To Leave, or Not to Leave? That Is the Question.

In recent years, “leaving America” content has become its own genre – TikToks about “how I moved abroad and never looked back,” YouTube breakdowns of visa pathways, and Instagram reels listing “the best countries for Americans right now.” Some are meticulous and practical: breakdown of digital nomad visas, the savings required for Spain’s non-lucrative visa, and how much French you need to know before applying for citizenship. Others are fueled by something less logistical: exhaustion, grief, and the quiet realization that no matter how hard you work, the country may not work for you.

Then there’s the celebrity version of this narrative. A notable public figure relocates, buys property abroad, or implies that their move is connected to “American decline.” During election years, especially, the “I’m leaving America if…” fantasy resurfaces like a seasonal flu. Most recently, Kristen Stewart shared she will “probably not” stay in the U.S., claiming that “reality is breaking completely under Trump.”

But for ordinary people, leaving the country is rarely an op-ed or Instagram announcement. It is paperwork, money, and risk. If you are wealthy, leaving the United States is often just a lifestyle choice. It can be framed as “prioritizing peace” rather than protecting your life. It’s the ability to live in New York and summer in the South of France, hold a visa as a convenience, and treat crossing borders like crossing sidewalks.

And this year, I quietly became part of that growing number.

When I first told people I was moving to Paris, they often responded with the kind of excitement usually reserved for glossy job offers and engagement rings. Paris. The word itself carries a cinematic sheen of café tables, slate rooftops, and couples sharing a baguette in the park. And to be fair, my announcement on Instagram was quite dreamy: two years abroad, an MFA, mornings spent writing and wandering, evenings spent drinking good wine and smoking skinny cigarettes. But I’d be lying if I said the decision was purely romantic.

Lately, the United States does not just feel politically divided, but politically weaponized. Immigration raids and the expanded presence of ICE agents, a genocide in Gaza directly funded by American tax dollars, the reversal of laws and protections, the quiet panic of layoffs and unemployment threading through professional life, among several other disasters, are constant reminders of the depraved state of our country. Recent research has suggested that, for some Americans, the country is becoming increasingly difficult to live in.

For some, this version of America has always been a reality. In my 2023 book, In Our Shoes: On Being a Young Black Woman in Not-So “Post-Racial” America, I write about my experience and the experiences of dozens of other Black women, with navigating America in our bodies. Through detailing our encounters with micro and macroaggressions, medical racism, policing, and bias, our stories shed light on the various obstacles many Black American women are subjected to from childhood throughout adulthood. For these varying reasons, the idea of leaving America has been a constant thought of mine, but I first seriously considered it in 2022. My boyfriend at the time, who was Swedish, and I were hypothetically discussing having children. A quick online search revealed that the rates at which women die from childbirth and pregnancy complications were much lower in Sweden than in the US. As someone in the demographic who is four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, I began rethinking whether childbirth in my homeland made sense for me. But even before this conversation erupted, I’ve known that America has historically never been a safe place for people who look like me.

Even in my particular situation, leaving through means of education is its own advantage – one that places me somewhere between those who relocate with wealth and ease and those who, for financial, legal, or family reasons, cannot leave at all. The resources to afford higher education, the support to stop working full-time, and the ability to fit in elsewhere without fearing for safety are privileged qualities I recognize in my own move. Yet I am sometimes still haunted by my decision to take space from my country at a time when it is desperately struggling. So even when a move is technically temporary, it cannot help but become symbolic. In my case, moving to Paris was both a question of self-preservation and the start of planting seeds elsewhere.

If your identity makes you targetable, leaving becomes rational

There’s a particular American moral trap in the idea that leaving is betrayal and selfish, as though staying automatically makes you principled. But this logic falls apart quickly depending on your specific position within the social hierarchy in America.

America’s political climate doesn’t land evenly. Some bodies are treated as neutral – default citizens – and others are treated as debates. You can often tell who is most endangered by looking at who is most legislated. If you belong to a group that is increasingly framed as a threat – trans people, immigrants, Muslims, Black communities, activists, educators, political journalists – you may not have the luxury of waiting to see what happens. “Let’s give it time” is a phrase that sounds reasonable until your rights evaporate in real time. Many people are not theorizing their danger; they are living it.

And while some argue that leaving concedes the country to extremists, there’s a hard truth underneath: staying in harm’s way is not the only form of resistance, especially if it drains you to the point of collapse. To leave, for some, is not an escape. It is a strategy, a form of protection, or buying time.

Burnout is not a personal failure — it’s a political outcome

The American mythology of activism loves an endlessly giving hero: the organizer who never sleeps and stays “in the fight” until their body becomes the instrument. I’ve always understood the appeal of that story — the romance of sacrifice and the clarity of purpose — but the older I get, I also recognize that activism does not exist without self-care. As Audre Lorde famously wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” If rest can be political, then exhaustion is not a personal failure. Especially when the people most often cast in that role are the ones already living with the consequences of the fight. Marginalized people are asked to defend rights that are actively being chipped away while simultaneously absorbing the harm of that erosion. It’s a strange logic to expect the people a country is most at war with to be the ones tasked with saving it. So if you’re considering leaving, not because you’ve stopped caring, but because you also need to care for yourself, I don’t see that as weakness.

My Paris move is temporary — but the question isn’t

When I first announced that I was moving for two years, my plan was never to leave America for good. Despite my issues with the country’s political landscape, it is still the country where I was born and raised, and where the majority of my loved ones and community reside. James Baldwin famously wrote, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” That line reminds me that distance and devotion can coexist. The impulse to leave is not necessarily an abandonment of the country, but another form of engagement with it – one shaped by distance, reflection, and the hope that critique can still be an act of care.

My plan to move has been in the making for years, but 2025 felt like an appropriate time to finally execute it. As someone who is very in tune with their body, it didn’t take long for me to realize that my mental and physical health was slowly collapsing in response to racial trauma within my homeland. In order for me to be active, I have to be well. This break, or more so pause, is not an ideological exit. I’m simply stepping into a different life for a while – one built around writing, study, and the chance to breathe in a country where my nervous system is not constantly on alert.

And still, I can feel the larger question stalking the edges of this choice. Because even a temporary relocation is a form of recalibration. It asks you: What does it feel like to live without bracing yourself every day? It dares you to consider that the way America feels may not be inevitable – it may be optional.

For some people, the choice will be to stay, fight, and build. For others, the choice will be to leave, regroup, and survive. Neither means that the work has to stop; it means changing vantage points. Whether through expat support groups that double as communities, voting absentee, donating to mutual-aid funds, organizing over Zoom, publishing essays, or creating content to amplify issues back home, I have witnessed several Americans continue their work abroad in various ways.

“To leave, or not to leave” is no longer a dramatic line. But a realistic question several of us are asking ourselves, and no one answer fits all.