JTK says - So you're moving to Canada, eh?
Life has taken a bit of a left turn
A tale in two tweets: Life comes at you fast. One minute you are giving fun, slutty advice, the next minute you are contemplating an unexpected move to Canada. Apparently, with non-location-adjusted-pay!
But more seriously, this is not what I wanted to be doing right now
This was supposed to be my zen moment, after being done over a year of full-time school. For once, I have nowhere to climb. If the happiness I've generally felt in my life lately means I've "peaked", it is not a half-bad peak.
At one point I thought after finishing my degree I'd do the whole Google-algo-hustle and try to get a FAANG job. Such has my contentment been with my job and house and life, I decided not to pursue it. My job is wonderful. And I'm probably happier in humble Durham, NC than I would be off in the SF rat race.
I was trying to lean into contentment.
And then the draft opinion was leaked indicating that the nearly fifty-year legal precedent of abortion law set out in Roe v Wade was likely to be reversed.
Immediately, concerns spiraled about the implications for privacy and other rights we have come to expect in a "civilized" country (sarcasm). It is easy to say people were being hysterical, but even easier to smack down that idea as instantaneously, laws criminalizing miscarriage or IUDs rapidly were put forward.
I felt shock and flashes of fiery defiance, and my first response was something along the lines of "fuck all y'all I'm getting my tubes tied, you will not for a second control my body".
In some parallel universe, some parallel version of me sticks with that initial decision, and the rest never happens.
I used to understand conservatives
From 2000 to 2008 I lived in such a conservative area that me and the other handful of lefty kids/families just learned to mostly shut up. It wasn't worth infuriating myself, I mostly just worried about teenage stuff with my politically opposite peers and on my own coped through copious watchings of The Colbert Report, etc.
I don't know what to make of where we are now.
I don't remember ANYONE gunning for no abortions regardless of the life of the mother back then, even though they were all ardently pro-life. I don't remember ANYONE gunning for no abortions for underage minors in case of assault. It wasn't even on the table.
What is different here to me, is the spirit of violence. Punishment.
The punitive extremes now being treated like normal ideas. Making women carry nonviable pregnancies to term, risking sepsis. Criminalizing people leaving the state if they may be seeking abortions. Criminalizing IUDs(!).
The one that is the most unconscionable to me though, is the seemingly new argument that even minors, victims of assault sometimes from their own family, should be forced to carry a child to term. These ideas are physically nauseating, and morally revolting.
As the days went on, my defiance and commitment to sterilization waned and faltered. It took me some time to pinpoint why.
America was worried about sharia law when it should have been worried about Westboro Baptist law
As the days went on, I realized my grimly defiant commitment to tubal ligation was not the ace in the hole I imagined. Recovery up to three months in some cases. I live alone and would need to manage that for this surgery that I hadn't planned for or particularly wanted.
I'm forever-ever-ever child-free, but I live by myself. I'd considered tubal ligation but surgery was never convenient, and yeah - it is kinda a big deal.
As the days went on after Roe, something chilling occurred to me.
I lose no matter what here.
Sure I can get a tubal ligation, but for what? To live under a government where extremist Christian ideology means people can basically carry out a witch hunt for people with IUDs, like me? Pay taxes to an extremist right-wing propaganda monster whose laws are not representative in this joke of a representative democracy?
I realized sure, I can rush into a tubal ligation I wasn't planning for but guess what? If I do?
I realized with a chill, it is STILL coercion. It is still a loss of control over my body to go that route. Aggressively rushing into surgery because of my legal autonomy collapsing rapidly against long-held legal precedent is a legitimate cause to be more than concerned.
I know it seems like a laughably small inconvenience to get a safe surgery when the other bad outcomes on the table are women literally dying, and children being forced to bear children against their will. But while although my situation is far less grim, it is still not okay.
EITHER of them is too far. EITHER of them is reprehensible.
I am still privileged, and I do have options - but I realized no matter what, I lose here. I lose money, time, peace of mind, body parts, or alternately I lose the only country I've ever lived in, where all my family reside and have to chart out alone to somewhere new.
One of those losses, I am prepared to bear.
I know how it sounds, but I'm off. Seriously.
I know how it sounds. Maybe it does sound like the hyperbolic, grandiose ideas of people upset by Trump's win. Maybe you secretly laugh a little to yourself at my improbable mission after hearing all your blowhard relatives rant over Thanksgiving about relocating to Europe, only to never follow through.
I get it - "Fuck all y'all I'm moving to Canada" is like the adult US version of screaming at your parents as a teenager that you hate them and are going to run away. Probably many, maybe most? People who threatened to escape to the great white north probably did not go far with their plans or intentions and so it is easy to write off this idea as me being dramatic or ridiculous.
I don't know what to say other than, I'm built different.
People asked me, over all these years getting the degree, all the toil, all the missed fun, all the lost weekends, all the boring assignments, all the contrived coding: why bother? You work in the field already. Literally two months out of school and having finished is part of my ticket out of here. I guess now I know what it was for.
