I’ve Lived Abroad For 4 Years And I Don’t Feel American Anymore

Here's why

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

First of all, “American” isn’t even the right word to use here.

Technically everybody in North, Central, and South America are Americans.

It’s a fact I learned when I moved here to Mexico.

If you say you’re American here, Mexicans can get a little weird about that — and I understand.

But “American” is easier to write in a headline than “Person from the United States” so we’ll break the rule.

I’m from the United States.

Four years ago, at the age of 25, I began living abroad.

I spent two years in the Philippines and I’ve lived here in Mexico for the last year and a half.

When I came back home to the United States in July 2019, something felt off with me. This place I came home to felt unfamiliar.

It was the abundance.

Anything you need is right down the street, it seems. The buildings are beautiful. Everything is clean. Everybody has a car. The houses have actual lawns.

You’d think in a country with so much abundance there’d be people who actually appreciated it.

But no.

I came back home in the middle of a Trump Presidency with everybody clamoring on about the most recent political scandal that, with time, didn’t matter in the slightest.

When you see people living in shacks in the mountains washing their clothes in the nearest river, it lends an entirely different perspective.

As Appreciation For The USA Grew, I Felt More Alienated

As appreciation for my home country grew, I felt alienated from its citizens even more. And that happened because few of them saw this country how I did.

They complained. They fought with each other on Facebook. They stayed behind their fences. They were stuck-up and rude.

I didn’t even know this country anymore.

I didn’t want to talk to anybody either.

I shared so little with them.

I guess it’s kind of like spending a few years away from a friend and trying to pick up where you left off.

That’s hard because both of you have grown in opposite directions. You’re totally different people now, and whatever common ground you had in the past is just that —in the past.

An old friend and I talked about moving away from our hometown recently.

He told me that he went to our long-time bar downtown and saw a table full of high school friends sitting there together.

They’d been friends for over a decade.

Sitting in the same bar. In the same town. A stones-throw from where they went to high school.

I look at that with both admiration and disgust. Good for them they’ve stayed friends — that’s not a bad thing. But damn, they’re just going to stay in the same place forever?

I can’t relate to people like that.

I’ve seen shit that would blow their minds.

When I try to talk about it, though, nobody cares. They just want to keep living their comfortable life in their comfortable little bubble.

I look at the world with a lot of open-mindedness. I’ll listen to anybody talk about anything. These people look at the world with insane closed-mindedness.

How can I feel at home amongst people like that?

For me, it was the people that made me feel uncomfortable in my own country — not anything this country actually stands for.

I wonder if anybody else has had the same experience.

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