On fleeing fascism

A photo of a sky filled with dark, stormy clouds and a line of rooftops beneath. There is a double rainbow in the sky, and a brightly lit green tree to the left. A signpost in Irish and English is along the bottom of the frame.

So I have left the US, with any luck, for good.

In 2012 I moved from New York City to the SF Bay Area for a job. One of my teammates was emotionally volatile-he would become loudly and aggressively angry in response to unexpected things. It wasn't until he left the company that I noticed how much tension my body was holding each time I walked in to the small, windowless conference room where our team conducted daily standup meetings and realized how relaxed I was. This is how I feel in Ireland.

Living in Dublin, there is the usual city noise. Sometimes I hear fireworks, and my instinct is to listen carefully and try to discern if it's a gunshot or fireworks before I realize "this is Ireland, it will be fireworks." I don't hear aggressive honking. When I do hear traffic honking, it's relatively constrained. Though still a bit annoying, it doesn't cause anxiety to accumulate in my body the longer I'm outside of my home, like a dryer lint screen in need of cleaning.

For a long time I was conflicted about leaving-after all, not everyone in the US has the privilege of leaving, and even if they had the resources to do so, they may not have that magic blue passport that enables so much more freedom to access the world than I think many USians realize. I didn't even need to apply for a visa to study here; the passport control person barely glanced at my grad school acceptance letter. (I'm sure part of this is the immense privilege of having fair, freckled skin and red hair. Gosh, everyone here is half convinced I'm related to some Gilmore or other on the Isle even after I explain that I'm "an American mutt" who has more recent German and Dutch ancestry than Irish.)

But I didn't realize until I had it how badly burned out I've been by both the US, the wildly toxic