How not to leave America: a letter to we the very online people of the divided states

There are many insignificant irritations about life admin when you move away from America. Most you wouldn’t think of until you’re, say, figuring out how to get two-factor authentication codes via text to log into your U.S. bank app, which you desperately need to access. Or when you’re invariably forced to create a secondary iCloud account with the location set to your new country — and then forever logging in and out of both accounts to download and periodically update the apps you need from both regions. Because while you no longer live in America, America follows you everywhere. 

These digital frustrations become silly metaphors for the immigrant experience itself — your identity fragmented across borders, your daily life a constant negotiation between here and there. Even your solidly international iPhone refuses to let you exist wholly in one place or another.

For context, I became an iSheep at the age of 18 after working at a gas station all summer to afford a white plastic MacBook so I could “produce” music on GarageBand and write a “novel.” Since then, the references to my digital life have remained solidly within Apple’s walled garden, for better or worse. But even that experience is fragmented along nation-state lines. Many of the American apps I use on a regular basis — apps for banks, credit cards, credit monitoring tools, global cellular service Google Fi and so on — understandably aren’t available on the U.K. Apple App Store. And vice versa. And I obviously need apps from both regions on my phone to manage my life. Ergo, creating a secondary email to open a secondary iCloud account and ping-ponging between the two.

These are certainly not the first tips you’d relay to Americans back home who are in the early phases of taking a similar leap. First, it’s dreadfully dull to talk about. (“Oh hey, so yeah, let me explain step by step how to monitor your financial life on your iPhone through dual iCloud accounts” is the kind of stuff you go to Reddit to explain, not for those rare phone dates with old pals plotting their exit.) And, second, in the grand scheme of immigration, they’re low on the list of pain points. 

Securing a visa for your preferred country and decoding the tax treaties between that country and the United States are far more puzzling — and potentially quite costly if you make a mistake. It’s why my largest annual expense after home/office rent is an accountant registered in both the United Kingdom, where I live now, and the United States, where I lived until 2021. Because the most frustrating everyday fact of life for Americans abroad is certainly the tax code.

This is one fact most Americans won't know unless they move out of the country. The United States is the only major country that taxes its citizens everywhere they live. By contrast, most nations have something known by accountants as residence-based taxation. The frustration isn’t actually about dual taxation in most cases — treaties and the U.S. Foreign Earned Income Exclusion tax credit mean your income is taxed primarily in your new home country. But the complexity of the paperwork and the hassle to file will become so crushing until you get professional help. It’s so burdensome that some U.S. corporations that send Americans overseas cover all the accounting costs, even though most won't owe any taxes anyway. 

Despite the hassles, Americans continue to leave. And then in part because of the bureaucratic overreach and in part because of the ever-blazing political dumpster fire back home, a small but growing number of Americans with citizenship elsewhere are renouncing their U.S. citizenship. Moments ago, while drafting this letter to you, a friend texted me about their plans to renounce their citizenship at the embassy in Paris in a few months’ time. “Very, very excited,” she said. 

Taxes, visas and work opportunities — those are only a few of the major issues that come with being an American who left. But when you’ve settled into a routine of life as an immigrant and want to maintain friendships and credit scores back home, it’s the little digital irritations that serve as the prickly reminders your life remains split between your chosen home and the divided states of America. 

Minor tech hassles — the dual accounts, the region-locked apps, the constant switching between systems — are part of the mundane reality of having to maintain a life in several places at once. 

On January 19, 2025, I awoke a bit tired, as usual, in my damp and cramped East London flat. It's on the second floor — or first as they say here — of a crumbling building overlooking a noisy high street with a cosmetic shop on the ground floor.

Now, here the mold in my building would like to correct one common misconception that non-partisan non-profit American Citizens Abroad address in much of its external communications in support of residence based taxation. It’s the fact that most Americans abroad are not ultra-wealthy — or even ordinary wealthy. If you really want to leave America, generational wealth and family connections to Ireland, Italy and a few other countries will certainly help you. But you don’t need that, or a cushy corporate gig lined up, to make the move. Many of us did it without. The reality is that most are middle class. Plenty like me are self-employed and relocated abroad without a hot husband. And I've spent the last four years here in what you might charitably describe as a “shabby chic” flat. It's proof that if you want to make the move, you can find a way too. 

