I grew up thinking everyone had a passport. I have to admit that I only recently found out that is not true. I just…assumed. The way you assume everyone has a Social Security number or a birth certificate. A passport was just something you had. My family got me one when I was a child. It lived in a drawer and was there when I needed to use it. It got renewed. It was nothing remarkable. I used it when I needed it.
San Diego to Minneapolis. Minneapolis to Los Angeles. Blue city to blue city to blue city. Recruited from job to job. Surrounded by people who traveled, who had opinions about airlines and airport lounges, who debated whether Italy or Barcelona was better in the spring or fall. I moved through the world thinking my experience was universal and because I was a Black woman navigating that world, I genuinely believed I understood what it meant to be on the outside of something. That’s the part that gets me.
I thought being Black in America automatically meant I couldn’t be living in a bubble. I thought the challenges I faced, the real ones, the ones that shaped me meant I had a full, unobstructed view of how the world worked for everyone. I confused one kind of awareness for total awareness.
But here’s the thing about bubbles: they’re invisible from the inside. Last year I did a random video about renewing my passport and was verbally corrected loudly by people in the comments. People telling me a passport was a luxury, telling me they’d never left the country, or that getting a passport felt like a big deal because where would they go with no money, too much of an investment and too expensive. I was like, wait, not everyone just… has one?
The numbers are sobering. Less than half of Americans hold a valid passport. In some communities, that number drops to single digits. For many people, a passport isn’t a drawer item, it’s a $165 aspiration that sits behind rent, groceries, car repairs, and the electricity bill. And even if you could afford one, where would you go? International travel requires money, time off (if your job even offers it), and the kind of cultural fluency that says this is something people like me do.
I had all of that. Honestly, I just didn’t know it was something to have. Kinda like Blue City Blindness. Here’s what nobody tells you about growing up in progressive spaces: they can make you blind in a very specific way. When your schools are diverse, when your city votes blue, when the restaurants in your neighborhood serve food from six continents, when the conversations around you are about equity and justice and representation, you start to believe you’re seeing the whole picture. You’re not.
I went from San Diego to Minneapolis to LA. I was recruited. I was mentored. I was in rooms where people discussed the wealth gap and systemic inequality, and then we’d all go to dinner at a place with a $40 entrée and not blink. The irony wasn’t lost on me later. At the time, I was too deep inside the bubble to see its edges.
Every city I lived in had the same general shape: educated, mobile, culturally engaged, politically aware, economically comfortable enough to care about things beyond survival.
I thought that was just the world. Even though I was and always am well aware of the racial aspects in our country I thought everyone debated which farmers market had the best produce. I thought everyone had opinions about thread count and olive oil. They don’t. And that’s not a judgment on them. It’s a mirror moment with myself.
So I’m just going to say it, being a Black woman gave me the illusion that I couldn’t be privileged. Not in every way, obviously. I knew I was educated. I knew I had opportunity. But there’s this unspoken equation that many of us carry, marginalized identity = automatic understanding of struggle. And while my identity absolutely shaped my experience in ways that are real and documented and ongoing, it also became a shield against self-examination.
I could point to the ways the world made things harder for me and use that as evidence that I wasn’t living in a bubble. But hardship in one area doesn’t eliminate advantage in another. You can be underestimated in a boardroom and still be completely insulated from how most people actually live. Both things are true. Holding them at the same time is uncomfortable, but it’s honest.
When you live inside a bubble, you don’t just miss facts, you miss entire frameworks. You miss:
The person who’s never been on a plane, not because they’re afraid of flying but because it’s never been a realistic option. The family that’s never eaten at a restaurant that requires a reservation. The community where “travel” means driving three hours to visit relatives, not browsing flight deals. The brilliant person who never went to college, not because they didn’t want to, but because no one in their world ever did.
You miss the weight of things you take for granted. A passport. A choice. The assumption that the world is yours to move through. I’m not writing this to perform guilt or to center myself in someone else’s struggle. My mother worked hard and so do I. I’m writing it because I think a lot of us, especially those of us who hold marginalized identities in progressive spaces need to have this conversation with ourselves. It has helped me understand the world and the people in it a little better.
The bubble isn’t about being a bad person. It’s about being a comfortable one. It’s about mistaking your normal for the normal. It’s about the quiet arrogance of assuming that because you’ve experienced one kind of hardship, you understand all of them.
I grew up in San Diego. I moved to Minneapolis. I came to LA. I had a passport in a drawer my whole life and have used it extensively. And I had no idea that simple fact made my world fundamentally different from most people’s.
The first step out of the bubble isn’t guilt. It’s not performative humility. It’s not a donation or a post or a declaration.
It’s just… noticing. Noticing what you assumed. Noticing what you never questioned. Noticing the glass walls you’ve been looking through your whole life, thinking you were seeing clearly.
You weren’t. I wasn’t. But now I am and it changes everything and at the same time makes me incredibly grateful.
