When You Don’t Love the Country You Live In
By: Felicia C. Sullivan
Tags: Culture, Travel, Mental Health, Psychology, Home

They believe sickness can’t touch them. They shimmy into the pool with their swimsuits, goggles, and inflatable donuts and make a mess of it. Sporting visors and sunglasses, they slather on sunscreen fragrant with coconut and passion fruit. Maskless, juice boxes in tow, they pretend they’re on a resort holiday in Fiji or Maldives where the water is an impossible blue and the sand is hot, clean, and bone-white. But the reality is we’re in the middle of the desert and our ocean is a tiny, chlorinated pool surrounded by manufactured greenery.

A week ago, I marveled at the family of ducks making a home in the water. How they squawked and clacked and splashed, and now it feels wrong to violate their reverie. Ours is an intrusive race. Given time, there are no spaces humans won’t colonize and occupy.

The temporary home in which I live is host to a monied lot who believe the pandemic doesn’t exist for them. Masks are an inconvenience. Social distancing is a cute trend they grew tired of. With ball fists, they stomp their little feet. Their tones are emphatic. We’re Americans! We have the right to spread sickness if we want to! We have the right to our Targets, Walmarts, and Tiffany charm bracelets! Failing to realize the distinction between a right and a privilege.

Funny how it’s the ducks that break you.

I don’t love the country I live in — I haven’t for a long time. In my twenties, the internet was a shiny, curious object and I still believed the news reports on nighttime TV. We didn’t have the instantaneous and democratized news cycle we now take for granted. No one was publishing cell phone videos to Twitter because in the late 90s and early ’00s there was no Twitter. Outside major metropolitan cities, most people cleaved to what they saw on TV, heard on the radio, or read in their local newspaper.

Politics eluded me; I had the privilege of not paying attention to the world because it felt untenable and so much larger than me. I worshipped at the great altar that was the American fiction — we were the righteous and good combatting some distant, nefarious evil. Although I was never quite sure where that evil was because once I thought I knew it, understood it, it seemed to change form.

Never did I consider that the call would be coming from inside the house. That we were often no better than the enemy we rallied against.

Everything changed once the Towers fell. When one unseasonably warm day in September, a day when I got into work earlier than usual, a day when I turned on the television in my boss’s office and couldn’t believe what I saw. A day when my boss called me from the Lincoln Tunnel and asked me what was going on. And I remember riding down the elevator and walking out onto 23rd Street and seeing the plume of smoke in the sky.

I remember the walk to my home downtown and ashes raining down. How a police officer stopped me on Houston Street and asked if I had a passport — who brings their passport to work? Who could have foreseen this unfathomable terror? And the sky grew dark and grey in the late morning as I gathered my things and made the trek to Spanish Harlem because the subways were out of service. And I remember everyone wandering aimlessly, dazed and confused. Did what happen really happen? Our distraught was collective.

But what I remember most was a trip overseas months later. The anti-American protests in Paris. Men in bars in St. Petersburg telling me, in broken English, how much their country hates George Bush, and by extension, all Americans. Do you know George Bush? No. I don’t know him. You Americans. You think you’re so much better than everyone else.

It was the first time I paid attention to the news and yes, I was naive, but I sat in hotel rooms in Paris and Madrid, in dorm rooms for the near month I spent in Russia, watching the narrative that wasn’t constructed by Americans. We weren’t the heroes of every story because the world in which we lived was more complex and filled with compromise and deal-making. Politicking and placating. And sometimes lies. And this knowledge would continue for the next two decades where I’d have to rely on dozens of sources to piece together some semblance of truth.

For me, this is larger than two parties constantly at war — this is about the truth. Who owns it, who tells it, and how we come to know or not know it. This is not a political story and I’m deliberately not bringing specifics into the picture because politics has a way of building walls between decent people. And as the days pass and the chasm grows wider between “us” and “them,” it occurs to me our country may never be made whole in my lifetime. Living with people on the same street starts to feel as if we’re continents apart.