The TikTok ban wasn’t on my mind when I awoke in a slightly crossfaded daze from a hangover and reached for my phone. I accidentally took yet another screenshot of my alarm while turning it off (my screenshot folder is mostly filled with alarms I’m trying to snooze or disable). I'll say my January has not been dry. The night before I’d been out in divey pubs around Hackney Downs and Dalston with a fellow queer American Londoner, with our conversation intentionally avoiding the circus across the Atlantic. We’d made plans to go to an alien-themed London Short Film Festival screening at the historic Rio Cinema, an escapist distraction from the inauguration. I checked my text messages to confirm my alien film plans for the evening were as I remembered them. Good.

Next, I unconsciously tapped the TikTok icon, where I routinely spend a few too many minutes in a typical morning scrolling through my For You Page, which has an uncanny sense of my particular interests (for instance a talking head video of the writer Anne Carson explaining why she doesn’t take writing advice from others mixed in with African grey parrots dancing to Prince — one smart grey named Apollo can repeat the English words for loads of objects in exchange for treats — pistachios, of course). 

But when the app popped up, I was not met with the algorithmic mirror of my curiosities — instead, I got the same error message that Americans in America saw when they awoke on Sunday. “Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now,” the notification popped up. “A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S.”

At one point in recent weeks, it had crossed my mind that I might want to migrate my TikTok app from the jurisdiction of the U.S. Apple App Store to the U.K. App Store, where TikTok would not be banned and I could carry on wasting my time as usual. But, to my credit, the online folk wisdom suggested that you’d be fine accessing TikTok outside of America (or maybe with a VPN). But that turned out to not be the case, as I spotted a few other Americans who lived in other countries were posting on Bluesky that they’d also been locked out. 

I’d procrastinated because while it sounds simple, logging in and out of dual iCloud accounts is actually not at all fun. Apple has no incentive to make it better, either, because it’s primarily a common practice among immigrants. While logging in and out of the iCloud accounts isn’t hard, and you can keep both country’s apps on your phone at the same time, there is a downside. When you log out of your “main” iCloud account, all the synced and FaceID protected stuff is instantly removed from your phone. That means everything in your Apple Wallet, all your downloaded albums in Apple Music, photos and so on. It’s not hard to re-add and re-download, but it takes time — reentering credit card numbers, re-validating bank accounts for use and the time to let all your media become available again on your device. It takes long enough that I avoid it on days I need to tap into London transport using my phone as my ticket. Which is most days. So I avoided it. And, consequently, I got swept up in the several hours that TikTok was offline. 

And, sure, “boohoo” — this whimpering episode in America’s internet history is pathetic. It’s a sideshow distraction to the far more alarming fascist currents that were on display the following day at the inauguration, where South African billionaire Elon Musk did what many observers described as a “Nazi salute.” 

I recount that surreal experience of being abroad and yet looped into the U.S. TikTok ban because it feels like a microcosm of the absurdity of our times. And the political showmanship around it reads like a soap opera for we the very online people of the United States of America — even if we're not physically there.

I frequently delete the TikTok app anyway, so the few hours of downtime was probably a nice break for everyone’s phone batteries. But the content posted in the hours before TikTok went dark in the United States had hints of that Y2K energy. In the hours before the app went offline, our feeds were full of frustrated farewells, eulogies for subcultures and communities forged through algorithmic recommendation, and unhinged takes from content creators who were like, if this is going up in flames, let me go out with a bang. The final hours saw the Costco peach lady reach viral notoriety for a video where she drank peach juice out of a massive jar and then struggled to pull a peach out of the jar's mouth with her bare hands. The peach lady epitomized so much of the zaniness that TikTok thrust into pop culture in the past several years.

TikTok can primarily be a place for dancing parrot videos if you want it to be. But over the last year, media coverage of the platform’s potential ban has demonstrated how the app has been an economic engine for many small businesses, wrote checks to content creators of all generations and dominated culture in ways no other social platform ever has. It explains the palpable anger in many content creators' farewells. 

That’s why the biggest story about the TikTok ban I’ve observed from abroad is how it’s only served to turn more Americans against their own government regardless of who the president is.

It’s only the latest event that underscores the massive gap between legislative action in the United States from both parties and the reality of everyday life for Americans. Similarly, this anger explains why the alleged assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO has made Luigi Mangione a folk hero among netizens whose lives have been harmed by the inhumanity of the U.S. healthcare system. And in an era marred by political violence and the growth of white supremacist militias threatening national security, the one thing that gets all the urgent bipartisan cooperation is a ban of the TikTok app.

