Becoming an American Refugee

Identifying as an American refugee isn’t something I thought I would ever have to do, let alone become.

But here I am.

This isn’t about politics, though the darkness consuming America is impossible to ignore. This isn’t wanderlust or some romanticized expat fantasy.

This is survival.

It started with the work. Years of social activism and racial justice organizing that demanded everything from me. I showed up, held space, fought battles that left marks most people will never see. By 2021, my body had taken so much damage that I was formally diagnosed with PTSD - not from a single traumatic event, but from the systematic breaking down that happens when you refuse to look away from what’s destroying people.

I thought New York City would be my breakthrough. A fresh start. A place to rebuild and create something meaningful.

Instead, it became my breaking point.

The city that promises everything delivered systematic brutality - energetic attacks, toxic relationships, the complete dismantling of everything I’d tried to build. My body became the battlefield. The trauma didn’t just live in my mind - it manifested as documented injuries, chronic pain, medical conditions that doctors could see but couldn’t fully explain.

I have the receipts. Emergency room visits. Diagnoses. Physical evidence of what happens when you become the target and your body absorbs the hit.

For six years, I’ve been in the midst of complete destruction. The financial collapse. The health crises. The loss of everything I’d worked for. And through all of it, the people who were supposed to show up didn’t. Family offered zero empathy. Friends disappeared. I was left to fight battles most people don’t even have language for, completely alone.

Eventually New York spit me out. Broke and broken, I had no choice but to return to Ohio. Back to my parents’ house. Back to living behind a curtain wall, watching the same toxic family patterns play out that had damaged me in the first place.

The months that followed were daily energetic warfare just to survive. I woke up hours early every morning to clear attacks before my parents woke up. Salt baths. Protection rituals. Frequency healing. My body kept score of all of it - the hip injuries, the wrist damage, the chronic pain doctors could document but couldn’t explain.

My nervous system was so fried that solar storms and lunar cycles would knock me completely flat. Some mornings I woke up feeling like I’d been poisoned, forced to spend entire days doing full-body energetic cleansing just to exist.

So I’m leaving.

Not because I want adventure. Because staying means accepting my own destruction.

I’m not the only one. There’s a growing wave of people realizing the same thing - that the systems we’re living in (family, financial, governmental) were never built for us. That trying to survive within them means getting consumed by them instead.

We’re the ones who refuse to dim our light to make others comfortable. Who won’t pretend the darkness isn’t real. Who see clearly what’s happening and won’t play along anymore.

This is my story of extraction. Of refusing to be killed slowly by a country that wanted me small, silent, and compliant.

If you’re reading this and something resonates - if you’ve also felt like you’re fighting battles no one else can see, if you’ve been labeled difficult or crazy for refusing to accept what’s destroying you, if you’re wondering whether there’s actually a way out -

You’re in the right place.

I’m going to tell you everything. The whole fucking truth about what it takes to liberate yourself when everything wants you to stay trapped.

Starting now.