Europe, Mama’s Coming!
Michigan, USA - February 2025
ep, I'm ready! I've shuffled around the states a lot in the last several months, spending time with family, But I'm super anxious to get back to traveling abroad. I stayed home wayyyy longer than I planned. One situation after another arose and kept me here. Fortunately, things are back on course, and I leave the beginning of March. I couldn't be more excited.
"Home". It just doesn't have the same meaning to me anymore. I've always been a homebody, and a proud Neapolitan, Floridian, and American. I love my beautiful hometown. But now I find I need to love it from a distance. To be completely honest, the entire country. I find myself struggling here. Angry, frustrated, worried, sad. Our political situation is appalling. I'm not a fan of this administration. At all. I'm a fan of kindness and looking out for one another, of helping the disadvantaged and disenfranchised, of leading with love, of equality and fairness. There is an enormous lack of those things in our current government, which seems fanatical about greed and destruction. Where billionaires rule with no regard to the plight of others. I fear for my children and grandchildren. For women and young girls, for our LGBTQI friends and family, for our immigrants and for our people of color. There are a lot of people in my family that disagree with me. Some friendships have been strained, some even failed. I regularly voice my disdain of the administration and their policies on social media.
I have so much more in common with the people I've encountered in Europe. My values seem to align more with them. I don't even want to get started on the gun violence here. It's incomprehensible! And deplorable. America is gun crazy and completely uninterested in any regulation that would save lives. So, I'm fleeing the US. Sadly, that's not a joke. I just really don't want to live here anymore. I want to live where I can be happy, safe, and welcome. I also plan to spend quite a bit of my time in Canada each year. Montreal to be specific, where the people seem to share the same moral code as me. Where I can feel at "home" again.
But first, a couple of months in France! CAN'T WAIT!!