What living abroad has taught me about empathy, community, and our inability to decenter ourselves Since moving to Romania, I've become frustrated by something I never noticed quite so prominently when I lived in America: how difficult it seems to be for Americans to step outside their own experiences. We talk endlessly about empathy, compassion, and understanding, yet we often show remarkably little curiosity about how other people live, what they struggle with, or how our o

A year ago, I wrote about why I chose Romania. I wrote about democracy indexes and homicide rates, immigration pathways and cost of living. I wrote about the Carpathians reminding me of the Appalachians, about history that was still being lived instead of preserved behind museum glass, and about choosing my home carefully because I couldn’t afford to uproot my life over again. I still believe in all of that research. Maybe even more than I did then. But a year is long enough

We moved to Romania thinking the house would follow us. That was the plan: leave, list, sell, move forward. Clean. Simple. That's the kind of transition you imagine when you are still in the part of deciding that follows orders. But the reality we walked was harsher. The renovations stalled. The listing got delayed. When the house finally went up, there were four walkthroughs. Four. We dropped the price by seventy thousand dollars and still the house sat. Empty. The sixty tho

No one is entitled to me. Not my presence, not my voice, not my endurance. And I am entitled to seek my own safety, even when that inconveniences someone else, even when it disrupts something they were counting on, even when they never quite forgive me for it. I did not always know that. I had to learn it. Over and over, though each chapter wore a different face. Nobody told me I had to stay. Not directly. Not using words. It's all subtle. A hesitation when I mentioned leavin

The loneliest I have ever been, I was also the most visible. I was posting, sharing, building something. Or maybe trying to. A career from a story, a platform from a belief system, a community from an algorithm. I was shouting into the internet about things I genuinely cared about, trying to help people, trying to matter in the way American culture tells you mattering is supposed to look: reach, engagement, followers, impact you can measure on a dashboard. And I was desperate