Chapel Orahamm's Blog

I moved to the Netherlands.

I was done with the political kerfuffle that is the USA right now. And being honest, as a transman out to the world on the internet and in my writings, I didn’t feel safe there. Not with the government floating the idea of calling trans people terrorists.

I stripped my blog of all of my writing for a while – just in case there were shenanigans getting on the plane. I had also gone pretty quiet on my social media too – deleted a bunch of posts and such. I didn’t know what to make of TSA at that point. I’m hoping when my passport comes due in 2 years, I can get it renewed without incident – but I’m fully expecting that I will be dealing with asylum seeking by then if the midterms falls through, because I don’t know what type of background checking will be performed when I have to send in my passport and if I will even get it back or if the government will possibly issue some type of “return home” demand. I don’t feel like “being disappeared.”

All the book reviews I had to scrap…I had to take down my developmental and substantive editing because I no longer have my LLC for that. And I sold off my embroidery materials for my other LLC. Essentially, I had to close everything. We sold our house that we were five years from paying off. We had to get rid of so much household goods, appliance, and rehome our chickens to my SIL. And I took TEFL certification courses and got certified with a plan to teach as a route to get out of the country safely.

Thankfully Wren was able to get a DAFT visa with the Netherlands, hence why we are here and not in South Korea or Portugal at the moment.

In theory we get our household goods collected from storage on Friday and it will go to the shipping warehouse to be catalogued and made ready to ship. We’ll see if I get some of my lgbtq+ stuff back. My Stained-Glass Pride quilt I was in the midst of finishing is the big one I’m worried about.

My physical copies of the books I published back in 2020 and 2021 and am putting back up on here this year are still in my MIL’s safe because I didn’t have enough space to fit it in my suitcase and I would be devastated if the shippers destroyed them out of malice. They are also the physical evidence of me being out as a transman and right now, I don’t want someone I don’t trust handling those. I’m hoping my parents can bring them when they come to visit. They currently fear visiting though because they aren’t sure if they will get trapped on this side. Every day is another mind-boggling level of weirdness from the US govt right now.

Now that I’m starting to feel settled and safe here, I’ve begun the process of putting my books back up. It’ll help as evidence if for some reason politics does go south and I need to claim asylum as a trans person. But also, my characters are starting to talk again. And I’m starting to see scenes again. It’s been a long time. Pretty much since my father in law passed from esophageal cancer back on Valentines in 2024. Wren’s cat had died the week before – 5 days after my full hysto. And my cat died six months later. We were not doing well that year, or as we waited for election results. Then we started the process of leaving the country in February of 2025. We didn’t tell my MIL until my birthday when we fled to her house because our house was evacuated due to a massive wildfire that burned a part of our town. Now it’s Thanksgiving week and I finally feel like I can start a routine.

It’s been a very rocky road.

Looking forward, I have project ideas. Some may not pan out. Others I hope to pursue.

I plan on going to museums on Tuesdays. The goal then is to do a review of them sometime later in the week. I will probably make a publishing routine day for those.

I want to continue with publishing my chapters for my books.

Then there’s doing manga and book reviews as I get those done.

Let’s see, what else?

Not sure if ya’ll care about my craft projects? It’s what I do when listening to Dutch audiobooks. I’ve been working on a 12 days of Christmas felt ornament set I bought off Etsy because all of my Christmas decor is back in the states – all 20 ornaments, 2 nutcrackers, and 4 christmas village houses because I had to seriously downsize all of my belongings.

I’ve wanted to get into doing B-roll voiceless Youtube videos of the crafting and traveling around the Netherlands like a bunch of slow-living people I enjoy watching right now. My problem is major body dysphoria because I cannot medically transition (prior stroke means HRT can kill me) and it’s pretty hard to look masc no matter what way you slice me. That project might end up being more fantasy self than reality. We’ll see.

I also want to take some time in writing in Dutch on some of my posts to encourage my language acquisition.

We don’t really know if we’ll be here longer than the 2 year temporary residency card grants us. We might still taste test Portugal or another country that has a decent nomad visa. The current goal is to wait out the fascist dictatorship burning up the US right now. After that, we will re-assess if we want to move back. Currently Europe is proving to be tremendously better than hillbilly redneck no mans land we moved from. The bar was buried six feet under, so its pretty easy to see improvements.

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