I awoke on January 20th to the inauguration of Donald Trump for his second term. Acid in my stomach churned as I replayed all the promises of his campaign and the negative consequences that transfer of power will have on undocumented immigrants, women’s rights, Black women’s rights, Black trans women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights generally, asylum seeker’s rights, human rights in general. We could go on. Yes, that is nauseatingly well established by now. The day one executive orders were only the start.

Instead of repeating those harms, let me contribute this: It’s genuinely weird to be an American living abroad amid both the TikTok dramedy and the presidential transition — and getting regularly prompted to explain both to strangers at pubs.

I've spent most of the 2020s out of America, which I left coincidentally on Independence Day in 2021. (The flight was much cheaper.) Before this, the prior two times I lived and studied abroad were during the Obama years. I’m not often prone to episodes of nostalgia, but I certainly preferred life overseas with presidents the rest of the world didn’t generally despise. While it doesn’t affect too much of your daily life, it certainly affects the conversations you have with strangers at the pub, as if you’re actually the U.S. ambassador who stopped in for a pint at the Such and Such Arms or the Allegedly Virgin Queen. It begins when you open your mouth. 

Imagine being asked multiple times in any given week to offer a witty account as to why an app where people do silly viral dances and sketch comedy is being banned because both parties somehow deemed it a threat to national security while automatic assault rifles are, like, totally 100 percent not the greater national security problem.

Well, I’ve got a well-rehearsed answer by now: a shrug and a “beats me.” Therein lies another minor and totally inconsequential social irritation you experience as an American abroad: well-meaning strangers will use the fact that you’ve got a twangy American accent as the prompt for small talk about everything they perceive about your country, good and bad. The bad? We’ve earned it.

But it’s not always negative. Sometimes it’s even cute. Here in London, for instance, bartenders, baristas and strangers at bars often tell me about the solo trip they took to Las Vegas or how they really want to retrace Highway 66 or live the impossible “Friends” fantasy in Manhattan. (Young Irish Londoners, in particular, are my favorite conversationalists — they love to tell me about their summers working in touristy pubs in New York City, which are often a bit scandalous.) All that’s amusing to me because I once did the opposite living in Limerick, Ireland — and I genuinely enjoy being The American. Less amusing is when you’re asked to explain something like the rise of neofascism — sometimes it’s hard to muster the brainpower while you’re waiting for your first americano of the day or last Guinness of the night.

It’s less amusing not because those questions aren’t fair ones. To casual foreign observers, ordinary Americans might seem like we need to account for ourselves if you only read the unhinged headlines about resounding victories for politicians such as Trump. (But if a Brit brings Trump up, as commonly happens, I can always resort to Brexit to level the playing field.) Many Europeans have little experience with how diverse the United States is — both in terms of the American population and the political persuasions between the rednecks and the cosmopolitan cities.  U.S. cities, for all their problems, are often more open minded and progressive in many ways than their more traditional European counterparts. (Even cannabis isn’t technically legal in Amsterdam.)

But no matter how many times I'm asked, I have no good answer as to why both major political parties in the American republic have decided to ban a social media app and yet remain in gridlock about the uniquely American problems of mass shootings and ordinary Americans’ financial ruin due to the costs of necessary medical care.

If [insert domestic U.S. political issue here] seems without explanation to many people in the rest of the world, it also seems without explanation to me. And it seems as mad as it does to strangers I encounter in pubs as it does to my American friends living in America. 

None of this is new. America’s government has for my entire life rarely passed laws that actually address America’s real problems. Instead, it’s passed laws that benefit the rich and powerful in America.

TikTok’s ban is not surprising, even though the issues with that platform are shared by American-oligarch-owned Big Tech. It’s also not surprising that the ban turned into pop-up modals that served to further inflate Trump’s ego as the messiah saving the app (despite he being the original one wanting to ban it because some K-pop fans once organized an ego-bruising campaign to register for a rally they weren’t going to attend).

All of this together seems to have accelerated a trend that Americans who have permanently relocated abroad have witnessed in their social circles in recent months: texts from well-meaning friends back in the states with urgent-sounding questions on how they, too, could leave America just like you did. 

