Ask Not What Your Country Can Do

What it's like to be an American immigrant, watching and worrying from abroad.

Photo by Liubov Shramko on Pexels

I have a dedicated phone booth in my living room.

It's a 3D-printed miniature replica of a bright red British telephone box with a hole in the bottom for charging cables to push through. My boyfriend Richard printed it a few months ago to keep us honest about our daily phone usage. He's English, I'm American, and we live in Spain. I judge my mental health and the productivity of my day by how long I've managed to keep my phone confined in the booth. Screw productivity apps. They only lead to Trump, rage, death, lies, and nuclear war.

My schedule's written out on a plastic sheet of whiteboard stuck to my office door below an old-school analogue flip-clock that Richard heroically managed to sync to our phones' clocks after multiple failed attempts. Every evening, I write out the next day's schedule and tasks on my whiteboard door so I don't have to touch the phone to remind myself of them. When we start work, we're forced to 2-factor authenticate into our accounts, which often leads to news alerts and scrolling during break times. But in the evening, the phones go back into the booth, we don our matching blue-striped pajamas, and we read in bed for half an hour. He's reading Game of Thrones and marveling at the fantastical realism of a world that has yet to assure me it won't end in the disappointing downfall of every thoughtfully-written-woman-come-to-power. I'm reading the biography of Mark Twain and dealing with yet another of my all-time heroes falling off his pedestal (I really don't know why I do this to myself).

For my physical and mental health, I've recently adjusted my schedule to include twice-weekly exercise at a neighborhood Pilates studio and stained glass classes every Saturday, where I've been working on a series of window panels I hope will one day be as significant to my future kids' memories of childhood as my mom's hand-sewn Christmas stockings were to mine. I have this fantasy of one day lying on the floor with a kid, in no hurry whatsoever, watching dust particles float through colored beams of light…

Right now, I can't afford a family. Even here in Barcelona where the cost of living is relatively low. I came to terms with that when I turned 30 during a world-wide pandemic…and then met my boyfriend and subsequently decided that hope can, unintuitively, sometimes require a certain lack of peace. Last year, I nearly killed myself applying for better-paying jobs to try to afford the future we fantasized about together, and discovered that AI has poisoned the jobs well.

So I dropped the daily applying like a toxic habit and curated the routine I have now — work, sleep, chores, pilates, stained glass, reading, writing, romance, and on the horizon are a few in-person job fairs and a UK writing retreat I'm hoping to win a grant for.

When the phone booth is utilized and the schedule is followed, even without the higher-paying job, life looks pretty precious and full of possibilities. Goals feel far more achievable when things are consistently getting crossed off a list — when the beta-blockers have been taken, for example, when the laundry's hung out on the line, the trash has been taken out, the birds are chirping and I've stopped to listen, etc.

But sometimes (too often lately), something happens in that little phone that I can't look away from — Epstein files. Covered-up strokes. An invasion of Greenland. Impending war with Europe. Impending war between my home country and my boyfriend’s. A poet-mother-love-of-someone's-life getting shot in the face — "Fucking bitch." A nurse, who had been trying to protect someone, getting shot 10 times after he was already on the ground — "Boo hoo." An administration gaslighting an entire nation about it — "Domestic terrorists", "Paid extremists" "Shouldn't have impeded federal processes".

My sister is doing immigration casework, taking on heaps of her clients' PTSD in order to get them to safety, taking on the failure of a corrupt system as though it's her own when she doesn't deserve that. When she's going above and beyond doing everything she can.

My best (and most consistently ill) friend, who recently moved back to Minneapolis to be close to rare disease medical specialists, is running out of her meds because the roads to her pharmacy are blocked by people who could drag her out of her car. She won't tell me if she's been going out to protest or who she's in contact with because the feds are tracking phones, but I know her. She's a fighter with a body made of glass and a soul of laughing steel.

Poor Richard recently came home from a 4-day work trip to Paris to an apartment that had become my bunker. I hadn't slept in days for all the traumatic footage I'd consumed and adrenaline racing through my system. I'm well-read, ok? I couldn't stop thinking about A Tale of Two Cities, The Hare with the Amber Eyes, Homage to Catalonia, 1989. I've read these stories — about political tensions reaching their breaking point and people not getting out in time. We needed a plan if we were going to avoid the same fate. What were we going to do if my friends and family back in the US needed to escape? What were we going to do if Spain revoked all US visas or if the conservative party won the next election? Who did we know with skills and connections we could utilize? And why the hell was my boyfriend looking at me like I'd gone nuts? Like I wasn't just doing my best to adjust to ridiculous circumstances? It was the world that had gone nuts, not me. And, I swear to god, if he so much as considered the phrase, "I don't think that's likely to happen", I was 'bout to Brexit. We'd gone so far beyond what we'd thought was likely to happen. And if we hadn't thought it likely, that in itself was a sign of utter privilege. We were being mass-gaslit, and I wasn't about to accept it from my own partner, ok?

I've written before about vigilance being a genetic trait, and about having had the big revelation that love, when filtered through premature grief, doesn't do anybody any good. It's annoying as hell to have my own words quoted back at me in moments of panic, though, because having that realization doesn't make it suddenly easy to stop — especially when it feels irresponsible not to pay attention, or callous and inhuman not to be angry.

The world doesn't have to be literally ending, that's the thing — Just a way of life. Just a sense of safety. Just a fundamental value. Just the life of a friend. Just a potential future. Three shots, ten shots into someone trying to help, somebody's loved one, SHOULD be on par with a nuclear explosion, dammit.

So then where's the line? Between caution and panic? Between righteous anger and violent rage? Between paying attention and letting yourself be consumed? Because I know my boyfriend came home and was worried they'd successfully terrorized me, that he'd lost me to the overwhelming dread. And, in a sense, he was right. Neglecting my own health isn't the homage I'm often tempted to think it is. I'm sensitive, and I feel it all, but I need to remember that I have no interest in being a living representative of the current state of things. I want to be a protector of what matters.

Sometimes — more often than we realize — protectors are made of glass. They require upkeep and care in order for the colored light to shine through and the ICE to be kept out. Doors and windows are being broken down, yes, but the protectors have souls of laughing steel. "I'm not mad at you."

"Are you ok?"

So… work, sleep, chores, pilates, stained glass, reading, writing, romance, and on the horizon are a few in-person job fairs and a UK writing retreat I’m hoping to win a grant for. My best friend sends me bathroom selfies in the coat she bought when she came to visit a few years ago, to let me know she's ok. My sister sends me beautiful, sob-inducing thank-you notes she gets from the people she's helped. My boyfriend and I are having conversations about possible scenarios and how to be prepared. In my mind, it's so we can move as fast as possible when we need to. In his, it's because it makes me feel better, and because he doesn't know what it's like to live in a body that's spent so much time in fight or flight mode. The conversations themselves are all the validation I was really asking for, and they end with him reminding me that we're living in (currently) the most progressive country in Europe and that we are (physically) safe. We don't have a lot of money, but we have state assistance and (relative) stability.

And the phones stay in their booth for as long as possible.

And when we have an opportunity to help, to speak, to donate, to mourn, we do.