Living in Europe, watching the U.S. from afar

I’m in the Netherlands, but my nervous system is still in the U.S.

This week made that split impossible to ignore.

I’ve spent the past week living my usual daily life here in Haarlem: making coffee, answering emails, walking my dog along the canals.

And also: waiting to see if the country I used to call home would follow through on its president’s threats to commit genocide. Watching the U.S. escalate a war that is already killing people, and waiting to see how much further it might go—how much worse it might become, how many more lives it might take.

These two realities have existed side by side all week, and I don’t know how to reconcile them.

I am physically removed from the United States, but emotionally, psychologically, I feel tethered to it in a way that distance doesn’t undo.

I am not there, but I am not not there.

It’s a kind of emotional whiplash: being physically safe, or safe-ish, while feeling completely tied to something unfolding elsewhere.

I move through routines that should feel ordinary. I bike past people sitting on cafe terraces in the sun, children running around playgrounds, people carrying groceries home. Nothing around me signals immediate danger. And yet, internally, it feels like bracing. Like waiting for impact that may or may not come, but could at any moment.

My environment is calm, but my nervous system isn’t. My life here continues at its usual pace, while my attention keeps snapping back somewhere else, trying to track something unstable—something I can’t influence, but can’t fully look away from either.

The news feels different here, too. Not less serious, but differently paced, differently shaped.

There’s the hours-long delay because of time zones, obviously. Major developments in the U.S. land during our evenings and nights, when we’re supposed to be winding down. Instead, I end up sitting with new information precisely when I’m least equipped to metabolize it: when my energy is low, my guard is down, and there’s no immediate action I can take except to stay awake with it.

It’s not just when the news arrives, though, it’s how it arrives—how information is framed, what gets emphasized, how urgently it’s delivered. I find myself hopping between sources, trying to piece together something like a fuller picture.

So I end up in this loop, waiting for updates that arrive at night, trying to understand them in real time, and knowing that by the time I wake up the next morning, everything may already have shifted again.

Then there’s the way that current events show up in the conversations around me. Talk of fuel prices, supply chains, and what happens if things continue to escalate and energy becomes more constrained. Occasional mentions of European countries needing to rethink their security, of military coordination, of what it would mean for the EU to respond more collectively in a crisis.

None of it is framed with any certainty. It’s more like… background awareness? Like people testing out the edges of a possible future out loud before moving on with their days.

All of these elements come together in what I’ve come to think of as the “guilt/relief paradox” of living at a distance from your homeland.

Relief that I’m here in a place that currently feels more stable, where daily life can still unfold in relatively normal ways. Relief that I’m not directly inside the immediate blast radius of decisions I have no control over.

And alongside it, guilt. At the distance itself, at the fact that my life can continue to look like this while so much elsewhere is uncertain or already unfolding in violence. Guilt that my safety is, in part, geographic and privileged, the result of luck rather than anything earned.

Neither feeling cancels the other out. They sit together, unresolved, as I try to hold on to a normal rhythm of life, while repeatedly being pulled out of it by this huge, unresolved thing.

It has felt… destabilizing.

And I don’t really want to tie this up neatly, because it isn’t tied up. Not internally, and not in the world outside it. So I’m not going to try to resolve it here either.

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Though I’m not sure “got through” is even the right framing. From the so-called president’s fucked up Easter Sunday post to his literal snuff film post on Friday (please do not watch it, it is graphic and horrifying—I’m only linking it for documentary purposes) that shifted the tone of the week to the stream of unfolding news that followed, it felt like I moved alongside each passing hour of consciousness in fragments rather than in sequence.

My days were… smaller than usual? I did the things that had to be done, and I let a lot of other things wait.

I made the same meals more than once, not out of intention, but because decision-making felt heavier than it usually does. I checked my phone way more often than I needed to, opening Threads or news apps in loops that rarely gave me anything new, but still felt hard to stop.

There were stretches of time where I couldn’t really take in anything additional. Reading felt impossible. Even music sometimes felt like too much input. So I just sort of sat in silence? My partner would walk in and ask if I wanted to put on a podcast or something to listen to, and I’d shake my head, no, not now.

There was also numbness. Not constant, but noticeable when it lifted. Moments where I realized I wasn’t feeling much of anything at all, which was simultaneously its own kind of relief and a kind of absence.

But there were still moments of joy and connection in between.

I watched shows I’ve been returning to lately, small comfort viewing that didn’t require much of me. My partner and I played Mario Party. I finished an advanced reader copy of a soon-to-be-released thriller and immediately wished I had chosen a different ending for myself. I played the NYT version of Scrabble with a good friend.

I FaceTimed with my family on Easter and got to laugh with my niece, who is growing up faster than I can track. An old coworker messaged me to say that something I shared recently had helped her feel less pressured to perform creativity in her own life. I heard from someone from my hometown who said I’d come up in conversation with her family, and that they wanted to send love.

I visited a friend’s table at a local makers’ market. I started thinking out loud with people here about small queer community events we could build toward Pride in Haarlem this summer (a queer bowling league, a drag afternoon tea, a rainbow floral workshop, LGBTQ+ trivia night).

Nothing about the week resolved itself. But life kept happening anyway.

How’d you make it through?

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