When you’re born, you are given a dollhouse. Everybody gets one. Some are elaborate, filigreed, overrun with lace curtains and tiny oak banisters and real wallpaper. Some are ramshackle, cardboard and balsa wood with bare walls and missing doors. Some have furniture, some don’t. Some are sprawling, one-twentieth scale Victorian manors taking up a whole room in themselves, with miniature gardens and fountains and coach houses. Most are more modest; a handful of rooms, maybe an attic, cozy but comfortable.

You will, of course, be offered other dollhouses as you grow up. Some will be bigger, some smaller, with different architectural styles or materials or configurations of rooms. If you’re lucky enough to be born rich you’ll have many, many choices. If you’re poor or unlucky or both you’ll probably only have a few. Some people find the one they had at the start suits them fine, or just were never offered one that suited them better. But most people have at least a few choices. And over time, they choose different dollhouses to suit their needs.

Most people don’t just settle for what they pick, though. They find themselves renovating, tweaking things so that they’re perfect. Different paint, better furniture, maybe adding a tiny sunroom. People get settled, happy with what they have. Or maybe they’ll lose theirs unexpectedly, and have to scramble to find some other dollhouse. But people do, eventually. You find the bits and pieces you need or want or at least are prepared to live with. You stop looking. I’m done, you’ll think, this is basically what I want.

And I did all that. And a year ago, I smashed it all to pieces and I left.

I seem to blow up my life every five years or so. I did it after college, when I took a contract to work overseas in Germany for a year. I did it again after 9/11, when I quit the computer industry, left New York, and went back to school. And again four years after that, when I left my graduate program, and yet again five years after that, when I returned to New York and went back into the computer industry. The eight years I then spent in New York City is the longest I’ve been in one place since I left for college.

So I suppose I was overdue for the next thing. Unlike most of the previous times though, I haven’t really had an idea of where to jump. I’m getting a little old to go back to school, especially without a burning interest in something to learn. I haven’t found a relationship. I’ve lived through the part of my life where all my friends were getting married, and I’ve entered the part of my life where all my friends are having kids. I could have done that. But I didn’t.

All that I had was a strong and growing dread of how politics in the United States were going, and a fear that the rest of the world was headed in a similar direction. And there’s so much out there that I just don’t understand. I haven’t seen it, I haven’t experienced it, I have just the barest sense of how so much of the world fits together. As bits of the world slip closer and closer to outright insanity, it seemed more important than ever to get out there, to escape the gravitational pull of America, and see the world, face to face.

In the 1990s, only 10% of Americans owned a passport. It’s now closer to 40%, which is both so much better and still horrifyingly low. For a country that prides itself on the allure of the open road and the adventure of setting out into the unknown, Americans are remarkably incurious about any place outside of America. There’s a slew of reasons the number of issued passports is going up — Canada and Mexico now requiring passports to enter, international airfares being cheaper than ever, politics in the United States making people plan a quicker escape route — but in a lot of ways it feels like too little, too late.

I recently finished Notes on a Foreign Country by Suzy Hansen, an American journalist who’s lived in Istanbul for over a decade. I’d recommend it to anybody, but it feels like essential reading for Americans. It’s a broad indictment of American foreign policy but, even more than that, it’s a meditation on why American foreign policy is so bad, of the ignorance and myopia that allows Americans to imagine they’re running a benevolent empire, of the ways Americans forget their own history and blunder from disastrous intervention to disastrous intervention.

I’m finding it’s nearly impossible to talk about this book with people. With Europeans, the reaction is almost always well, duh. I think this is somewhat undeserved — Hansen’s careful to point out that all cultures have certain unquestioned and unquestionable myths. And many of these delusions have infected Western-style democracy, not just America; as just one example, half of the citizens of the UK think colonization was good for the colonized.

But with Americans, the problem goes a lot deeper. It’s not that Americans aren’t aware their country does appalling, stupid, misguided things like the 1953 Iranian coup d’état. It’s that they never quite manage to stitch everything together into a cohesive narrative. All the bad things are isolated incidents, a few bad actors, and not evidence that the rot goes all the way back to the source. You come up with rationalizations — Kennedy would surely have withdrawn all our forces from Vietnam, had he survived — that keep you from seeing the big picture.

James Baldwin once wrote of Americans that “Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy.” It’s a quote Hansen brings up — Baldwin lived in Istanbul for a time — and it’s stuck with me. What he means, at least in part, is that Americans don’t truly understand how horrible things can get; how badly your well-meaning intentions can get mangled by the world. We can’t imagine how pouring $20 billion dollars into training and arming violent extremist religious resistance groups in the ’80s in Afghanistan could come back to hurt us. Or how propping up repressive pro-Western military dictators might make anti-Western political movements more common, not less. We’re continually and repeatedly surprised to find other countries hate us.

Hansen argues it’s nearly impossible to escape this brainwashing unless you leave the country. The ideology, the melange of false assumptions and misunderstandings, is just too pervasive and firmly entrenched to wrap your brain around. It’s only outside that bubble that you can start to clear your head. Minorities are an obvious exception to this; they tend to have vivid first-hand experience of the difference between the ideals America espouses and those it promotes. Most everyone else has to leave.