I have replied to every such text with a question: “Where do you ideally want to go? And how do you intend to leave?” It’s quickly clear for many that it's more of a reactionary response to the moment than any well-hatched immigration plan.

If you want to leave America, you already know your reasons why. For some, that why might include political dysfunction, which is deeply entrenched. As many Americans vehemently disagree with the new administration, there’s growing interest among some in exploring life abroad.

That impulse isn’t new, either. During every modern presidential campaign, search interest has surged for topics related to life abroad from Canadian immigration pathways to digital nomad visas. That trend is repeating again, but the tone I’m hearing among some friends sounds different this time — acutely bitter, worn down and disenfranchised. It's a complicated thing to respond to when folks think you're the one who "got out."

The internet is not lacking advice on how to leave America. Less has been written about how not to. So in the hours following what may be one of the most consequential inauguration events in American history, I got to work drafting this open letter to Americans with kneejerk sense they should leave.

Raise your hand if this resonates: If you’ve entertained the idea of leaving America, even if it’s more of a fantasy, you’ve probably found yourself up late at night, googling how to leave America, and landing on any number of immigration-related subreddits. Maybe you’ve even posted something about your circumstances in hopes that strangers on the internet reveal some shortcut that makes the overwhelming prospect seem a tad easier. Two of those subreddits are r/expats and r/iwantout, along with dozens of country-specific subreddits where people go for advice. 

In fact, on many subreddits, the naive and disgruntled American leftist has become a whiny caricature. Posts from young Americans legitimately concerned about the rise in political violence and violations of their basic human rights ask genuine questions about where else they could go. This provokes plenty of negative "advice" from disgruntled residents of countries outside America, who live in the after-ripples of American mass media and cultural trends — many of them view this “woe is me” stuff as a bit entitled even when it comes from a place of valid worry for the future. The residents of other countries often reply to these kinds of posts with dismissive long-reads that make it sound like everywhere else on the planet is pretty shit, too, and the arrival of "expats" from America and elsewhere has been vilified as driving up the cost of living. That anti-"expat" and "nomad" sentiment has spilled into the streets, with protests and marches in hotspots like Mexico City and Lisbon.

In the subreddits, disgruntled Americans sometimes join in with bitter reviews of life abroad, too, often remaining due to a spouse. These commenters will remind the OP that American salaries are higher than almost anywhere else in the world and they’re better off sucking it up; they’ll also share anecdotes about dysfunctions with their new country’s political systems. The far-right surge is not, after all, unique to America. 

If you take these most cynical Redditers at their word, you shouldn't stay but also you shouldn't go. Many of those comments are grounded in hard economic facts (e.g., Biden’s years in office saw America with one of the world’s biggest and strongest economies, though those benefits remain grossly unevenly distributed). They’re also filled with anecdotes of unfortunately similar political realities in other countries (Britain’s governing party, for instance, remains deeply unpopular as Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform party surges in popularity across historically Labour-leaning constituencies). 

Of course, taking random life advice from strangers on the internet is the first way you should not leave America. But countering those commenters, you’ll also get a few kinder anecdotes from some who are happily living their life elsewhere. They’ll share some encouraging wisdom.

Yet both sides are, in a strange way, making the same point: leaving America won’t be easy. And whether you’ll be happy largely depends on how and why you want to leave.

Along similarly shallow lines, the second way you should not leave America is because of a vague sense that the rest of the world must be better. The reality, as ever, is far more nuanced. For some disgruntled Americans, an ignorance about the rest of the world can lead to a weird phenomenon: their lack of understanding about the realities in other countries can lead to a romanticized view of places perceived to be better. That often presents in the Eurocentric prioritization of the whitest countries, which is not helped by the media routinely promoting the Nordics as the world’s happiest, most prosperous and most democratic places. And by many measures, they are, though it's only part of the story.

As Bernie Sanders reminded us frequently on the campaign trail in 2016, lots of things really do work well in Denmark, for example. In fact, how often he mentioned Denmark could've been a drinking game.

The facts can inform a compelling manifesto for a social democratic revolution in American politics, but they’re not unto themselves good reasons to move to Denmark without a strong desire to be in, say, Copenhagen. Simply because the systems of governance in Denmark are inarguably several steps up from America — the country performs better on almost any metric — that does not mean you’ll automatically be better off in Denmark.

