Pour Me A Story, Vol. 5
it's just me and you this time folks, and the good news takes a while to get to
the first time I remember thinking, “oh shit, I’m in way over my head here” in the U.S. was on my third or maybe fourth night here, as an idiot 22-year-old tourist in the summer of 2008.
I’d walked into the men’s room on the casino floor of the now-defunct Hooters Casino in Las Vegas to find myself standing at the sink beside a guy not much older than me who was smoking a joint and rearranging the pistol in the waistband of his sweatpants.
the first time I remember thinking, “oh shit, I’m in way over my head here” as a permanent resident of the U.S. was also during the warmer months, in my first summer in Maine in 2014.
I’d had the good intentions of making an appointment to get a general physical to make sure I wasn’t harboring some dormant medical condition so, armed with my insurance card, I made the rounds of virtually every physician’s office in Augusta, trying to book myself a timeslot to get a check-up. as I wrote at the time:
I must have made 10 phone calls in the space of a morning, and when I didn’t get someone’s voicemail, I got either a confusing rundown of the hoops I had to jump through to be seen by the right physician or a vague date “a few weeks away” when I might get in. Maybe.
All I could think was, “It’s lucky I’m not dying over here.”
It was frustrating to the point that I went through a few minutes of questioning whether I’d done the right thing in making the move here, given it’s likely that at some stage in the next however-many years that I’ll need some sort of medical treatment.
when I finally did get to see a doctor, it came with the assurance that my insurance was going to cover it. of course, three months later I received a notice from a collection agency demanding $200 that I hadn’t paid.
healthcare is one of the creeping-dread things that has followed me from central Maine to South Florida to Colorado over the past seven years, and I’ve always semi-jokingly reasoned “well, at least if something goes seriously wrong I can just fly home and get treated,” as though 24 hours’ worth of travel time would be just so doable during a hypothetical medical emergency.
for those lacking context, I moved here from Australia in 2013 via the diversity visa lottery, which is colloquially known as the green card lottery. visiting the United States was always a fascination of mine growing up, and after spending a month or two out here each year on vacation between 2008 and 2012, I decided I needed to make a run at living and working here to see whether it was the mostly wonderful country I was experiencing on my travels.
well we all know how that turned out, huh? I left Maine for a job in South Florida in the fall of 2015, ended up near broke and working a 5am-2pm newspaper gig and a 5pm-12am restaurant job just to pay the rent, and eventually escaped for Colorado where things have been much better. but of course by the time I arrived in Denver, the spray-tan grifter-in-chief had been in office for three months and things were getting progressively worse for basically everyone in the country who didn’t look like me.
by this point I was determined to complete my journey to full citizenship — I was eligible after five years of permanent residency — so that I could do my part in the democratic process and vote him out in 2020. obviously that wasn’t the singular driving force: I had long, long since decided that while Australia will always be where I’m from, the U.S. is my forever home, and obtaining citizenship was the way I wanted to acknowledge that.
that became a reality in May of 2019, and I was able to say the Pledge of Allegiance with some close friends bearing witness, eat some hot dogs and apple pie for dinner and throw a red, white and blue-decorated party to celebrate.
but ever since then, the question that has filled up my Twitter mentions more frequently than any other has been some version of “you ever think of getting a refund on that citizenship?” and while I always laughed it off as a “haha…fuck” kind of moment, it gave me pause every time. it was confronting to think that the majority of my time living here has been under a president whose governance has raised concerned texts and emails from friends all around the world.
despite the mental unease of the past four years, and the uncertainty of the past few weeks, I’ve never truly considered packing up and moving back to Australia, because my life is firmly rooted here and, as I’ve written about at length over the years, you can’t go home again. not in the metaphorical sense of the word, anyway.
but since two Saturdays ago, that unease has lifted considerably. the results of the election aren’t perfect, and the president- and vice president-elect aren’t the progressives that the marginalized people in this country need fighting for them, but the weight of frequently being asked “wow do you regret getting citizenship here” feels like it’s been lifted from my shoulders.
perhaps it’s naive, or even stupid, but the past two weeks have allowed some hope and relief to sneak through the balled-fists and clenched-jaw mentalities of “how am I going to raise and protect my daughter in a country like this for, at minimum, four more years?” there’s a lot more work to do from top to bottom, but it feels like it’s gonna be a little easier to do now.
and that, friends, is some good news.