In the world of writing for a living, I think a degree of regret is part of the writing process. I don’t know a single time I haven’t read back over something and stumbled over a line that made me wince — or wished that I’d changed the tense or found an adjective with an extra syllable.
Other times, the regret’s a little bigger. On June 12, 2016, I was celebrating at D.C. Pride with my friends when the Pulse massacre happened. In the week following, I cried every day. I was afraid to be and go out. In my typical use-work-to-cope fashion, I poured everything I had into a piece titled “Orlando could not ‘have been any of us,’ ” which ran on The Daily Tar Heel website three days after the attack.
And then I never read that column again. As far as I’m concerned, the second half of June 2016 is a place in my mind that’s closed for visiting.
But finally, looking back eight months later, what I need to admit is this: I should have considered that my own feelings about Pulse weren’t enough.
I should have acknowledged that the victims weren’t “any” of us in the queer community; they were the members who experience some of the most marginalization, both from inside and out.
I don’t regret sharing the pain and grief that weekend brought — in some sense, I think those feelings of anger and fear are the shared experience of queer people across the globe. But in my column, I wrote there was “no room for generic statements” of the lives lost. I begged the public not to erase us from our own tragedy. And, in relegating the factor of race to one paragraph of a 900-word column, I did exactly that.
At the time, I had given some thought on how to navigate my whiteness. I wrote it reacting out of my own raw emotion. I wrote the piece before rumors arose that Omar Mateen might have specifically chosen Latin Night to carry out his assault, and I wrote it before an overwhelmingly Latinx list of names was released for the victims.
And in the time since, I’ve come to know that was a misstep. In experiencing the fear, frustration and sorrow of Pulse, I learned the sense of support that happens when people you haven’t spoken to in months reach out to ask if you’re OK. I also realized how much I’d allowed myself to ignore the pain and violence inflicted on communities I’m not part of.
I can’t find words to describe how ashamed I am that it took the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history for me to wholly empathize with a grief my friends of color have known their entire lives.
