Even J has said I’ve been almost continually grumpy since the referendum. Take action, people say. Be the change, they say. Optimism is a weapon, they say.

I think: I haven’t felt this boiling-lava bad since my father was diagnosed with several forms of cancer and an aggressive degenerative neurological condition at the same time as I had moved away from all our friends, seen my sister move to the other side of the planet, birthed a third baby and realised I was over a year late to my publisher with my next book.

Even with my barrels and bowls and mounds of privilege, I am miserable in this world at the moment. In the UK and US, the tone of political discourse leads to racist abuse in the street, leads to the murder of citizens by their own police. Far-right groups grow in popularity across Europe. Homelessness, child poverty and foodbank use is sky-high here. Our planet is slowly shutting down around us. Everything seems like shit.

A machiavellian bumblefuck who has used many and varied racist and misogynistic terms in print and person has been appointed Foreign Secretary. A greasy silken handpuppet who dedicates his life to fucking over the NHS has been allowed to continue his demolition job. A woman whose breathy emphasis of children in an interview with the Sunday Times that she denied ever happened reminded us that the entire Tory ideology is utterly at odds with the concept of helping someone who didn’t come out of your own/your wife’s womb; a dead cat dropper; a disgraced former defence secretary. These are the people in charge of the country.

I can’t separate out my anger any more. I can’t distinguish between the fury I feel at a child hitting my child so much in a school assembly that mine ends up sobbing, and the fury I feel at the news that David Cameron is currently shacked up in a £17m London townhouse. I can’t pull apart the red-rage threads joining soaring rates of anxiety and depression among my friends, and having to haggle with my phone company for over an hour for an upgrade I don’t even really care about. I can’t unloop my wrath of the truth of this heartbreaking, uplifting speech, from my burning, shaking fury at a friend’s manager not only failing to support her in the face of bullying, but repeatedly taking credit for her work; or my anger against climate change deniers, or men’s rights activists, or all lives matter-ers, or anyone who didn’t vote Remain, or adults who don’t say thank you to service staff, or people who organise events on Facebook, or the continuing career of Woody Allen, or school fetes that charge too much for a coconut shy, or people that stop in busy doorways to fold up massive golf umbrellas, or adverts that serve ice cream in brushed-metal bowls.

I feel crushed by hopelessness. We are so hungry for a leader to lift us up from this mess that we’re terrifyingly vulnerable to any half-friendly face and some rousing words. While Labour slowly disintegrates amongst rape threats and bricks through windows, the only legitimate government opposition seems to be Nicola Sturgeon, peeling her country away from England, waving goodbye in joyful slow-motion. But what leader in Westminster would ever stand a chance under the arc-light glare of social media? That terrible thing she said when she was 17. That t-shirt he wore in his twenties. That vote she made early in her career. That questionable friendship he maintains. Who could ever be pure enough to offer us anything but another meme opportunity? Everyone’s garbage now. What fucking hope is there.

In a time when it feels horribly like we’re teetering into civil war, I don’t know how to be kind to my enemy anymore. I barely know how to bite down on the scream I feel all the time, all the time. If I briefly escape this feeling through fun, through a drink with friends, through laughter with colleagues, I feel guilty. There is too much burning chaos at the moment to dare use the luxury of turning away.

But I want to be positive. I want to make things better. I want to make other people, vulnerable people, feel less frightened or worried or ignored. I think of the inspiring people I know, and of Osborne and Gove and Letwin and Morgan and Whittingdale losing their cabinet positions. I think of the Snickers ice cream in my freezer.

But I am still continually grumpy.

One of my father’s many double-edged legacies is a political passion I can no more hide than I could hide my thin Binnie locks and burn-tastic Scottish skin. It’s one of the many reasons we did so little talking in later years: the importance of raising a child with strong political beliefs backfired when my politics leant further and further left, the distance growing annually from his own deep blue.

I woke yesterday morning to find two messages on my phone: an email from my friend in Canada with a link to their Immigration procedures, and a shocked text from my immigrant mother, furious with the Leave voters who, in her words, ‘are still craving the days of a poisonous, destructive Empire that is long since dead, thank goodness.’ I love those people, and my furious mother-in-law, my tearful, shocked friends, my twitter pals enraged and joking, all of us looking for a hand to hold in this fucking baffling disaster movie.

At the bar last night over many consolatory cocktails, three of us swore and sighed and held our hands up in loss. We pored through the Facebook posts of righteously indignant friends of friends lamenting the vitriol, the abuse, the unkind language directed at Leave voters. Isn’t this a democracy? they say. Do I not have a right to vote the way I wish?

Good news, guys! You do! That’s why you could freely walk into the voting booth with your pencil and vote exactly the way you wanted, with no coercion, no police brutality, no one keeping you from the polling station, no one burning your ballot box! But it also means that I’m allowed to think less of you for voting Leave, or for not supporting Remain because you ‘just didn’t know which side to believe’. That’s my right.

My husband used to have a long-running debate with me. Do you think you’ll ever be able to separate a person from their politics? he would say. And I would say: I can separate a person from their loving or loathing of mushrooms, or of Mad Max: Fury Road, or of holidaying in Spain. These things do not contain a moral dimension. But if a person denies a woman rights over her own body; if a person denies rights to gay and trans people; if a person votes to maintain a government which penalises the poorest, which refuses to increase tax on the highest earners, which maintains secret courts and hidden trials, which systematically attempts to privatise the NHS; when a person talks only of their family, their home, their town, and cannot conceive of a world which is improved by understanding that we don’t live in a bubble, but in a series of deeply interconnected trades and experiences, that, for want of a better word, we’ll call ‘society’; if the way they vote indicates selfishness, and ignorance, and intolerance, and an inability to differentiate between headlines in right-wing newspapers and expert opinion expressed by, say, Unison, the head of the NHS, the governor of the Bank of England, Greenpeace, the leaders of every single major UK political party, the Institute of Fiscal Studies, Women’s Rights groups, LGBTQ groups, and David motherfucking Attenborough – then yeah. I can’t separate a person from their politics. And I’m ok with that.

I’m sorry that you’ve already found yourself on the wrong side of history. But I’m not going to play my tiny violin when people call you out for failing to support tolerance, togetherness, and gratitude for the multitudes you already have.