Or take any country that lands above the United States on an index of world’s happiest: that doesn’t mean they’re happy countries for immigrants, broadly speaking, or for you, in particular. Many of the countries that land on the lists of the world’s happiest and most prosperous often score poorly for satisfaction surveys among immigrants, who might have trouble integrating into countries that are not diverse and not that welcoming if you didn’t grow up speaking the language and embedded in the particular social norms. On top of that, Europe is in a full-blown reboot of fascism, too, with seemingly every major country from France to Germany struggling to tamp down the rise of its own far-right parties.

Dissatisfaction with the state of American politics isn’t a great way to start the process of leaving America if that’s where your interest in the rest of the world begins and ends. And fantasizing about being in other countries simply for the sake of not being in America — without a genuine cultural interest in a new country and a desire to integrate — isn’t a great way to begin, either. 

Indeed, if there’s a lesson we should learn from this moment it's to end the romanticization of nation states in general. The far-right weaponizing expressions of American nationalism is, after all, a large part of what got us to this mess. Choosing another country to "exceptionalize" in your mind will invariably lead you to a painful crash landing when you hit the harsh facts of immigrant life. 

Finally, burning out in a nihilistic privileged rage won’t help you or anyone back home, either. Complaining about how entirely lost America is and how the country is fatally wounded — that’s salt in the wounds of the most marginalized in American society who may not have the means to choose. Yes, I repeat: more Americans could make the move if they really wanted to. But many still cannot. That’s not a reason to stay if you don’t want to and can leave. But if that's how you sound before you make the move, you'll no doubt change your tune after the honey moon period wears off somewhere new.

Once the inevitable culture shock hits you, you'll be reflecting in far a more nuanced way about everything you miss back home. Because America remains home. For all its established flaws, American cities resonate with energy that few places in the world can match. They’re open-minded cultural hubs, places of entrepreneurial opportunity and close-knit communities filled with plenty of civically minded neighbors who drop poetry books into little free libraries. 

I grew up in the rural panhandle of Maryland, to a financially struggling young family in the hills of Appalachia, on a few acres sliced out of the old family farm. My first “job” was throwing bails of hay on the tractor’s wagon, ¢50 per bail thrown. From the top of the several acre field behind my house, luminous sunsets would dip behind rolling forested hills into the distance. It was the kind of sight that made you never want to leave. The only problem is that I was queer — and wanted to be a well-traveled writer. 

Some blend of growing up in a culture where you sensed a violent wish against your inherent queerness and the culty vibes of Seventh-Day Adventist homeschooling made me want to run away from my roots. It partly explains why I spent my early twenties back at the gas station to save money to fund me backpacking across five continents and eventually moving to Portland, Oregon. The Pacific Northwest seemed as far away as I could go without needing a visa.

It’s partly due to my coming of age — the sense that my younger self had to run to discover a place where I’d belong — that I always counter “grass is greener” cliches with the fact that moving somewhere can change you life. Sure, your anxiety disorder, ADHD and generalized depression will, of course, follow you. You’ll navigate a new healthcare system seeking therapies and medications for that. You might have a hex placed on you that makes you feel like you don’t really belong anywhere, which is a crushing realization along the way. Finding friends will remain challenging because you're a nerdy introvert. But in many beautiful ways, you also discover moving can make you happier. 

One thing my younger self quickly realized is that moving somewhere the majority of people didn't actively oppose my right to exist did, in fact, help me accept myself. Moving somewhere because you agree more with the politics of your new neighbors can make you feel better about your life. Living in a bubble can be better for your personal safety, too. Any queer and trans person that’s done the quintessential migration from conservative hometown to liberal big city can attest to those facts. 

In the same way that moving can make you happier, staying put can also do that, too. I know a few LGBTQ+ folks who would live nowhere but Appalachia and their creative presence shows what staying and living openly can look like — and that’s radical. Last month, I spent several weeks at home in Appalachia with my family — enjoying long conversations about how much has and hasn’t changed while stuck in a mini-traffic jam behind Amish buggies. That’s how life moves out there. And even in Garrett County, Maryland — which voted 75.66 percent for Trump in the 2024 election — hosted its first Pride event ever this past June. That would’ve seemed unspeakable to the few LGBTQ+ locals there a couple decades ago. That first Oakland Pride was probably still a little risky. But it happened because trans and queer people exist everywhere, and when we fearlessly make our presence known, the culture there opens a crack more than before. 