I have lost life-long friends because of our politics and I’m not sure we’ll ever find our way back. Because we’re stubborn. Because we think we’re right. Because it’s easy to make the other person a villain in a story that’s probably too complicated for any one person to grasp. So, maybe it started then, back in 2016, and all the days after as the cracks in the fault became a 7.2 on the human Richter.

I remember the first earthquake I experienced in California and the feeling of unheimlich. How you have no control of the earth, which always felt solid and still, shifting and moving beneath your feet. It’s a terrifying thing to know that which you’ve taken for granted is never truly stable.

But this story is about me falling out of love with the country in which I live, and the complicated, nuanced heartbreak that was decades in the making.

Who could’ve ever anticipated a global pandemic and all the havoc it wrought? How it exasperated our gross consumption culture and hyper-individualism. How people in one of the richest countries on earth can’t stomach two months of inconvenience for the greater good. How it’s easier to say that this sickness is a hoax than to consider the larger affected community. How they’ll picket in close-knit groups in the street not for the plentiful rights they already have, but for the privileges they’re desperate not to lose.

We’ll hoard our toilet paper and Clorox wipes. We’ll look out for our own. We’ll frolic on the beaches and sun on the shores for no other reason than we want to. We’ve become a country of wants and demands. Petulant children stomping their feet. We wear our masks and practice social distancing as a capitulation. And it occurs to me our problem is larger than politics, it’s about societal values and norms. How we value our relationships in relation to the whole. How we care about the people in a two-foot radius and everyone else is disposable.

No, no, we’ll never say these horrible, selfish things out loud. We’ll smother this narrative by punctuating stories of people acting out of empathy and compassion. But make no mistake, it’s there. Simmering beneath the surface. We become more cruel and Darwinian than most and we’re not even in a pressure cooker. The water has only just come to a boil.

The truth is I live in a country fixated on individual wants, where the individual has no problem sacrificing the whole if it means their survival. A country where you can make $100,000 a year and still not afford healthcare. A country where — can you just wear your fucking mask? is actually a thing.

But we do love our status, our finery, our collection of expensive things.

I live in a country where every problem can be solved by a little gumption and a lot of hard work, while conveniently ignoring the systems and structures in place that make it impossible to level the playing field. A country we pillaged and robbed to get, built on the blood and backs of others, and we still won’t admit we haven’t changed much in the centuries since. A country where women have hard-earned rights but we’re reminded how fast we can be raped and murdered in the comments. A country where I can never talk about how I was violently raped in my home because some asshole on the internet will find a way to tell me it was my fault. I’m a victim playing the victim card — how meta.

A country that purports to have come a long way baby when it comes to mental health but will shun those suffering behind the tweets, exhaling that Virginia Slim. A country where making more money is never enough. We are drowning and credit bureaus are deflating the life jackets. It’s your fault, people love to say. Student loans are your fault when hiring managers demand a college degree for a job that pays $15/hour. We love talking about “personal responsibility” when the collective makes it impossible to breathe. I live in a country where people will collapse under a $400 emergency expense and, of course, that’s your fault. It’s always your fault.

Lies are lovely when it suits a narrative.

So, leave! The collective bark affixing their American flag stickers on their bumpers and balling their fists. We do live in a country of fist-ballers — this much is true.

I don’t know where to put myself — where I fit. At the end of last year, I decided to embark on a yearlong journey of traipsing around California, trying to fall deeper in love, in want, of the adopted home in which I live. New York has too much dark history. From a mountain town of 161 people to a home in the high desert where my clothes stained terracotta and gold — all it did was make me yearn for a place to call home.

But what do you do when the only place, country, and continent you’ve known doesn’t feel like home? Where do you go? Where do you live?

There is no shortage of strangers who believe they can repair and fix. My problems are so easy to solve if only they had the opportunity to solve them. They issue their armchair pop psychology and sympathy missives when I never once asked for their advice. As if me documenting this journey to and through myself deserves a neat and tidy resolution after eight minutes of reading. As if I’m not a person in progress trying to find her way home.

Where do you go when you don’t know where to go, but you know it has to be somewhere other than here? This is me, on my knees, tearing through clothes, breaking through my skin, to wrench out my still-beating heart. Blood-soaked hands. A body is a crime scene. All just to know you’re alive. To hear your heart beat.