Geez, I’m so behind on my blogging, I don’t know where to begin. There are so many things that have happened, so many feelings I want to share, so many moments I want to preserve. How do I prioritize that bundle of highs and lows? How do I sort through the slurry of triumph and sorrow and exhaustion and pride? Should I focus on the political or the personal? Is there even a difference?
If I’d written this post last Saturday, I would have talked about my band’s new album, Strong Black Coffee. I would have written about the CD release party and how fun it was to have people in the audience already singing along to all the words because they backed us on Kickstarter and got the CD pre-release. Last Saturday, I’d have been buzzing with pride, gushing about the amount of love and hard work that went into not only the recording, but the mixing, the production, and the distribution of that CD (Here’s a shameless plug: “Want your very own copy of Strong Black Coffee by Miners Creek? Click here to find out more!”
But then, last Sunday happened. Sunday, June 12th, 2016. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to forget that date. I think it’s branded on my memory like 9/11/2001. I’m still sorting through my thoughts on the Orlando shooting. It’s a terrible tragedy, an act of incomprehensible hate that’s shaken the LGBTQ community with it’s violence. And yet, this shooting, more than all the others we’ve had in the U.S. in recent times, hit me personally. I didn’t know any of the victims. I don’t know their friends or family. I wasn’t personally robbed of someone I love, but I felt something inside me shift.
At first, I felt too numb to care: another mass shooting. We seem to have one every week now. I about had to slap myself into caring. I forced myself to click on the links to news articles, to watch the news footage. I follow a lot of drag queens on Facebook and twitter and I read their posts about Orlando. I felt their anger and grief. And it was through the raw emotion of these entertainers who have affected me so personally that I was able to allow myself to rage and cry and process.
What’s struck me hardest is how alone I feel. In high school, I belonged to a group of LGBTQ kids and allies who strove to build a Gay/Straight Alliance at our school. We were a community. We supported one another through school board meetings and filing paperwork and the surprising amount of bureaucracy that goes into the approval of a high school student organization. In college, I again had my peer group I could lean on and who could lean on me. But since leaving college, I’ve been so isolated that I’m not even sure where I belong. I don’t usually mind much. I like the freedom of being able to drift comfortably between the different communities I’m part of. Some weeks I’m a musician, other times I’m a writer. Saturday nights I’m a Dungeons & Dragons nerd. During the week I’m a professional working woman. But I realized last week I haven’t been part of the LGBTQ community – actually physically interacting with it – for years. I haven’t been to a pride event, I haven’t gone to clubs. I went to one drag show a couple years ago and I watch RuPaul’s Drag Race like it’s a religion, but that’s not connecting.
I wonder now, writing this, if that’s what I’m mourning. I mourn the 49 men and women who died, the 53 injured. I mourn the piece of the world’s collective soul that broke apart and shattered in the face of such hatred and violence. But I also mourn for myself, for the teenager I once was who defined herself by her community. I mourn for the sense of connection that I hadn’t even realized I’d lost. I know it’s selfish – grief often is.
Thank you for reading. Tell your people that you love them.
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