They say Buddhism teaches that much of our pain comes from resistance. Accept, and we can be at peace, or something like that.
How, though, are we meant to accept life in a nation where more than half of the people choose a rapist over a woman for president. An unhinged felon, liar, bully, crybaby, fraudster, and wanna-be dictator who literally instigated a riot in a tyrannical attempt to clutch power for himself when he was voted out last time, over a confident, competent, easily qualified Black woman. Where the truth is, despite these peoples’ absurd claims it’s about the price of eggs or gas, it’s about letting the deepest, nastiest, most vile parts of themselves shine darkly. The parts that hate anyone who doesn’t look like them or love like them or worship like them. They get to fly those flags of hatred and misogyny and racism and homophobia and xenophobia so high, so proudly, and all in the form of the U.S. flag?
I can’t accept that. If I stay here, every day half the people I see, I’ll know they chose to put a revolting little man in the white house who said that the primary role of a woman after menopause is to take care of other people’s babies. I HAVE SHIT TO DO AND IT’S NOT RAISE GRANDBABIES.
If I stay here, the violent blood on my father’s side of the family that runs through me as much as it runs through the ancestors who would as soon shoot someone as to look at them, as much as it runs through the male relatives who believe in solving problems with a fist to the face, that white hot rage that pounds through their veins and mine, it will get me in serious, serious trouble.
My lizard brain blazes to life in an instant the moment I see a MAGA hat or flag, or the sneering smirk on the face of a white man who thinks they have us where they want us, weak, powerless, stripped of rights and agency; sneering at their triumph over us snowflake liberals who believe in justice and dignity for all humans, where they come from or how they love or live irrelevant in our eyes.
That lizard brain also possesses my imagination. A very vivid writer’s imagination that visualizes in crisp detail what it would feel like, look like, sound like, smell like, when I … well, I’m not criminally foolish enough to describe on a public platform what that brain so feverishly wants to do when I see those people and their fucking flags and sneers. But I’ve probably watched too much Game of Thrones and channeled Daenerys Targaryen on her final mission. And, while my logical, everyday brain understands this is horrible and wrong, and not the solution, that lizard brain fucking wallows in the thought of debasing myself to their level and bloodying their fucking sandbox.
But that’s not who I am. It couldn’t be further from who I am.
It’s only what my flight or flight instinct creates when it feels I am under attack, which I am, every day, every moment, by the inherent nature of being alive as a woman in the United States.
Since the earthquake I’ve had rarely a moment of freedom from that fight or flight. The drop of a pin in a quiet room, a car backfiring, a distant firework (or is it a gunshot, hello Louisville), anything unexpected and every alarm bell in my system clangs furiously, frantically; FIGHT, it screams silently, a nightmarish echo of a bullet-grazed monster rising from the ground to pump his fist and urge his legions to violence.
I can’t fight. And I can’t escape the onslaught. The man in our neighborhood, this place I thought of as such a sanctuary until a week ago, that sprays his fuhrer’s name in blood red letters on utility poles, and the moment we paint over them, returns to do it again and again like some post-apocalyptic zombie tv show character whose brains are dripping out of his rotted skull but can repeat this one motion over and over, he lives at the entrance to the place I call home. I can’t come home without seeing those letters scarring the post.
I tried the peaceful route, posting a sign over the paint. It was gone the next day. There’s nowhere safe.
If I can’t fight, the only thing left is flight.
If I stay, I’m not myself. Hate and rage will consume me in the way it has those people who elected a monster. I’ll hurt someone, or I’ll lose myself.
The tattoo I got in Paris a few months ago said it before I did. Allons y, it says. Let’s go.
I’ve always wanted to live in Paris. One more tick on the eternal list of joys they have stolen is that I’m sick with dread now at the thought of getting on that plane and leaving my life here behind.
I’m fleeing to Paris as a refuge, as the place that I am the most my true self. It’s not vacation. I’m going in January, before the inauguration because Jesus, I no longer have the ability in this world of funhouse mirrors that are actually horror house mirrors to discern the difference in clear and present legitimate danger, or theorized danger, but I’m a journalist and how do I know my passport won’t be frozen?
I’m going to Paris in January as a trial. I can stay for 90 days on a tourist visa. Live like a local, not in a cheesy Airbnb commercial kind of way, but in a take-half-our-household-grocery-budget and live and work in a 200 square foot studio to see if this is a life I can truly envision kind of way. Winter is Paris is grey and dreary and cold to the bone. I’ll most likely be in a far flung district an hour’s walk from the heart of the city. There will be no ubering budget or even e-bike rental budget. I’ll finally see what it’s like to shop at the cult favorite frozen food store, Picard.
While I’m there, I’ll work on applying for what’s called a Talent Passport visa. That’s a program that would allow me as a writer to live there for four years, and allow my husband to live and work there too. According to Claude, the French AI chatbot who’s helping me with the application process, I have good odds of obtaining the visa.
This is Paris
I dream, sometimes, that I’m speaking French. Words that dance below the surface when I’m awake in the world, so many tiny fizzing bubbles at the bottom of a champagne flute, spring free, colliding on their rise to the top where they burst, giddy with their freedom. It’s Paris where I’m talking in these dreams, of course.
Can I do it? Can I leave my family, my friends, my business, my best friend, my life of 20 years in this city behind to be 5,000 miles away and probably eternally struggling with the language? Can I even leave my dog and husband for the three month test?
I want to puke at the thought.
But staying and living through the daily fresh horrors to come? Untenable. I haven’t turned on a television or a device since I saw where this was going Tuesday night. I can’t live with my head buried in the sand for four years or longer if the despot is true to his word for once and we “never have to vote again.”
I want to breathe freely, not in fear, and not in gut-wrenching despair and agony. Living on the other side of the ocean doesn’t mean the horror show stops unfolding. But I can distance myself from it, remove myself from the danger of turning into someone I’m not. Focus on what makes me happy and fulfilled, not find myself helplessly enmeshed in a country that’s come unraveled and descending into entropy.
We white European people stole this land centuries ago. Stole it by slaughtering and displacing countless brown-skinned people, and then built this country on the countless more brown-skinned backs of enslaved people stolen from their own countries. How can anyone possibly be surprised that we are doomed? How can anyone possibly reconcile in their heads that brown skinned people from other countries shouldn’t be here? What the actual fuck is wrong with them?
If I stay I spin out into endless rage and impotent fury. I’m lightheaded typing this. My hands and body shook all day yesterday. I didn’t eat.
This is not a life.
Put me in a country that is, yes, absolutement far from perfect, with many, many of their own problems, but a country that rose up against tyrants and tore the power from them. A country where people poured into the streets in solidarity with American women when our ability to choose how we live our lives was torn from us by a man child. Where my heart has always felt it belonged.
This week should have been a celebration. A joyous time to be proud of how far we’ve come and to revel in the potential ahead of us. It’s a nightmare instead, and one that won’t end. And now it’s heartbreak layered on nightmare because I have to make the impossible choice. But I have to take care of myself or I’m not good to myself or anyone else. And what that looks like is trying on a life someplace new, somewhere I can think about what to do with this one life I’ve been given.
I have to go.