I’m Devastated By America, So I’m Getting Out.

This week, I finally reached my limit for bad news.

A few days ago, something showed up on my timeline (I can’t even remember exactly what, to be honest), and it was as if my already fragile psyche broke, sending me spiraling into an expansive five-alarm emotional crisis that was somehow equal parts panic attack, emotional numbness, and scalding rage.

I think the kids call it “crashing out.”

The days since have left me ping-ponging wildly between long bouts of mindless slot machine phone scrolling, lengthy stretches of sleeplessness, and valiant but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to extricate myself from a sticky black pit of fatalism that has rendered me laboring to accomplish otherwise simple tasks. (Sounds fun, right?)

It’s clear that America has presently become toxic to my system.

I’ve decided that the only way I’m going to save my sanity and my physical health is by getting out, and if any of this is helpful to you, it will do my heart good.

Moving forward…

I’m getting out of my head.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been working overtime inside your brain for years now, struggling to figure out the unfigureouttable things: trying to make sense of how millions of people have jettisoned basic empathy and hitched their sense of self to an abject madman; looking to somehow calculate how bad things might get; and creating an endless set of contingencies for doomsday scenarios that while once seemingly impossible, on many days feel quite likely. Lingering in such a treacherous brainscape means that the light of alternative thought patterns gets all but shut out. So, the cliche of getting out and touching grass isn’t just a toxic positivity platitude designed to distract us from the grim reality around us, but the necessary practice of letting our minds be pleasantly surprised by a dissenting opinion coming through exercise, nature, art, new vistas, and other human beings.

I’m getting out of my phone.

There’s a razor-thin line between being informed and being overwhelmed, and I admittedly hurdled across that line somewhere back in late 2016. The sheer scale and velocity of the bad news, the availability at which it arrives, carefully curated in my hands, and a cultural device addiction that I confess has not evaded me, all mean that I often find myself immersed in the distorted reality of social media, where disastrous news is amplified, grief-worthy tragedies are boosted, and worst-case scenarios are ever-present. Blissful ignorance isn’t the goal, as that’s how we got here in the first place, but the challenge for empathetic human beings is to limit exposure to the raging torrent of information always swirling around us so that we’re aware of what is happening while making sure we don’t drown in the flood.

I’m getting out of my house.

I’m a serial introvert… like, an Olympic-level recluse, and I can quite easily find myself in my home for long stretches of time, and as I mentioned, both in my head and in my phone. And there’s a myth of helplessness that isolation and stasis can perpetuate, gradually building an iron-clad case for the futility of writing or speaking or fighting or working or pressing on. And yet, I’ve always believed that at any given moment, we always have two things: proximity to pain and agency to alleviate it. And the second you and I step out of our doorways and into the communities in which we live, that truth becomes palpable. When we place ourselves into the path of other human beings, finding our usefulness becomes effortless, and repairing the planet becomes attainable.

I’m getting out of corrosive relationships.

For the last decade, many of us have tirelessly expended Herculean levels of energy trying to preserve relational connections with human beings in our lives with whom we’ve become increasingly morally incompatible. Ten years ago, unpleasant realities about people we live with, love, have called friends, and worked and worshiped alongside began to surface in the form of offhand remarks at holiday gatherings, shocking social media diatribes, and facepalm-inducing text threads. And yet, we’ve done our best to excuse, explain away, or endure the disconcerting evidence in the name of keeping peace or not ruining the holidays or avoiding conflict. But at this point, those who are still tethered to He Who Shall Not Be Named are likely lifers: either permanently indoctrinated into a hateful cult of grievance or willfully choosing it because it reflects their hearts. Either way, severing ties with these people may be the path of self-preservation.

I can imagine it’s easy to dismiss the title of this piece as a clever bit of clickbait, but I can assure you that physically leaving America is something I’ve certainly spent a great deal of time considering (or at least daydreaming about), for about as many reasons as I imagine you might have. And while a geographic departure is not imminent, the other movements I’ve shared here are an effort to stay and to stay sane simultaneously. I imagine you’d like to do the same.

If you’re maxed out, exhausted, and drifting into apathy or hopelessness, maybe you need to get out.