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It has been roughly 48 hours since Orlando.
I have spent most of that time feeling as though somehow, something has been ripped out of me and I鈥檝e been walking around in a sort of deflated fog, attempting to engage with the world around me that I struggle to want to be a part of, while trying not to spontaneously erupt into tears.
I鈥檓 trying to figure out what it is about this particular shooting that has me paralyzed with fear, tired with anger and raging with frustration, coupled with the inability to understand how it is that there are still so many people in this world who feel I am not worthy enough to be in it, because of who I am.
I鈥檓 trying to remember how lucky I am. How fortunate I am to have been born into my family. I came out 11 years ago, when I was 23 and though it was a relatively easy experience, something my mother said then resonates so clearly now.
鈥淚鈥檓 just upset because of how hard your life is going to be now.鈥�
I think I laughed at the time, joking that I鈥檇 always chosen the path less taken; it felt like a self-imposed curse, whereby I鈥檇 be destined to learn everything the hard way. I wonder if she even knew then, what I am starting to learn now.
It is hard.
It is hard to tirelessly remain visible.
It is hard to constantly be deemed a radical personality just because I believe I deserve respect and acceptance.
It is hard to constantly have to explain who I love, and how I love them and why.
And, it is hard to see the beautifully bright colours of our rainbow flag, now attached to something so, so dark.
There has been a lot of dialogue around the importance of our queer spaces, whether those are bars, or nightclubs, or bookstores, or barbershops, or the streets down which we parade. It is true, they are much more than the four walls in which we congregate.
Standing like lighthouses, yet sometimes hidden, with only a heavy, black door to mark the spot, we found them. We lived and laughed and danced and read and talked and listened and looked into the eyes of others who knew what we knew, and we made these spaces our own.
On a day like today it feels as though there will never be enough of them. It feels like I鈥檝e been walking around naively trusting in the progress we鈥檝e made. Though Canada is a much different place than the United States, when I look into the faces of the people whose lives changed or ended so dramatically just 48 hours ago, I see me. I see you. I see my friends, and my lovers and my community. With so few spaces for LGBTQ people, we often find ourselves at these exact parties in these exact places in other countries, within our global community, especially during Pride. It could have been any one of us.
I don鈥檛 know if we鈥檙e still safe in these spaces. But what I do know, is that the space in which my true self lives and breathes and loves and writes and communicates and advocates and excels isn鈥檛 a physical space I can be run out of, fearfully.
Our queer spaces are the like-minded thoughts we share in times of joy and in times of pain. They are the spaces that lie before one heartbeat and after the next, and they are the energies that meet in those moments before our bodies engage in a hug, or a kiss.
Try taking that away from us.
That's hard.
