Escaping America on America’s Birthday: A July 4th Confession from Portugal

Happy July 4th! I think?

Being an American abroad is always an exercise in perspective. But this July 4th, it feels like an exercise in crisis management – a reminder that while I’m thousands of miles away, the turmoil back home is escalating. The intense stress doesn’t dilute with distance. If anything, it concentrates, like cheap wine left too long in the sun.

Here I am, tucked into a sun-bleached corner of Portugal – where nobody is wearing star-spangled anything, contemplating whether I should even acknowledge the holiday. The locals are eating sardines and living their lives, completely unbothered, and here I am doom-scrolling between bites of pastéis de nata.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate where I’m from. I do. 

The Intense Stress Of Loving A Country From Far Away

Hey, this girl from Iowa, grew up on the mythology of fireworks, the reverence for freedom so grand it had its own annual festival of hot dogs and excessive flag decor. But this year, watching the strife from a safe European distance, I’m aware of just how complicated it feels to celebrate something as broad and unwieldy as “America.” 

 It lands in my chest like the kind of grief and loss that has no name, this strange mourning for something that hasn’t technically died but doesn’t feel alive either. And it pokes at those emotional triggers you thought you outgrew, all those July 4ths where the world still felt simple enough to wave a flag without flinching.

I remember being a kid, sparkler in hand, genuinely believing the whole thing. Now I’m sitting in Portugal wondering when exactly that belief got replaced by dread.

People here don’t much care that it’s America’s birthday. On July 4th, sunny, warm Southern Portugal keeps going as it always does: cafes full of locals nursing espressos, tourists squinting at tiled facades, the Atlantic exhaling salt air over our Lagos harbor. Nobody is arguing about politics over the bread basket. Nobody is bracing for a Supreme Court ruling between appetizers.

No fireworks displays in the evening, no parades down the main streets. If I were to walk around with an American flag t-shirt, I suspect the response would be a polite curiosity (maybe a little bemused pity these days). Because what exactly are we celebrating? Freedom?! Not now, when America is turning inside-out on itself. 

That kind of overwhelm that just sits in your body doesn’t care about time zones or tiled Portuguese facades. It follows you to the cafe, to the beach, to the pillow at night. You walk around with this invisible stress nobody else can feel and order another espresso like everything’s fine, smiling at the waiter while your phone buzzes with another headline you’re afraid to read.

Freedom?! Not Now

How do we toast to liberty when civil rights feels SO VERY fragile? How do you wave a flag when it has become, in many contexts, less a unifying emblem than a tribal signal? These are pressing questions whether you’re inside or outside the country’s gravitational pull.  

Underneath all the noise there is a fear that just won’t stop getting louder, the kind you don’t bring up at barbecues or family dinners because nobody wants to be that person who ruins the potato salad with existential panic. These are pressing questions whether you’re inside or outside the country’s gravitational pull. They sit right next to old trauma that was already there before the news got this bad, the stuff we shoved into a drawer and hoped would stay put. Turns out the drawer doesn’t lock. It never did.

And so, if we…  No – I really mean if I am to celebrate July 4th here in Portugal, it can’t be the performative pageantry we know historically. It has to be something more introspective, more honest – an intention, or perhaps a prayer.

What I actually want is some kind of emotional liberation from this weight, though I’m not convinced a sparkler and a hamburger are going to get me there. Not this year. Maybe not for a while. As humans, we need rituals to tether us to time and place. But “celebrating” (or let’s say “observing”) July 4th this year feels really conditional, tempered by grief over all that is broken (and getting more broken!). The American Psychological Association found that national crises significantly raise our collective stress levels, and honestly, you don’t need a study to know that. You just need a group chat with Americans. Mine has been on fire since Tuesday.

So How Do You Mark A Day Like This

Saying this then, how will I mark the 4th? For now, I’ll do the only thing I can do – offer my deepest intentions for moving through this historical epoch with perseverance and caution in equal measure. The intense stress of watching from here, espresso in hand and heart in my throat, is its own strange form of participation. You’re not marching, you’re not protesting, you’re just… witnessing. From a distance that makes everything sharper and duller at the same time.

I keep thinking that maybe healing just looks like staying honest with yourself, especially on days that are supposed to feel happy but don’t. Reconciling the ideals with the brutal reality, and deciding what to do with the looooong distance between them.

That gap has a way of pulling up buried feelings you forgot you had, old loyalties and disappointments that come rushing back the minute someone plays the national anthem on a tinny phone speaker. It happened to me yesterday in a cafe. Some tourist’s ringtone. I almost cried into my galão.

Maybe the most patriotic thing I can do today is sit with all of it and not look away. Not reach for the wine, not close the laptop, not pretend Portugal has made me immune. There is pain tangled up in red white and blue that most of us never learned how to touch, let alone hold.

We just cover it with bunting and call it tradition. And there is this stubborn shame and guilt about choosing to leave, about picking the Atlantic over the mess, about feeling relief and heartbreak in the same breath. Some days I feel like a coward. Other days I feel like the only sane one. Most days, both.

I guess the intense stress of July 4th is just the cost of caring from a distance, the tax you pay for leaving and still loving the place you left. And you do still love it. That’s the part that makes the whole thing unbearable.

Sitting with that, without numbing it, without another espresso or another scroll, feels like finding your own quiet way back to yourself. Unglamorous. Unfiltered. Just you and whatever’s left after the fireworks stop. And making sense of the contradiction, the celebrating and the mourning at once, is its own strange way of integrating all these fractured pieces together.

I’d love to hear how you’re thinking about July 4th this year, whether you’re celebrating, questioning, or somewhere in between. I invite you to drop down to the comments section and share your reflections.

With Love,
Becca