Sitting in the lobby of the hotel we'd occasionally stop by for warm drinks and wifi, I saw the headline. The numbers 50 and 53. Facebook's little lightning bolt trending arrow. Worst mass shooting in US history. Gay club.

We were talking about something else. I locked my phone, listened as intently as possible, read no more, didn't mention it. I didn't want to be the one to tell them.

We were on the island of Iona, a small Christian community known for being a "thin place." I don't know what that means for others. For me, it meant I was largely disconnected from the rest of the world, deeply and solely involved with the moment, the place, the people.

The night of Orlando was the one and only time we were given news. After that, there was prayer after prayer, tears and more tears. But I grieved in the way one grieves for a classmate they never knew. It felt like a dull ache. Impersonal. Not about me. Not my brother and sisters, not my community.

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Whenever I would find my way to connectivity at Iona I felt heavy, laden with a feeling I did not want to name. I talked in near euphemisms about Orlando to my queer friends at home, whose pain I was unready to share. I avoided learning concrete fact, stayed away from numbers. Abstractions were easier.

And then.

As we left Iona we entered into a period of constant connection, hopping from ferry to coffee shop to train, from train to hotel to coffee shop, never a quiet moment of separation. For the first time, I heard their stories. I saw their massacred bodies being separated from those stories, fodder instead for exploitation and cruelty and tone-deaf commentary on the constitution. At long last I read the numbers, empty and cold; tried to fill in the gaps, pushing myself to see personhood in the dry bones that were the statistics. I remembered my place in the circle of things and made my first attempts at processing. This is absolutely about me. Not just my liberation under attack, but my right to exist. Not just a foreign-sounding place in turmoil, but my own country. Land of the free. My home.

It felt like a punch to the gut.

I did not love Iona because I felt no hurt there. I loved it because I could work through my own hurts, feel them fully and come out the other side, absent the burden of the surrounding world.

Distance is seductive. It is so very tempting to make yourself immune to the pain of this life by checking out from it.

Reading back through old journal entries I found myself stuck on a line I'd written years ago: "Is this all there is? Opening this body to be wracked with pain again and again and again?"

I do not know how to live in a world in crisis without feeling that hurt so keenly that I always long for distance. But perhaps I was not meant to. Perhaps these are growing pains, the price that must be paid for having a voice and the privilege to use it.

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I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that I was wearing rainbows.

I was out in every possible way for the first time in my life, winding my way through the crowd on the verge of tears, overwhelmed by the little disruptive space we were making together; my first Pride. All around me controlled and beautiful chaos, thousands of people packed into Trafalgar Square.

There was glitter and face paint, selfies and hugs. Flags of all kinds- trans colors and bi colors and rainbows- worn by all kinds of people. Parents in flags, couples in flags, middle school kids in flags. Colored hair and tattoos. Pithy shirts. A pair of platform heels printed with jelly beans and rainbow angel wings. More hugs.

In front of me a teenager dressed in at least three different patterns was talking animatedly to a friend who was equally brightly clothed, explaining away her dour expression.

"The rainbow on my lips is eyeshadow. I put hairspray over the top of it to make it stay and it tastes bad."

"You didn't! You're supposed to put Vaseline!!"

Later that day a woman with an accent I could not name asked me what country the colors on my face were from. I felt every ounce of irony as I explained, giggling with nerves the entire time I talked to her about Pride.

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The moment I left Trafalgar Square I became keenly aware of how vulnerable I was.

Each time someone looked at me for a fraction of a second longer than expected I wondered if they were repulsed by me, how brazen I was, the rainbow flag on my cheek and the Pride band on my wrist.

I'd always had a sense of my romantic relationships and my friendships with other queer people as a separate world. Pride was similar, a place of its own, and I was crossing boundaries, taking the costume of one world with me to the other. I felt like I'd left home without pants on, exposed and afraid.

This is what Orlando was about.

If Pride is a kind of place, attacks like this are attempts to take back that space- to make us feel that a glaring stranger on the train could mean imminent danger. Ultimately they mean to push us out of the public sphere, back into our homes, back into the closet. And if our only spaces are hidden ones we cannot be powerful. The long connection of queerness to sex and indulgence and things that aren't discussed in polite company is effective; current comparisons to divorce or affairs, even well meaning ones, make us R-rated, our very existence too morally fraught to be discussed with children.

Pride after Orlando is tinged with grief, but more than that, with defiance.

Pride is saying we are not dirty, we are not afraid, we will not hide. Pride is a place of simple affirmations: people took the stage to sing songs with names like "I am a boy" or "Mom I like a girl." Those simple statements are made powerful through numbers and support, through the big stage and crowd.

That is not to say that Pride is paradise. London Pride was sponsored by a bank and an array of corporations seeking a youthful progressive face for their products. But even if it is co-optive, so is everything else. It's still powerful. And right now, creating those spaces, as often as we can and as publicly as we can, may be the best resistance we have to those who would keep us hidden.

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On June 12th the LGBT community was the target of the most deadly mass shooting in American history. On June 25th I went to my first Pride.

I had always thought it would be a refuge, had put off going on the excuse that I had no one to go with. Mostly I was afraid that the thing I had built up so much in my head wouldn't be what I needed in the end. If I didn't find myself there, where else could I go?

After Orlando, my need for that space grew beyond what was holding me back. I went to Pride, and I went alone, and I went despite the nagging old anxieties and the chorus of new fears. When I got into Trafalgar Square I went right up to the barricade to see the drag queens and boy bands and West End starlets as close as I could.

The fear was gone, but that was temporary. By the time I was in the tube, I was all anxiety; afraid strangers might hurt me, afraid friends might find me ridiculous, afraid I was ridiculous. It was so easy to fall back into shame, the fragile well-being of capital P Pride slipping away when I passed outside its borders.

And then.

Coming down the stairs in the tube station as I left were two girls with rainbows on their cheeks and wristbands on their arms that matched my own, beaming and holding hands. We grinned at each other as we passed, and I saw the same hesitation in their faces that I was feeling- unaccustomed to being so exposed, unsure whether to acknowledge each other. A second later, one of them turned around, called out, "Happy Pride!"

I smiled all the way home.