I’ll also attest to the fact that while leaving has made my life better, staying away from home has made family life more challenging in many ways. Luckily, my family accepts me now. And leaving gets harder on each trip. Living with an ocean between us is the most heart-wrenching fact of my life. My mom texts me every Monday to say “Happy Monday! Love you!” That's when I feel the distance the most. I want to be there more to get coffee with my mom, to see my niece and nephew grow up, to get a pedicure with my dad, which was his gift to the family this Christmas — and, I mean, sign me up. Hence the long-haul flights.

Sometimes life suits you better elsewhere. Sometimes the grass is actually greener for you. But you won’t know that until you get to know yourself. And travel far. That’s one of the paradoxes of life: what’s true for someone else may often be false for you.

How not to leave America? Without a clear motivator in at least one core area of your life — whether that’s career, romance or some other totally valid realm that leads you to personal fulfillment — you’re bound to burn out. Because it’s hard. And American bureaucracy will follow you everywhere you go.

But if you’re motivated by something deeper, something core to what you want out of life, then leaving can be the most fulfilling move you’ll make.

Where you live shapes not only your career, but also your worldview, your social circles, your hobbies. It's a lot to consider. It's not a decision to rush. The process will take longer than you think. Wherever you go, choose wisely. But don’t let yourself get caught up in paralyzing analysis in hopes of finding somewhere perfect — America isn’t perfect and even “better” places won’t be perfect. Make an informed move, surely. And move again if you want to. Remember, you can almost always go back. 

If that’s something you want to pursue, then how you leave America depends on what you want. For me, what I wanted happened to be in London, yes, one of Europe's most expensive cities to spend the 2020s in. But a wild city that gives me life, a queer and trans community that makes weekends interesting and at least one moldy flat in my price range. 

Yes, I left America and I'm happy. But I’m happier not necessarily because I left America. I’m happier because I landed somewhere that I currently jive with on a deeper level. It’s a little woo-woo. You see, falling in love with a city is like falling in love with a person. I can quickly list out plenty of red flags for how you shouldn’t fall in love. It’s harder to articulate how you should fall in love because so much of it depends on the quirks of who you are — and the quirks of your beloved. 

My parting message to Americans flirting with the idea of life abroad has two parts: First, more Americans have the means to leave America than they commonly assume. I bring up my background not to working-class-wash this moment or center myself in a sociopolitical event but simply to underscore that avenues exist if you want to put in the work. You can save for years, hustle in your field and qualify for a “Global Talent Visa,” as I did. You can also find loads of other pathways abroad including those that are far less discussed like self-employed visas, which many countries have and give qualified applicants a door into countries that might’ve previously seemed out of reach. 

That brings me to my second message: If you want to do it, you’re going to need a strategy. 

“How would the American icons of the Lost Generation move to Europe if they were alive today? What kind of visas would be granted to a newspaper reporter like Ernest Hemingway, a bookseller like Sylvia Beach or a jazz legend like Louis Armstrong?”

That was the lede in an article I wrote for The Washington Post in 2022, about a year after I made the move from Portland, Oregon to London. The travel editor had asked me if I’d wanted to write about driving on the opposite side of the road, to which I responded that I had no plans of getting a U.K. license anytime soon. I was, however, interested in writing about how Americans without generational wealth, citizenship through descent, or a job sponsoring them to go abroad could realistically make the move. 

I followed the Lost Generation question in the lede with the following: 

“I found myself wondering that as I navigated the challenges of plotting a move abroad this past year. For creative and self-starting people today, the picture can be opaque. Without a multinational company sponsoring you or rich parents to bankroll a “golden visa,” moving to Europe can be a far cry from the romanticized vision you might have read about.

“But there are, in fact, many pathways to Europe that don’t require generational wealth or the backing of a mega-corporation.

“Over the past several years, I have researched the lesser-known and less-obvious ways to make the move. I have spent hundreds of hours poring over social media and immigration websites for dozens of countries, and I have networked with self-employed and entrepreneurial Americans across the continent. Eventually, my obsession paid off; I moved to the United Kingdom on a self-sponsored visa this past summer.”

For the piece, I interviewed many Americans who had made a similar move — including a pastry chef who set up in France on a self-employed visa and now runs an online pastry school; a software developer who relocated his family from the Bay Area to Scotland; and a start-up founder who went to, yes, Denmark. 

The good news is that there are plenty of places you could end up. The bad news is that you’re going to need to spend a ton of time researching online. Thankfully, researching things online is a large part of my job, so I dove in.

