I’m writing this article on the dawn of a second Trump presidency when a lot of people seem to be telling others to “just move.”

Has your right to healthcare been taken away? Are you fearful when you go to work or school because you don’t want to be rounded up and disappeared? Are you afraid to go outside because you’re constantly harassed for being trans? Have you been censored in your speech? Do you live in fear of police?

As more and more people face the issues that I listed out above, more and more people seem to give the same solution. “Time to get out.” “The US isn’t worth it anymore.” “Just move if you don’t like it.”

I’m writing this article to ask for a little more compassion. That includes self compassion.

Moving is a big fucking deal. I’m not just talking about immigration or international moving but about moving to a different city or to even a different neighborhood. Did you know that every single aspect of your life is destabilized when you move?

Moving is actually the number one reason why people come to get an astrology reading. I’ve seen a lot of people go through moves. Sometimes, people move because they have a fantasy about something and they find out later that the act of moving itself is a much bigger deal than they anticipated. Sometimes, people dread moving because they know that moving is such an upheaval and they’re forced into it.

Every single aspect of your life changes when you move. Your job and your access to resources changes. Every single one of your friendships change. Your proximity to family changes. You lose things. You lose your savings. You lose your ability to comprehend what is happening around you and you have to build that up in a new place. Your access to food changes and, so, your diet and your nutrition changes. Your body changes. If you have kids, then your kids lose education because they’re navigating changes to their friend group.

And that’s just moving without having to navigate international borders.

If you immigrate, then your nationality changes. Your understanding of history shifts completely. You lose your language and you have to learn a new one. You lose your proximity to your political allies and your relationship to the movements that you have been a part of. You have just sentenced yourself to a lifetime of learning how to be an immigrant and you have sacrificed the rest of your life so that your children might find stability. Very often, your children also make huge sacrifices so that they might build a life in the place where you have moved them to.

I saw my parents lose their adulthood because they immigrated. I’m not kidding about this. They lost their language and they spent decades of their life scared and confused. When you’re an immigrant, you make really hard choices about where you work and how you live because you don’t have the legal status that will allow you to make real choices yet. That’s a lifetime.

Want me to keep going? I will. Stop reading if you don’t want to hear this. When you immigrate, you lose your ability to see your parents through old age. You only see them around seven or so more times before you’re old and they’re gone. Everytime you see them, you think that this will be the last time. You lose your ability to connect with your own siblings. You have no relationship with their kids and you become an alien to your own because they are growing up in a place that you don’t understand.

Moving is a huge deal. It’s not a small thing. If you feel the need to move because you are facing political persecution or a loss of human rights or climate disaster, then you are just moving. You are escaping. That’s not a choice that you are making. That’s a loss that you are trying to comprehend.

Wealthy people have an easier time moving but wealth flight is not the only phenomenon at play here. Usually, lower middle class people move the most. We have just enough savings and get hit harder by crises. That causes people to move more. Usually, people who don’t have any savings can’t afford to move anywhere. A lot of us can’t afford to escape. If you move and survive, then your loss is partial. If you can’t, then your loss might be total.

We live in this weird reality where a lot of our mainstream narratives are for rich people. That fools us into thinking that housing is a purchase and that nationality is something you can shop for.

I’m not here to judge people for making choices that they can afford. I do believe that nationality isn’t a commodity, that housing isn’t a commodity. Where you live isn’t something that you should be able to buy because your home is your position in the world, your community and your history. But we pay for housing and that confuses all of our ethics.

I once watched a recording of John Trudell talking about why the feds assassinated Tina Manning, his late wife. He said that people make the mistake of thinking that they killed her because she was married to him because he’s so famous. He said that wasn’t true and said that she was always the more powerful organizer because she organized people in the place where she grew up. She organized people at home. You know, my mom and my grandparents and my great-grandparents all protested where they grew up but then my mom immigrated. She lost her ability to protest because she moved.

How do you protest in a foreign country? You don’t even know what is happening.

That’s your home. It’s all of your power. And, when you move because of persecution, if you get to escape with your life, you grieve the power that you lose because you are trying to save your own life. That’s the real cost of rent.

I just think that we can be less cavalier about people moving. It’s not “just” moving. It’s a total loss of everything that is familiar to you, a loss of your home, that may allow you to save your life. “Why can’t people who lose their right to abortion just move across state lines?” It’s not that easy. You lose everything you know when you move. You lose your home.