How it feels to be in Europe right now

Hoping for the best but expecting the worst

I spend a fair amount of time hanging out in online forums about the practicalities of living abroad. They’re the place to go if, for instance, you’re hunting for pumpkin pie ingredients, need to understand the Dutch school system, or can’t figure out how to read your Italian gas meter.

After every U.S. election (no matter the outcome), these forums receive an influx of Americans wanting help to flee the country, or even claim asylum abroad. Setting aside the stringent qualifications for political asylum (and the millions of people in real, desperate need for it worldwide), I totally get the feeling of wanting to leave. For me it didn’t even take an election, or any other precipitating event. Some of us are just restless souls.

So yes, I’m the last person to say you can’t profoundly change your life by changing your surroundings. And moving to Europe ranks high among the best and most consequential decisions of my life. If I had it to do it over, I would absolutely claw my way across the Atlantic Ocean as many times as it took to finally stay. Which, in fact, is what I did.

After nine years, do I still experience culture shock? Yes. Feel lonely on occasion? Yes. Get all maudlin and melancholic about spending holidays far from family? Yes. Fantasise about moving back to the United States? Nope, absolutely not. Never.

This is not an exaggeration. Nor is it particularly a virtue. It’s simply the truth. I know I’m a bit of an anomaly in this. And I do try not to make myself obnoxious in social situations where people are talking about homesickness and what they miss. Sometimes I even pretend to be dying for proper mac & cheese, or “home” just to be sociable.

But I’m not.

The truth is, I don’t miss the United States. It doesn’t even feel like home, if it ever did. Europe does.

I know, I know. Europe is a varied continent, a cornucopia of languages and cultures. But I’ve lived in three different European countries, and visited a dozen more (about the same number as U.S. states where I’ve lived and visited), and in every one I feel more at home than in the country of my birth.

Which I guess makes you wonder what I even mean by “feel at home.” Maybe it’s that I’ve spent over half my adult life abroad, so being the foreigner is what home feels like for me now. Maybe it’s that I’m a bit obsessed with beautiful architecture and European café culture; from Prague to Paris, from Valletta to Copenhagen, I think fondly of cappuccinos and pastries I’ve shared an hour with in a picturesque café.

Maybe it’s just that I feel safe here. Robust work contracts, great health insurance, social safety net; I’ve slowly gotten used to feeling safe in a way I didn’t know was possible before. And I like the feeling.

At least I did feel safe. Most times I still do. But these days that feeling of security sometimes gets rudely interrupted by an alarming turn in how the war is going. Yes, there’s a war on here. And by “here” I mean on the Continent.

It’s true that sometimes the war in Ukraine feels far away. And it is, by some measures: about as far away as if I were in California, watching war rage in Texas. Which sometimes feels far too close.

It felt close in the months after the war started, when Ukraine rocketed to victory in Eurovision 2022, with Kalush Orchestra’s rousing ballad, “Stephania.” The song is by turns a rap, by turns a lullaby, a heart-wrenching ode to the band’s mothers and their motherland.

Ukraine was on Europe’s mind then, and we were behind her. A few weeks after their victory at Eurovision, Kalush Orchestra performed the song again in Amsterdam, outdoors on Museumplein, where they shared a stage with several Eurovision performers from other countries, who’d been recruited to the cause. When they projected a QR code on the stage and asked for donations for the war effort, we all pitched in on the spot. This was one of dozens of similar concerts across Europe. It felt like solidarity, like we were united as a continent.

That same week, my neighbour across the street put up a shiny new Ukrainian flag. This is a closeup of how that flag looks now—tattered almost to shreds through two stormy northern European winters. I can’t look at it without seeing the metaphor.

The more this war drags on, the more it starts to feel like the Europe of the World War II stories I read as a child. My grandparents’ reality, not mine. It’s like we switched timelines while I wasn’t looking.

One of the first things the Russians did in the early days of the invasion was to take control of Chernobyl, where vast quantities of nuclear waste are still stored. It was a startling footnote in an alarming week, though the amount of radioactive dust they kicked up in the fighting really wasn’t much.

The next time the war felt close was when the Russians started shelling right next to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which unlike Chernobyl, was still in use. Things were touch and go, with fires breaking out perilously near the plant, and the staff overworked and sleep-deprived to breaking point.

That was the week I looked online for potassium iodide tablets and found them sold out across the Netherlands and nearby European countries. Potassium iodide is the thyroid-protecting medication governments routinely give out to people living within a certain radius of nuclear power plants, so that in case of an incident they can take them right away. There’s not huge demand for these pills otherwise, so I don’t think it took especially large numbers of paranoid people like me to cause a shortage.

I tracked down some potassium iodide eventually, along with a portable chemical toilet I imagined we could take down to our basement along with the extra canned food I always keep around. In the absence of a bunker, apparently a concrete basement is the safest place to hole up during the dangerous hours and days after a nuclear event. I learned this from a 1960’s U.S. government pamphlet. Because this is vintage Cold War subject matter.