“Begin by sketching out a strategy. Define why you want to relocate, and outline what your career goals are. Documenting these will help you filter opportunities,” I recounted my own process in the piece, having spent several years doing the same. “In my case, I kept a spreadsheet tracking relevant visas in two dozen countries, then used my personal criteria to narrow down to a visa shortlist in a few countries.” 

Part of the conversation needs to be logical. How will you make money? Does it matter where you are in the world to do that? For many people, they’re looking for a job. In my case, I had been happily self-employed for years before making the move, so it made sense for me to zoom in on a less-covered niche way to transplant abroad: talent and self-employed visas. I, too, also took on a lot of extra freelance projects to stack some cash before making the leap. That took me a lot of time and planning. 

But it’s not all logic. You’ll have a higher metabolism for stress and inconvenience and paperwork mazes if you’re driven by some deeper motivation. At the same time as I say romanticization of life abroad shouldn’t be the sole motivation, especially if you have little experience of the country you’re considering relocating to, I’ll also disclose this about myself: romanticizing life outside of America motivated my first hop across the pond. My first time was to study in Ireland, partly funded by a scholarship that took me to a city that's not so common for exchange students. Yes, I hate to admit my Irish heritage inspired me to sign up for Irish literature and language classes at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick, on the wild Atlantic coast, the hometown of The Cranberries. That was my first trip abroad. 

Since then, living outside America continues to fulfill my curious spirit — life isn’t an endless holiday, I assure you, but it does feel like an ongoing immersion in the ideas that shaped different places. That continues to enthrall me. For now, London hasn’t burnt me out. Romance serves a practical role. London wooed me — the rare megacity that’s both sprawling and yet intimately neighborhood-y. Its economy may still be recovering from Brexit all these years later but it’s a force of creativity and a source of constant theatre in its streets. I’m never bored. 

And now I need to end that paragraph because I sound like an insufferable 21-year-old study abroad student romanticizing the five months they spent here. I’ll counter those uppers with some downers: The Museum of London recently revealed its new logo, a symbol for our great city: it’s a pooping pigeon. Yes, in this city of bird shit you might need to donate a kidney to get a flat viewing; your phone could seemingly be stolen out of your hands even when sat on your sofa; and good luck with appointment wait times if you might potentially have dick cancer.

To find my flat, I spent four months looking and am too tired to think about moving even years later despite the mold visibly in the hallway. As for my first stolen phone, one Londoner told me I hadn’t truly become a Londoner until that happened. Well, here I am. And as for the dick cancer, I am a few months into waiting on the appointment letter for the incision and biopsy — but the lovely National Health Service's dick doctor has assured me I’m in good hands. And the NHS is doing the lord’s work. 

And that’s the point: I’m a Londoner now. I love the city as much as I hate the city. And I frequently stay up late at night wondering if I should move again to the middle of nowhere Scotland. No, London is clearly where I’m meant to be right now. Right? The romance is still on.

Hemingway, Beach, Armstrong — how would they make it today on this European continent? I’ve written about moving to Europe because that’s the primary region of the world I’ve lived outside of America. And I don’t know, to be honest, how exactly they’d do it today. Anti-immigration sentiments have made it hard for creative people to move anywhere unless they’re nepo babies — and yes, I’ve dated a few of those guys in both Portland and London. 

But if you're not a nepo baby, I know it’s possible if you really want to. Though as Berlin-based culture journalist Michelle No told me while reporting the Post piece:

“‘Moving to a new country in general is extremely stressful,’ No said. She cites the logistics of finding a new place to live, navigating bureaucracies and finding new friends in a foreign country as all part of the experience. And as a woman of color in Berlin, she also underscores how ‘experiencing some of the casual racism’ in Germany has been ‘jarring.’

“What does No wish she knew before making the move? Give yourself time to find your community (‘Everywhere you go, there’s always going to be someone just like you’). And save more money than you think you need or are required to have — some visas stipulate a certain amount of savings, while others do not. ‘It’ll help with your mental health as you fly through your cash in the first few months,’ she says.

“Moving abroad is a giant investment,” No says, “and it’ll be easier for you to think of it as a long-term one, not a short-term TikTok-ready vacation.”

Leaving America is not an escape from America — if that's what you're hoping it'll be. But wherever you go, America will give you something to talk about.