Do I really want to leave America?



Credit to periphery72271for this thoughtful response to an American looking to escape overseas.

"The thing I don't even think Americans realize sometimes is that your nation is BIG. Inside it contains nearly every type of environment, physical mental and social that exists on this planet. You can live in crushing proximity to millions of people in a smog coated metroplex or on a snow washed desolate plain with no neighbors, smog or anything besides plants and animals.

You want to live in tropical paradise? We got that. Want to live in the desert? Got that. Mountains, vast green verdant rolling hills, arctic ice plains, crystalline blue waters, hot sticky jungle and swamps, centers of technology and culture or places in mountain hollows that will take you back 50 years in both culture and lifestyle.

If you don't like bible belt Christianity, fine. Move to Berkeley, California, Dearborn, Michigan, freaking New York, upper or lower. Want great schools? Try Minneapolis. Great colleges? Live in Virginia and you are near some of the best the US has to offer. Need a little time away from just...people? Head up to Fairbanks, Alaska for a while.

The point is, the OP didn't need to go to the UK to find a new life, all he needed was a few tanks of gasoline and a desire, and he could've changed his life so radically that he would've forgotten DFW forever. That's without a passport or immigration issues.

If you live in the US and have something to offer, don't leave. What you're looking for is still right here, where you were born, you just have to do the work to find it. I have lived in every major region of the continental US, and what has amazed me and still does to this day is how granular and fine tuned you can tweak your life here in America.

You can be dead certain somewhere, someone is living the exact life you want to live, and they're looking for or don't mind neighbors. Whatever you think an American is? There are thousands, millions of people living completely opposite lives and still are citizens, and no, not oppressed desperate minorities, but people that run their communities and have lives they enjoy.

Or hate, America is pretty good at letting you be as miserable as you can get, too. And if you want to experience a new kind of Hell, you can imprison yourself, literally, if you prefer, in places that are everything you despise about humans.

The op hated his surroundings and took the first out he found. Fine. If you're trying to get out, that's okay, too. But realize you don't have to. Whatever you are, you can be it in America and there is a place for you. That's not rah-rah bullshit, it's truth. You name any overriding personality or life trait and I can probably tell you where to go to meet people like you who will accept whatever you are. Not just small groups of people, but possibly whole cultural subsets who will embrace you, or at the very least leave you the hell alone.

I dig my country. Not the flag-waving because I was born here stuff, but because I've traveled it a little bit and actually love the people, the places, the climates, the cultures...I don't know what the UK is like, but man, I know the US is amazing. Amazingly beautiful, amazingly horrifying, but always amazing.

It's everything I could ever want, and at the same time it's the worst nightmare I could ever conceive of. But most of all, it's my freedom to choose where on that continuum I choose to be.

Stop listening to me, to Reddit, to the TV, to anyone else. Start moving. If you've tried a few places in the US, really, honestly looked for people like you all over the country, even our island and arctic states and can't find a home that will take you in and love you? Fine, take off. I was wrong, you were right to want out, peace and long life.

At least you were free to do it. And that, in the end, is the real point. Whatever you tell others, and whatever they tell you. In America, we really are free."