My path forward is steep but clear. It will be expensive, time-consuming, and in some ways heartbreaking. My house in Durham is the single place I've probably been happiest in my life outside of my childhood home in Baltimore. Financially, it will be hugely expensive. When I moved here, I had two dogs. I now have a dog and two cats, and no earthly idea how to manage moving them. I bear guilt that I'm the one that CAN leave considering I'm not the absolute worst off. But there's not really the capacity to even out this vastly unfair system of life advantages and disadvantages as one individual. No amount of donations or phone banking can make the Canadian immigration system re-score someone more deserving with the points my specific skill/age/financial profile gets me right now.
So I'm playing the hand I was dealt, for myself and my own way out.
Determined as I am, I'm a little heartbroken
I know plenty of people who let off steam after Trump's win, probably the majority of the people I've heard express intent to leave this country. I was not one of them. I saw an existential threat, but I thought who better than me to stay and fight? I have always chosen to live in purple states so my vote counts. I have some privilege (white, able bodied, financially secure for at least the past couple years). I truly believed Trump would be horrific but I thought I was the right person to stay. I thought people as privileged as me SHOULD be the ones to stay and deal with the mess we created (looking at you white women voters in 2016).
I don't know if that's true anymore.
As someone who is not Christian, being coercively legislated into some extreme right wing version of Christian morality feels more violating than I can explain. I know it is hard for people on the fence about kids, in some ways more so - it may be murkier for them whether a tubal ligation is the right call, but I have a deep, long held near-phobia of pregnancy. I will apologize in advance for this next unfiltered opinion which I know is unusual, unique to me, and will probably sounds crazy to some of my wonderful parents out there, but:
My phobia of pregnancy makes the idea of something sharing my body like a horror move. Like a parasite. Like a yeerk from Animorphs would be as welcome in my body. It completely repulses me, I feel honestly queasy even thinking about it. I don't know why I'm wired that way but I am. The thought of not having a decision is as scary as any thought I can imagine. The thought of having a miscarriage and being forced to basically rot from the inside out and face sepsis and not receive appropriate treatment --
It is all horror.
The idea of sharing my choices with a religion I don't follow is also abhorrent. I am not only not Christian, I am actively unchristian. I don't care how anyone feels about that. I am not willing to live under any theocracy but certainly not the one we've got in the works in the US right now.
So yeah, think I'm being melodramatic, think I'm overreacting, think I'll fail.
Ultimately, the only opinions I need to care about are those of whatever Canadian bureaucrats let me in.
I wouldn't be me if I wasn't willing to be bold
At first, this decision felt out of left field. It has simmered and hardened into steely tendrils of constant thought, planning, calculating, scheming, and analyzing. Sometimes I think I'm overrated, or not really as smart as others think, but I admit I have been stunned to see the full resourcefulness of my mind united and focused so singularly. It was a little like watching once-ephemeral vines of ideas harden suddenly into jagged, ruthless iron spires.
It will happen to the extent my own steam can make it happen. If Canada says "Thanks, but no", not much my will can do about that other than become an international squatter, and I uh, hear that's frowned on.
As of my writing this, some - hopeful, delusional? - writers are preemptively inventing a rosier future, insisting a late-stage reversal of the reversal of Roe is still possible. I imagine if I didn't have a uterus maybe I could just think happy thoughts about all this.
My assumption is that Roe will die.
I don't think I consistently fall into "glass half empty" or "glass half full", I'm kind of "glass is what it is" sort of gal. And that's my take.
But what if it doesn't happen? What if I could go on living my life the way I had previously planned?
I don't think I will.
I semi-recently dated someone very politically preoccupied, honestly sort of bitter to a level that didn't seem completely healthy. I used to ask them, why not channel those feelings, volunteer, do something? They weren't interested. That is the opposite of how I want to operate.
Fuck if I'm going to stay here after this. If the court surprisingly reverses itself, great I have more time to make a decision on logistics/specifics. If Canada rejects me, darn - this is harder than I thought but oh well.
It will be an adventure
After some moping about the hard parts, I think I'm ready. Maybe at absolute level I'm not "glass half full" but I try to be.
My beautiful, wonderful house is very lorge. It has been a lot to manage and could probably make some family out there very happy. By selling it, I could wipe out all my debt and still have a nice six figure amount to invest or use on a new property. Durham is the closest I have had in the US to feeling like I have a "home", but I remember how much I love each new country and city I visit. Maybe my boldness will find me something I love even more.
While sometimes I feel like my intelligence is overblown in how others see me, that is not true of my determination. Others pick up on that, but I don't know if they know the extent.
I don't know that there is much more powerful than my decisions, once I've made them.
So far as I can tell, they are a law unto themselves. In a way, there's some small peace in that, some small relief. Nice try US legal system, but the severe limitlessness of my mind and will are truly powerful enough to defeat your designs on my life and liberties.
Maybe I still sound like a drama queen. I'm not, and oh well.
I'm a little scared, I'm a little sad: but I'm very ready.