Losing My Country
There is no single day when you wake up and find your country gone. The loss is not a sudden shattering but a slow erosion, like watching the shoreline collapse into the sea grain by grain. You stand there, helpless, as the familiar landscape of values, trust, and shared destiny is washed away. What is left behind is foreign, even hostile, though it still carries the same name. That is how it feels to lose one’s country: not through invasion, but through betrayal, neglect, and willful blindness.
I grew up believing my country was imperfect but noble. We told ourselves stories about liberty, equality, and opportunity—not always true in practice, but powerful enough to serve as a compass. People fought, marched, and sacrificed to make those ideals more real. My teachers spoke of civic duty as a calling. My neighbors, whether they voted blue or red, still agreed on basic decency. We believed in the value of education, in protecting the vulnerable, in working hard to make things better for the next generation. That was the promise. That was home.
But promises can be broken. And mine was.
The first crack was trust. I began noticing how truth itself became negotiable, a commodity for sale to the highest bidder. Politicians, media figures, and even ordinary citizens learned that lies traveled faster than facts and paid better dividends. A falsehood, repeated enough times, became the new reality. I saw people I had once respected trade reason for rage, facts for slogans, community for tribe. The shared language of evidence and empathy vanished. Without truth, how could we remain one people?
The second crack was cruelty. It is astonishing how quickly cruelty became fashionable. We were encouraged not to see human beings at the border, but “illegals.” Not families struggling with health care, but “leeches.” Not people of other faiths, but “threats.” To cheer someone’s suffering became a badge of loyalty, a way of showing that you belonged to the right team. When cruelty is no longer a shame but a virtue, the soul of a nation rots. I recognized the stench.
The third crack was power without shame. Guardrails that once protected us—norms, traditions, mutual respect—were deliberately dismantled. Leaders mocked accountability, rewarded corruption, and turned public service into personal enrichment. Instead of inspiring us to rise higher, they taught us to accept the lowest. And still, millions cheered. Perhaps they mistook domination for strength, or perhaps they simply enjoyed seeing others humiliated. Either way, the country I thought I lived in—the one striving toward “a more perfect union”—was slipping through my fingers.
It would be easier if this loss came from outside. If another nation had conquered us, at least I could direct my anger outward. But no, we lost ourselves. We handed over our freedoms in exchange for fear. We traded compassion for resentment. We bartered away the future for cheap victories in the present. That is the most bitter truth: we are not victims of theft but accomplices in our own undoing.
And yet—what do you do when you feel your country slipping away? Do you leave, physically or emotionally? Do you stand and fight for the scraps of decency that remain? Or do you retreat into private life, building a small island of kindness amid the wreckage? Some days I imagine exile, the freedom of walking away. Other days I remind myself that this land is layered with the bones and dreams of generations before me, people who believed enough to plant seeds they would never see bloom. Do I owe them my fight? Or do I owe myself peace?
Perhaps losing one’s country is also a kind of awakening. Maybe what I thought was solid was always fragile, and what I thought was shared was never as universal as I believed. If so, then this grief is not just for what has been destroyed but for the illusion that it was ever whole. That does not make the loss easier, but it makes it clearer.
Still, I cannot shake the memory of what was good—neighbors helping neighbors after storms, strangers holding doors, the quiet decency of ordinary people who never made the news but made life bearable. If those embers remain, maybe the fire can be rekindled. Maybe the country is not entirely lost but waiting, somewhere beneath the rubble, for those willing to dig.
For now, I carry the ache of absence. I walk the same streets, salute the same flag, sing the same anthem—but I know the country I loved is gone, at least for now. What stands in its place feels alien, rough-edged, crueler. That is the heartbreak of losing your country: it keeps the name, but it no longer feels like home.
Julie Bolejack, MBA
