You know, I had an entire post here ready to go, all about a writing issue that’s exercising me a bit right now, and at the last moment, I pulled it. I’ll post it next month when perhaps I’m not as despairing about separation and severance and… well, divorce.

Not me personally, you understand, but my country and Europe. We have a tiny reprieve of a couple of weeks, but in essence, the UK is facing an uncertain, doubtful and doubt-filled future. The sheer folly of it all is breathtaking.

I won’t make this a political post. It’s a personal one really. I’m taking time to grieve and mourn, because it seems to me that Brexit is a symptom of a bigger drive towards disengagement and division in a world and at a time when, more than ever, we need to be united. And that scares me a bit.

The last generation has made huge strides in building a more equitable, inclusive society. Not just in terms of LGBT issues, but in every way: race, gender, socially, economically. We’re all mostly much better off than our parents were. We’re better connected—the internet has the capacity to be the great spider-web of links between people, communities and nations—and those connections have brought a greater understanding and acceptance of difference. We’re all (mostly!) less willing to allow overt discrimination against others.

Of course, it’s not perfect. There’s still entrenched and systematic racism, sexism, anti-LGBTism, ableism and any other -ism you might like to mention. It runs deep and will be hard to eradicate, not least because that wider connectivity has also brought with it the ability of the haters to connect, organise, and exploit our weaknesses. But the point is things are better. They’re improving.

And that’s due, I think, to the massive effort made after 1945 to consciously construct a better world. The formation of the EU was a direct consequence of war, and the need to avoid another. For all its faults (and there are many) it’s been the breeding ground for a more enlightened, humane view of the world. We’ve advanced a step towards being better humans.

And we’re tossing it all away to become a little, irrelevant island with delusions about its place in the world. We’re bowing to those haters, who want nothing more than separation and division, because that, they can exploit. If unity holds them at bay, they’re at home in a disjointed, disconnected world. These people foam and froth over even the bare notion of tolerance and equality, because tolerance and acceptance are what corrupts their vision of society ruled by men, poisons their Little Englander illusions.

I worry that hard-won freedoms will be at risk. I worry that we’re losing so, so much in friendship and connection and commonality. It bothers the hell out of me that what we can see happening in the US with the seeding of right-wing authoritarian religious judges in the courts, will happen here too, with a rise of demands for ‘freedoms’ that simply hate and prejudice wearing new hats and smiling masks.

All our struggles—for women, for gay people, for trans people, for the undecided, for the asexual, for the queer, for black, for white, for every colour in between, for the able-bodied and those who aren’t, for every darn person who breathes on this endangered planet of ours—might be at risk.

And we’re separating ourselves off, muting our voices, turning our backs on the strength that unity of purpose brings. I can’t… I just can’t.

So here I am, feeling a shocking sense of loss and fearful for the future. Just a little bit scared that the baddie’s winning the war, and wondering what the future holds for everything I hold dear.

There’s no upbeat ending to this post. It has helped to articulate a little of the grief, I suppose. I’m clinging to every little connection at the moment, so, despite everything, I’ll be in Amsterdam in June. I may have to get a visa first, but I’ll be there.

And maybe that’s the best we can do right now. Hang on in there, and hope for a blinding moment of sanity to hit the world. Catch your breath and come back swinging, and don’t stop fighting until you’re dead. It’s not over yet.

I hope.

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About Anna

Anna was a communications specialist for many years, working in various UK government departments on everything from marketing employment schemes to organizing conferences for 10,000 civil servants to running an internal TV service. These days, though, she is writing full time. She lives with her husband in a quiet village tucked deep in the Nottinghamshire countryside. She’s supported there by the Deputy Editor, aka Molly the cockerpoo, who is assisted by the lovely Mavis, a Yorkie-Bichon cross with a bark several sizes larger than she is but no opinion whatsoever on the placement of semi-colons.

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