The thing is, once you’ve left America, you can’t come back. Sure, you can leave without really leaving — pop up to the casino in Windsor, Canada on the weekends; or spend your vacation time in foreign ports at the beach bar closest to the cruise terminal; or last your entire tour of duty without ever going off-base. But once you do leave, the world changes. And the longer you go, the more it changes. Bedrock assumptions about the way things are, fundamental principles about the world and your relation to it, start to shift. You can’t come back, because you are no longer the person who left.

Currently, the US Department of State has a worldwide caution against travel. It says, in part, “As terrorist attacks, political violence (including demonstrations), criminal activities and other security incidents often take place without any warning, U.S. citizens are strongly encouraged to maintain a high level of vigilance and practice good situational awareness when traveling abroad.” Among the countries listed at “Level 2: Exercise Increased Caution” are France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Since 2010, there have been about 50 deaths due to terrorism in the United Kingdom. In comparison, the United States, at five times the population, had about 275. That doesn’t seem like a “Level 2” risk to me, although if you include mass shootings — if you’re worried about being randomly shot, and not just worried about being randomly shot by a terrorist — that leaps up to about 500 for the United States. The State Department could just as easily be issuing “Level 2” travel advisories for visiting Texas or Florida or California.

It’s hard not to feel like this is part of the plan, promoting the general idea that America is safe and the world is dangerous. It’s insidious. It plays into this “Everyone’s trying to kill us” idea that contributes to an overwrought military budget (We’ve got to be ready to kill them), regressive immigration policies (They’re coming here to kill us), and disengagement with foreign policy (They hate us for our freedom). It feeds chauvinistic and nationalistic rhetoric and reinforces a militarized society that gets immediately turned against minorities and the disenfranchised in our own society.

Shortly before I left in 2018, the US Government’s child separation policy for immigrants had just become public. It was (and is) a gross violation of basic humanity. The outcry forced them to back off, slightly, but it didn’t stick. We’re now at the point where the US Government has created full blown concentration camps for immigrants. We’re seeing the mass detention of civilians without trial. The conditions in the camps are reportedly worse than in the Japanese internment camps during WWII.

I don’t know how to live in a country that does that. I mean, I do know, but I’ve lost the appetite for it: you compartmentalize. You rationalize — Obama would never have allowed this to happen — and forget that most of these programs started in the previous administration, not the current one. Some of them were put into place by Bill Clinton. This isn’t an aberration. This is America.

Since I started traveling, I’ve had an odd feeling sometimes, like I’ve found a glitch in a video game and I’m running around outside the map. It’s hard to discuss all this. People hear I’m spending the week in Naples and don’t realize it only means I dropped $15 on a 4-hour bus ride from my last stop and I’m spending $35/night on a dingy AirBnB. Sometimes I stay in the apartment all day. Sometimes the only difference between where I am and New York is that here the pizza is cheaper and harder to order at the slice shop.

But I’m here because I can visit the Archeological Museum and catch the train to Pompeii on the weekend. Every week I travel I’m faced with at least one thing that stuns me into silence — Cy Twombly’s Fifty Days at Iliam, or the view off the coast of the Isle of Lewis, or the cool sepulchral majesty of the Taj Mahal — and I’ll remember why I’m doing this. These experiences cost barely anything at all, beyond the effort to get there.

I talk to a lot of friends back in the US about leaving, and they almost all express a wish that they could do that. They feel trapped in the United States, with the same sense of horror and dread that I have, and they’re usually struggling with low-paying jobs or shitty health insurance or discrimination hiding under a rah-rah diversity! mask. And I always think, well, you can. Or you could, anyway. I know it’s not easy. You need to research immigration policies for a whole host of places, possibly learn a new language, maybe even retrain into a new career. It can be hard to figure out how to do it. Even if you do, you might get stonewalled and have to start over. But then I turn around and see someone’s posted a GoFundMe to try and get enough money to be able to cover their medical costs for another month, and I can’t imagine the stress of going through that every month is equal to the stress of at least talking to someone who got a German freelancer’s visa about what the process was like.

I guess that’s why I’m having trouble talking to people about this. Most people seem to want to settle down, like life is a checklist you should sprint to the end of — spouse, career, house, kids — so you can start enjoying yourself. Blowing all that up, getting rid of your stuff and packing yourself off to someplace else, learning a new map or a new language or a new way of being in the world, that’s a huge amount to ask. It’s terrifying. I know, because I’m still terrified.

But I’m also learning something every single day. I’m seeing new things. I’m outside of my comfort zone three or four times a week and it’s always been fine. I’ve always said I wouldn’t want to return without significant changes back home, politically and otherwise. But even then, I’m not sure I would want to. I’m different, now. I don’t think I can go back.

I’m publishing this on my birthday, and taking stock of the past year. And … I’m fine? It feels a little unseemly to say, in the midst of all the horrible things happening in the world. But I’m really doing okay. Sometimes I’ll get a little tired, or feel strung out, and I’ll think again about finding a place to settle long-term. I’ve started learning German, just in case I find myself applying for a residency visa in Germany in two years or five years or ten years. But every time I think about settling down, I think about all the things I have yet to see, and the thought passes. I can’t get past being tied down. Not yet, anyway.

That’s not the same as being happy. But I don’t think that’s the right measure. It’s not like I’m unhappy. I’m just busy. In The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon says “The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality.” Maybe the world is on the verge of disaster. Maybe the world has always felt like that. Either way, I’m going to be in it, exploring it, seeing it, for as long as I can.

Here’s to another year.

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