If you want to sleep at night, don’t do what I do, which is keep tabs on what the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says about the ongoing risks surrounding Zaporizhzhia. It’s appalling on several fronts. Suffice it to say that they sum it up, “We are living on borrowed time when it comes to nuclear safety and security at the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant. Unless we take action to protect the plant, our luck will sooner or later run out.”

And that’s just in case of accident. As seems obvious once the IAEA points it out to you, the most catastrophic thing that could happen at Zaporizhzhia is a direct nuclear strike.

Of course, a direct nuclear strike anywhere would count as fully catastrophic. And since we’re imagining possible targets, just for funsies, which ones close to home might be likely? Well, let’s give it a moment’s thought. The largest port in Europe, perhaps? Rotterdam: 60 miles from me. The International Criminal Court, which last year issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin? The Hague, 30 miles from me.

At this juncture, you or some other sane person might point out that this sounds like an anxiety spiral. To which I’d respond that definitely, yes, it does. I’m aware that what I should really do is accept that nuclear war is outside my sphere of control, and just live my life. Which mostly is what I do. After all, have you ever heard me mention this before? Mostly, I keep it on the down-low, or at least between myself and my therapist.

What’s also outside my control is a more conventional war. I wish I were the only one thinking about this, because then it would be easier to chalk it up to anxiety-brain again. But I’m not. Last week, everyone in Sweden received this pamphlet in the mail:

You can download it here if you like.

The pamphlet does not explicitly reference the war in Ukraine. It does say that “military threat levels are increasing.” It references other types of attacks like “cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns, terrorism, and sabotage,” and without specifying which, informs the public that “some are happening here and now.”

It covers the fact that everyone ages 16 to 70 is “part of Sweden’s total defence and required to serve in the event of war or the threat of war.” And then goes on to explain how to seek shelter in an air raid, and what to store at home or have on hand in case of evacuation.

A lot of this, like storing food, water, and candles, is useful preparedness for any disaster. I learned about these things growing up in California with the threat of earthquakes, and living through hurricane season in Florida. But the tone of the pamphlet certainly skews toward war.

I’m sure the Swedish government had been preparing this pamphlet for awhile, but it just happened to come out the same week the U.S. authorized Ukraine to strike Russia with long-range missiles and Putin changed Russia’s nuclear doctrine.

Finland, Norway and Denmark have made similar information available to their citizens. The Netherlands has not. For one thing, we don’t share a border with Russia (though neither do Sweden and Denmark). It’s a balance, of course, between making sure people are prepared and trying not to panic the populace.

On an individual level, how worried people are seems to correlate pretty heavily with how far east in Europe they’re from, even if they live here. Ask a Pole or a Romanian, and you might get a very different answer from a Western European. That said, the distance between me and countries that view a Russian invasion as a distinct and terrifying possibility is getting worryingly short. What if you’re in California, and instead of war in Texas, it’s war in Arizona or Nevada?

Even I don’t imagine that the entire continent of Europe will be engulfed by war tomorrow. That’s not how war generally works, not on this continent, at least. If history is any guide, you really do see it coming. Not weeks or months before, but years. And that’s what I wonder about over the long term.

Thus far, when it comes to continent-(or world-)wide conflagrations, the Pax Europeana of the European Union has held. It’s not time yet to say that the lamps are going out all over Europe. I fervently hope it won’t come to that at all.

Still, you don’t need a clinical diagnosis of anxiety to see that there’s a non-zero possibility of a wider war in Europe within the next few years. Which is why I’m a little surprised that I haven’t seen much discussion about it in expat forums about moving to Europe.

I’m certainly not discouraging anyone from following their dreams. But if you’re across the Atlantic making a life plan involving a move to Europe, I’m here to tell you that once you cross that ocean, Ukraine might feel closer than you think. What that means in a concrete sense remains to be seen. I guess this is partially just an example of all the tradeoffs—known and unknown—people make when they move abroad. This set of problems for another; and whether you leave or stay, the future remains uncertain.

That said, I’d really love to know: do people thinking about moving here consider the potential for war? If you’re here already, are you thinking about it and just not talking about it (like me, till now)? Or is most everyone else out there blissfully unconcerned with all of this? If that’s you, by all means don’t let me stop you from carrying on with your psychologically healthy life. I’m just here to spread a little holiday angst.

Speaking of which, Happy Thanksgiving! This year I’m grateful for peace in our time, however tenuous, and however long it lasts. I’m grateful for all the precious moments that shine brighter the more fragile they feel. And I guess I’m a bit more grateful even than usual for that American passport in my back pocket.

How luminous the landscape seen across

the crystal lens of an impending loss!

– Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Note: I wrote this post back in November, but I’ve left it pinned, because sadly, the feeling hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s grown stronger. The Netherlands now has a dedicated website called Denk Vooruit (“Think Ahead”) detailing potential disaster risks and how to prepare.

And if you’d like more from me, here’s my latest post on the topic: