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It’s 2 AM in Berlin, and I’m at a club when I hear a pop. Fear sobers me instantly. Faces fill with terror, and I drop to the ground. Then I remember—I am in Berlin, not the United States. I get up.
I recalled this moment while riding the train to class. A man boarded, glanced at the passengers, and reached into his bag. My heart stopped, and I ran off the train. I arrived late to school and realized I wasn’t safe here either; a recent shooting had just occurred on a college campus in Michigan. I had a panic attack and sat in the bathroom. Someone ran through the hallway, and for a second, I thought it was happening. It wasn’t.
On May 3, 2023, a mass shooting occurred at a Northside Hospital facility in Midtown Atlanta. Five people were shot, and one died. My dentist’s office is inside Northside Hospital. Ten days later, I got on a plane to move abroad, hoping to leave that anxiety behind. But I was wrong. They don’t get it here. They make jokes about it. At a comedy show in Paris, a guy made a joke about Uvalde. Nineteen children and two adults were killed in a shooting at Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022. But hey, at least they’re reducing their carbon emissions one tiny footprint at a time. The crowd laughed.
I hate when it rains. I hate seeing tall men with hats who have black phone cases and black umbrellas. I always assume the worst. I moved so far away, yet I’m still traumatized. I can’t visit home without envisioning the headline: “Girl moved away to avoid mass shooting, returns to visit her family, is fatally injured in a mass shooting.” No matter how far I move, I am still an American, and all the people I love are American. I get all the news alerts. I worry about the same laws I used to. I often wonder if it even matters that I’m safe when my family isn’t.
I was in Madrid in 2022, pre-gaming for a pub crawl, when I received the notification that Roe v. Wade had been overturned. I wasn’t drinking for fun after that. I was thinking about the 15-year-old girl who was assaulted and is now pregnant; she doesn’t live in Madrid, she lives in Texas. My heart burned. Living abroad, I don’t have to worry about my reproductive rights being taken away. Yet the same news that keeps them up at night keeps me up too.
I have access to affordable healthcare while my mom has to fight for access to heal her own body. I can see a doctor promptly and affordably, get necessary treatments without navigating a convoluted insurance system, and obtain medications without prohibitive costs. It’s heartbreaking to know that my family’s health is compromised by systemic inefficiencies and inequities back home. That guilt is inescapable.
It’s a strange feeling to live in a place where, as a Black woman, I feel safer. I removed myself from proximity, but I can’t erase the fact that more than 97,000 cases of missing Black women were reported in 2022 alone. I don’t have to worry about extreme profiling leading to me being shot. I don’t have to worry about being caught in a sundown town because I’m 65 miles north of Atlanta. I no longer carry the heavy weight of racial divide on my shoulders. But my brothers do, so I hate when they don’t answer the phone.
So yes, I live abroad, but I carry my country with me. The anxieties, the fears, and the constant stream of troubling news are never far away. Whether it’s mass shootings, the loss of rights, inadequate healthcare access, or violence against Black people—these issues continue to affect me and those I love, no matter where I am.
- 22 years old in Berlin, Germany for 534 days
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