probably has a significant influence on how we are most likely to approach big-life decisions, especially when they are about how to manage a situation that is causing us harm.
This sounds very reasonable. It would be so interesting to understand it more, because I think the difference in responses could determine a life or death outcome. If a freeze/fawn response is what one defaults to when under grave threat, it calls their ability to adapt and survive into question. And so how to mobilize people to adapt is what I want to understand. So far I feel my attempts to do so often backfire, causing people who could otherwise adapt (as in the case of queer people who do have the capacity to move out of the U.S., for example, but remain in denial about the danger they are in) to dig in even harder and resist. But also, should I? I feel some sense of moral responsibility to raise the alarm, so to speak, but ultimately, I cannot force the unwilling, even if it means they would survive. Kind of like when the government warns of the urgent need to leave an area in imminent danger of disaster with a high risk of fatality and there is just some subset of the population with the financial and physical ability to leave the area, but still refuses to do so because they are in denial about the risk they take in staying, and by doing so, they endanger others who will later have to go in to rescue them.
Hm, interesting. I do agree that humans, as a group have a tendency to use denial as a first-line defense against society-size, or gradually building threats, and that it's important to take that into consideration when examining our motivations and assumptions. That being said, I don't agree that freeze or fawn are necessarily less effective defenses than fight/flight. I think what is the best option is highly contextual, including an individual's specific concerns, priorities, aptitudes, resources, etc. For myself, my first comment here was meant as an exploration of my knee-jerk emotional response to imagining myself taking the same action you did. What is important to me in this context is not so much what the eventual decision/action becomes, but what I can learn about myself, and possibly use as part of an eventual decision about what to do with the threats at hand. It is important to me to ensure that I don't do a knee-jerk criticism or judgement of someone else's decision that is different than what I might choose to do. I don't believe that my knee-jerk default to "freeze" is, in itself, an indication that it is contrary to the best option for me in the long run. It is important that I know what my tendencies are so that I can adjust for them when I consider further the pros and cons of the decisions I make (especially the really complicated ones). For myself, there are factors in my life and community that make it more likely that I will, in the long run, opt for staying here even if I determine that it would objectively be safer to leave. It's complicated. My wife and I talk about leaving sometimes, and there are also some significant reasons why we wouldn't necessarily really do that. But that might change, too...
I'm glad you weigh the pros and cons and determine what makes the most sense for you. So many people seem to just dismiss weighing options at all, because they dismiss that there could be any viable alternative to consider. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
I appreciate your story, and all the considerations that went into your decision. It looks entirely rational to me. A good friend of mine, a dear writing buddy, moved to Portugal recently. She and her husband, who is from another EU country, chose it because - no guns. That is so appealing. Are you learning the language or is it possible to get on without it?
Interestingly, they do have guns in Portugal, but they are for hunting and whatnot and not legally allowed for self defense. All the same, we feel incredibly safe here and I haven’t seen a gun even once since moving except for when I went back to Georgia in May. It was jarring to see them again.
Some of our Portuguese friends here have said they cannot imagine owning a gun and they've never heard what they sound like when fired except for in the movies, which was startling to think about since I feel like so many people in the U.S. know exactly what they sound like from first-hand experience.
I am learning the language a bit, and need to get more serious about it now that I'm feeling a bit more settled and at ease and so have more mental bandwidth for it, but for the most part it's been fairly easy to get by with my limited vocabulary. Most people under the age of 45 or so speak at least some English, especially in the bigger cities. But I always try my best in Portuguese as much as I can. They really appreciate the effort and are very kind and encouraging.
I love that. France and Italy are the only countries I traveled in knowing some language and people were always super encouraging and kind. (Not in Montreal, though, for some reason - heheh)
Most of the French people I tried to speak French to were at least neutral towards me (none were encouraging), but one French man running a crêperie snapped at me to just speak English and I almost cried. I was like, ow, was my attempt that bad?
