In what was one of the worst weeks in recent memory, my face was all over the world’s media. I was in The Daily Mirror, CBS, The Huffington Post, The International Business Times, Examiner, Heavy, Upworthy, AOL, The Guardian, Yahoo, The Digital Journal, Straits Times, Bangkok Post and, most bizarrely of all, I was on the front page of yesterday’s Shanghai Daily (much to the amusement of my friend who spotted the headline in China). Why? Because, in a week defined by hate, I got angry and I got active.
I woke up on Monday morning to the news that 49 people had been shot and killed at a gay club in Orlando. I wept in bed as I scrolled through the outpouring of grief on Twitter and the day was spent in a bleary-eyed stupor. Later, I went to the vigil in Soho and sobbed in the street as 49 multicoloured balloons drifted up into the sky to the soaring sounds of the London Gay Men’s Chorus. Strangers hugged me and squeezed my shoulders and wiped the mascara from under my eyes and the binaries of human existence were palpable that day and I felt it crushing me like a hundred thousand million bricks.
Then Bob Geldof and Nigel Farage exchanged horn blows and hand gestures on the Thames and the pantomime of the EU referendum became Spitting Image incarnate. It was mildly amusing, for a bit, until Farage unveiled his new Vote Leave poster in all of its hideous barbarity and we hastility tweeted stills from Nazi documentaries and felt sick to the stomach and panicked that history was repeating itself in the worst way possible.
Then the Labour MP and humanitarian Jo Cox was brutally murdered by a far right extremist and for a day it felt like the world was ending and we were being swallowed up by hate and turned inside out by fear and I was angry and frightened and distraught again. Another woman murdered for having the audacity to speak up for justice and unity and love. At the hands of another man.
Over the weekend I needed to do something good. To connect with people and smile. So I took part in Avaaz’s kissing chain that travelled from Rome through Berlin, to Paris and finally to London. I wore glitter on my eyelids and and waved a European flag and kissed an Italian man on the cheek and told him I didn’t want to break up. He laughed. We all sang and shouted ‘love wins!’ and touched and smiled with our mouths and our eyes, unified in our need to be reminded of human kindness. I went home feeling buoyed up on the warmth of strangers and ate a roast dinner with my boyfriend and talked about our wedding day.
The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. The Moulin Rouge slogan might seem passé 15 years on but last week I truly understood and lived those words. I let love spill out of me because I didn’t have any other way to cope with the relentless cruelty of human life on earth. Maybe that’s why my picture was everywhere? Because I went out and allowed myself to feel those feelings publicly, with an open heart and an open face. Open to healing through community. Open to mourning the death of people I never knew. Open to finding hope in the hearts of people I’ll never meet again. Open and hurting and hopeful.
I don’t know. All I know is that we have to carry on hoping and loving. Because that’s all we’ve got. And it’s the only way we’ll win.