I have left before. More times than I wanted to, more times than I planned — but I always knew I was leaving. I always knew I hadn’t found it yet. I was waiting.
Covid gave me something I hadn’t had before: time to sit still and actually look at my life. That happened to a lot of us. The world stopped and in the quiet, I could finally hear myself think. I looked at what I had, what I wanted, what was possible — and for the first time, I had enough resources to actually plan rather than just survive into the next thing.
I knew it wasn’t California. And I knew I wouldn’t find it while I was still there. So I sold the house in two weeks, gave away or stored almost everything I owned, and got in a van with my dog Edison. We spent fourteen months exploring the United States. Edison and I covered a lot of ground together.
Then we found Asheville.
It was immediately home. I knew it the way you know the things that don’t require explanation. After three months in a hotel I was signing papers on a house in the mountains. A few years later my body made a decision my mind hadn’t quite gotten to yet — it became clear I couldn’t maintain my health and stay in the corporate world. That wasn’t a choice so much as a reckoning. But even that landed with unexpected grace, because I had the resources to retire early and build the life I actually wanted.
I spent my life in true Gen X form, figuring it out as I go. It has been a journey of win some, learn some. But this time, for the first time, I was deliberate. For the first time, I let myself believe it was permanent. I built a community. I found my people. I planted things. I learned the rhythms of the place. I stopped planning the next move because there wasn’t going to be one.
I let myself trust that.
I need to tell you something about my relationship to this country before I tell you the rest.
My father was an Army Colonel. My mother hung the American flag outside our door every single day until she passed away. I do the same. Because I was raised to believe that whatever this country’s failures — and they are real and they are many — its Constitution contained a promise. A more perfect union. Not a perfect one. A more perfect one. The work was always unfinished. That was the point.
My family has been doing that work since the beginning. I have relatives who fought in the Revolutionary War. The Civil War. World War I. World War II. I was a military wife — married to an Air Force pilot who became a disabled veteran. I took ten years to finish a four-year degree because every time his orders required us to relocate, I lost credits and had to start over. I graduated anyway and carried the student debt of ten years because that was what you did. I kept going. I believed it was worth it.
Every single one of my ancestors who put on a uniform was fighting against exactly what this country is becoming.
I want to be precise about that. Not hyperbolic. Precise.
The slow financial erosion.
On January 1st of this year, I lost my health insurance.
For the first time in sixty years, I do not have basic health coverage. The ACA subsidy structure — the tax credits that made insurance affordable for people in my income bracket — was dismantled. I make too much for Medicaid and not enough to absorb the cost without the credit. The lowest tier of coverage available to me runs over $1,300 a month.
Energy, groceries, gasoline, insurance, and products are all increasing. We all feel it, the cost of living is outpacing what anyone could have reasonably planned for.
Then April brought the new assessment on my house. The assessed value increased 83%. Yes, 83%. Asheville has been a relocation destination over the last few years. This area is a haven for great weather, the arts, nature, and beauty. This influx is increasing the property values and outpacing the income of locals.
But there is another beat to this story. You may remember how hurricane Helene ravaged this area, we are still rebuilding nearly 2 years later. The county delayed the reassessment a year to allow us time to rebuild and repair — then increased the assessed value 83%. The downstream impact is raising property taxes and homeowners insurance rates. More financial erosion.
I am not leaving seeking a great tropical adventure. The ground was pulled out from under me. By policy. By people who will never feel the consequences of the decisions they made.
I am angry about this. I want to say that plainly. I am grieving a life I built carefully and deliberately, and I am furious at being pushed out of it. I let myself trust permanence for the first time in my life. I’m not sure I’ll be able to do that so easily again.
My journey to this realization did not start with contemplating leaving. It started with something that is born in my Scottish roots, to fight. I threw myself into the resistance. I helped build a grassroots organization. I showed up to protests with my dog. I wrote and ghostwrote for frontline fighters. I pushed back. I believed for a long time that the tipping point was close and that pressure was going to be contagious.
The reality is that I am losing ground too fast and the tipping point seems further away. People are awakening, starting to think about this moment, but I have had too many engagements that show the urgency isn’t rising to meet the moment in the timeline I need. To be clear, that is not a statement of blame. It is a strategic reality for my draining resources.
The last thing in the world I thought I would be doing as a sixty year old is seriously — seriously — considering leaving my country. A country defended by generations of my family, a country I love.
My mom was fond of saying, when the going gets tough, the tough gets going. I never loved that phrase. It always carried a message of grinding through with grit and force. But the sentiment is a powerful one. I am making it my own — when the going gets tough, the tough gets going. So she left. Pura vida.
So, lifting my eyes to the horizon, Costa Rica keeps rising to the top of possibilities. The Central Valley. Mountain communities. A life that might be smaller and wilder and more honest. I am researching. I am having conversations. I am asking hard questions and sitting with the answers. I have not packed a single box. I have not had all the conversations I need to have. I do not know yet how you actually do this — navigate a foreign visa, move a dog with separation anxiety across an international border, start completely over at sixty in a country whose language you are just beginning to learn.
I don’t have those answers yet. I am finding them in real time.
Part of me already knows where this is going. Another part of me isn’t ready to say it definitively. I am holding both of those things at once and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
Liam doesn’t know what’s coming. He just knows we go everywhere together.
This is that journey, documented as it happens.
The logistics and the grief. The moments when something lands so perfectly it almost makes sense of all of it, and the moments that go so sideways it challenges everything I believe in. What it actually costs — practically, financially, emotionally — to consider leaving a country your family has served since its founding, because that country has made it impossible to stay.
Edison got me to Asheville. Liam is going to get me to what I hope is finally, genuinely, permanently home.
I’m not writing from the other side. I’m writing from inside the question.
If you want to walk alongside, you found the right place.
— Bonnie