Was your attempt that bad? No, the problem was that he was so French in an ugly, stereotypical way. Ugly Americans? Ugly French, too. It’s simply the local varieties of the ugly human virus.
This is so true. When we left for Sweden in 2019, some people were supportive and excited for us, but those who weren't were angry and incredulous, as if such a thing should not be possible. And underneath that, some sort of primal fear about the clan seemed to be triggered. It was terrible, but also fascinating.
It's so fascinating to me to hear how many others experienced this mix of reactions! There is definitely some cognitive dissonance that gets triggered in some people.
Excellent, informative, and also heartbreaking post. Thank you so much for sharing.
The hostility you mention came as a surprise to me too, when I chose to leave my last 'proper' job all those years ago, leaving the city I'd called home for nearly a decade, with little plan beyond fixing myself and seeing more of the world. I still haven't even spoken to some of the people I thought were good friends after their reaction. It was not a comfortable time, and I know a lot of people who make brave decisions to do something different find the same, but it was something I wouldn't change, even if I HAD known it was coming. These things, hurtful as they can be, also remind me of precisely why I chose to be globally feral, to step outside the norm, and actually live an adventure closer to the ethos and ethics I desire.
I didn’t get any real negativity the previous times I went abroad, but those were 20-30 years back. And the framing was different. When telling people “I’m off to go teach English in Korea” (which turned into several) that implied that a) I was just off for an innocuous cross-cultural adventure, and b) that I planned on coming back (because why wouldn’t I?)
Now, of course, I’m telling people that I’m going off to Mexico for a nice long vacation, and it sounds awesome. I haven’t been mentioning that I’m quite likely to stay if I decide I like it, nor that I have disaster planning as a deep-down reason for considering it. But everyone I talk to (especially here in California) seems to know at least one person who’s retired south across the border, and everyone in the Bay Area can damned sure sympathize with wanting a reduced cost of living.
Maybe I’ve been lucky with who I’ve met. Or maybe this is just one more thing that nobody questions if it’s done by a cishet male. Either way, I have no problem with flying under the radar if I can manage it.
Now that's an interesting thought... were we only challenged on our decision because we're just silly fluff-headed women who couldn't possibly know our own minds and make the rights decisions for ourselves? I must do research! Lol.
Although we deliberately chose to live in distant places, on the occasions when we visited our families and friends back home, we always felt an undertow of disapproval from several. My own father frankly said I was wasting my life doing what I did. I finally reminded him that it was my life to waste, if what he said was true, and I would continue until I was satisfied that it was as completely wasted as I could make it by his standard. He was bitter that my life was no longer his to control. It’s a hard thing to hear words like those from loved ones, because deliberately hurting anyone was never one of my reasons for living abroad, but as Tara Westover wrote, ““You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them. You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”
We must follow our own muse, our guiding star, the beat of our own drum no matter how measured or far away. It’s who we are.
So very true. Thank you for sharing.
This is so interesting! While I never would post the kind of angry retort you describe here, I am guilty of suffering many of the misconceptions you clear up here. Thank you for educating me! It's so sad that the US zeitgeist encourages reactive judgement and admonishment instead of self-examination into our own fear-based impulses. For myself, your choice to move abroad invokes in me fears of the unknown, my own sense of feeling trapped/doomed in a society that doesn't give a shit about people like me and seems to be circling the drain anyway, and yes, I'll admit it - some envy, too, at your successful escape. For both your sake and the sakes of all those who lash out or judge you, I sincerely wish that we, culturally, were better at supporting and encouraging people to examine their own unpleasant emotional responses, and hopefully learn something from them, rather than knee-jerking. I know that I, for one, am humbly learning from both you and myself in this moment, and I thank you for that! 💚
Thank you for the response! I'm really glad that what I wrote has been informative.
The difference between people who feel more comfortable staying in a bad situation because the unknown causes more discomfort and people who would rather take a risk and jump into the unknown to leave a bad situation is such an interesting thing to contemplate. I was married to the kind of person who would stay in a job he hated for years, for example, rather than try to find a new one. One of our kids turned out like me and one turned out like him. And I am so much like my father in that regard it's uncanny! My fiancée is like me. A hell no, I'm out kind. (Side note, ever person I mentioned is autistic, too, so there are two kinds of autistics I guess hahahah. J/k.)
I have a sense that is is, in part at least, yet another facet of neurodiversity (unrelated to autistic/allistic). I believe most of us - IF (and for many of us, that's a big "if") we have access to the resources and emotional support we need to do this learning - are theoretically able to practice finding a balance, wherein we can evaluate situations and choose the response that seems the most fitting, given the circumstance. But... living in a culture that strongly discourages self-inquiry and growth, and encourages consumerism and denial as the best methods for coping with unpleasant thoughts and feelings, most of us tend to default to our hard-wired fight/flight strategies to deal with both immediate and chronic threats to our well-being. You and your partner, maybe, tend towards a fight/flight strategy. For myself, I tend towards a freeze/fawn response. It's of course not that simple, but I have a feeling that our hard-wired threat response probably has a significant influence on how we are most likely to approach big-life decisions, especially when they are about how to manage a situation that is causing us harm.
This sounds very reasonable. It would be so interesting to understand it more, because I think the difference in responses could determine a life or death outcome. If a freeze/fawn response is what one defaults to when under grave threat, it calls their ability to adapt and survive into question. And so how to mobilize people to adapt is what I want to understand. So far I feel my attempts to do so often backfire, causing people who could otherwise adapt (as in the case of queer people who do have the capacity to move out of the U.S., for example, but remain in denial about the danger they are in) to dig in even harder and resist. But also, should I? I feel some sense of moral responsibility to raise the alarm, so to speak, but ultimately, I cannot force the unwilling, even if it means they would survive. Kind of like when the government warns of the urgent need to leave an area in imminent danger of disaster with a high risk of fatality and there is just some subset of the population with the financial and physical ability to leave the area, but still refuses to do so because they are in denial about the risk they take in staying, and by doing so, they endanger others who will later have to go in to rescue them.
Hm, interesting. I do agree that humans, as a group have a tendency to use denial as a first-line defense against society-size, or gradually building threats, and that it's important to take that into consideration when examining our motivations and assumptions. That being said, I don't agree that freeze or fawn are necessarily less effective defenses than fight/flight. I think what is the best option is highly contextual, including an individual's specific concerns, priorities, aptitudes, resources, etc. For myself, my first comment here was meant as an exploration of my knee-jerk emotional response to imagining myself taking the same action you did. What is important to me in this context is not so much what the eventual decision/action becomes, but what I can learn about myself, and possibly use as part of an eventual decision about what to do with the threats at hand. It is important to me to ensure that I don't do a knee-jerk criticism or judgement of someone else's decision that is different than what I might choose to do. I don't believe that my knee-jerk default to "freeze" is, in itself, an indication that it is contrary to the best option for me in the long run. It is important that I know what my tendencies are so that I can adjust for them when I consider further the pros and cons of the decisions I make (especially the really complicated ones). For myself, there are factors in my life and community that make it more likely that I will, in the long run, opt for staying here even if I determine that it would objectively be safer to leave. It's complicated. My wife and I talk about leaving sometimes, and there are also some significant reasons why we wouldn't necessarily really do that. But that might change, too...
I'm glad you weigh the pros and cons and determine what makes the most sense for you. So many people seem to just dismiss weighing options at all, because they dismiss that there could be any viable alternative to consider. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
I appreciate your story, and all the considerations that went into your decision. It looks entirely rational to me. A good friend of mine, a dear writing buddy, moved to Portugal recently. She and her husband, who is from another EU country, chose it because - no guns. That is so appealing. Are you learning the language or is it possible to get on without it?
Interestingly, they do have guns in Portugal, but they are for hunting and whatnot and not legally allowed for self defense. All the same, we feel incredibly safe here and I haven’t seen a gun even once since moving except for when I went back to Georgia in May. It was jarring to see them again.
Some of our Portuguese friends here have said they cannot imagine owning a gun and they've never heard what they sound like when fired except for in the movies, which was startling to think about since I feel like so many people in the U.S. know exactly what they sound like from first-hand experience.
I am learning the language a bit, and need to get more serious about it now that I'm feeling a bit more settled and at ease and so have more mental bandwidth for it, but for the most part it's been fairly easy to get by with my limited vocabulary. Most people under the age of 45 or so speak at least some English, especially in the bigger cities. But I always try my best in Portuguese as much as I can. They really appreciate the effort and are very kind and encouraging.
I love that. France and Italy are the only countries I traveled in knowing some language and people were always super encouraging and kind. (Not in Montreal, though, for some reason - heheh)
Most of the French people I tried to speak French to were at least neutral towards me (none were encouraging), but one French man running a crêperie snapped at me to just speak English and I almost cried. I was like, ow, was my attempt that bad?
Bummer. So unnecessary.
Was your attempt that bad? No, the problem was that he was so French in an ugly, stereotypical way. Ugly Americans? Ugly French, too. It’s simply the local varieties of the ugly human virus.
This is so true. When we left for Sweden in 2019, some people were supportive and excited for us, but those who weren't were angry and incredulous, as if such a thing should not be possible. And underneath that, some sort of primal fear about the clan seemed to be triggered. It was terrible, but also fascinating.
It's so fascinating to me to hear how many others experienced this mix of reactions! There is definitely some cognitive dissonance that gets triggered in some people.
So well said!!!
Not possessing the eloquence nor middle class sensibilities you display, I will summon the temerity to offer the cliff notes version ..........
“Phuk the haters” 😉
Hahahah, that works!
I have no civil society mannerisms. I beg your pardon.
Your article concise, eloquent, and quite pointed. I sincerely appreciate it. I probably needed that.😉
Again, so well done !
Thank you, much appreciated! Civil society mannerisms are overrated anyhow.
Ask forgiveness, never permission.....😉🙈✌️
Excellent, informative, and also heartbreaking post. Thank you so much for sharing.
The hostility you mention came as a surprise to me too, when I chose to leave my last 'proper' job all those years ago, leaving the city I'd called home for nearly a decade, with little plan beyond fixing myself and seeing more of the world. I still haven't even spoken to some of the people I thought were good friends after their reaction. It was not a comfortable time, and I know a lot of people who make brave decisions to do something different find the same, but it was something I wouldn't change, even if I HAD known it was coming. These things, hurtful as they can be, also remind me of precisely why I chose to be globally feral, to step outside the norm, and actually live an adventure closer to the ethos and ethics I desire.
Thanks again for sharing, really appreciate this.
I didn’t get any real negativity the previous times I went abroad, but those were 20-30 years back. And the framing was different. When telling people “I’m off to go teach English in Korea” (which turned into several) that implied that a) I was just off for an innocuous cross-cultural adventure, and b) that I planned on coming back (because why wouldn’t I?)
Now, of course, I’m telling people that I’m going off to Mexico for a nice long vacation, and it sounds awesome. I haven’t been mentioning that I’m quite likely to stay if I decide I like it, nor that I have disaster planning as a deep-down reason for considering it. But everyone I talk to (especially here in California) seems to know at least one person who’s retired south across the border, and everyone in the Bay Area can damned sure sympathize with wanting a reduced cost of living.
Maybe I’ve been lucky with who I’ve met. Or maybe this is just one more thing that nobody questions if it’s done by a cishet male. Either way, I have no problem with flying under the radar if I can manage it.
Now that's an interesting thought... were we only challenged on our decision because we're just silly fluff-headed women who couldn't possibly know our own minds and make the rights decisions for ourselves? I must do research! Lol.
I really appreciate this super informative post. Thank you and excellent work 🤍