This article is written by guest contributor and Middlebury student Melanie English, whose voice deserves to be heard.

In the first minutes, hours and days after hearing the news coming out of Orlando, I didn’t know how to feel. I couldn’t process what I was hearing beyond the most basic, knee-jerk, emotional reactions. Incomprehension. Grief. Anger. Pain. Those emotions had many sources, some of them deeply personal. I would like to discuss those personal sources today. I would like to discuss how a nightclub can be a sanctuary, and what it means for us as a nation when such sanctuaries are violated.

I am a 20-year-old gay woman who only a few weeks ago went out for the first time to an LGBT nightclub. My first time, and I hesitated to go, thinking it would be too stereotypical, mostly men, or that I wouldn't fit in. But in the end, I will always be grateful that I went. I've never been in a space like that before. It was the first time I had ever felt entirely comfortable in my own skin at a party. I didn’t feel like people were looking at me and immediately assuming that I was straight. I didn’t wonder if it would be okay for me to approach another woman and flirt with her. It was like the weight of everyone I was supposed to be fell off my shoulders, and I could just be...myself...for a time.

My experiences at that nightclub made the events in Orlando that much more painful because they helped me to understand exactly what was lost. Not just lives, or health, or friends, or family, or even just a sense of personal safety - as though that weren't already enough - but a sanctuary. A place that should be sacred, now defiled by horror and violence. I see people commenting on the Internet - I know, never read comments on the Internet, but it's too late now - joking and questioning why a club could ever be described in such terms, as a sanctuary. I feel frustrated with those comments, partially because, just weeks ago, I might have been inclined to agree. Now, I can only shake my head and wonder why it took me so long to understand, and why so many people still don't: we in the LGBTQ+ community need a safe space. We need a sanctuary, and where are we supposed to go?

To church, to that most traditional of all sanctuaries, where we have so often been told – where we are so often still told – to deny who we are or fear eternal punishment? To our homes, where at best we are accepted, but perhaps never fully empathized with? To school, where countless children and young adults are bullied every day for being different? Where can we go if not underground, to bars and to nightclubs? Where can I go? It has taken me 20 years to have one night - one night - in which I felt that I could let my guard down.

To explain what that means, never letting my guard down, I’ll give an example from my own life. I don’t drink alcohol: when anyone asks, I always say that it’s the taste, and in large part, it is. But that isn’t the whole story. There’s another part, a secret I haven’t felt comfortable divulging before: beyond the taste, if I could find an alcoholic beverage I liked, I still wouldn't drink it. I still wouldn’t drink it because I have always been afraid. I have always been afraid of myself, afraid that drinking would pull down my barriers, my safeguards, my reservations and that I would flirt with people I felt attracted to without fearing the consequences like I usually do. Without fearing rejection or making others uncomfortable. All my life, I have been afraid of myself, afraid of my own weakness, afraid to love and be hated for it.

It is so easy for people to tell me I'm being foolish, that "no one who matters will judge you for being who you are," and not realize how much of a lie that is. It makes anyone a little bit uncomfortable to be flirted with by someone they have no interest in, of course, above all when that person is drunk, but I've never been convinced that my being a woman doesn't worsen that reaction. My club experience only reconfirmed that fact, as I realized that never - never! - had I seen two men or two women flirt and act so comfortably together in public without displays of discomfort around them, without side-eying or some off-color comment. Even the most well-intentioned of people can make for an uncomfortable environment, from the people who compliment couples for being so comfortable being out, as though they shouldn't be, or the family members who insist on calling your girlfriend your "friend."

I am so sad, so angry, to have found a place where I could be myself and acknowledge these things about myself, and about the world in which I live, only to wake up one weekend to a brutal reminder that for me and for people like me, no place is ever completely safe. There are risks to letting my guard down. I will never be able to come out to someone I've just met without first judging their opinions and my willingness to engage in a possibly difficult discussion, and without weighing whether I can afford to distance myself from them if things go poorly. I will never be able to take my safe spaces for granted. That will not discourage me from seeking out safe spaces, places and moments where I can just be myself, though. I am tired of hiding.

I realized recently that I would rather die than go back to denying who I am, and would run the risk of dying to feel so at home in a place again as I did a few weeks back. I only mourn that such a consideration is still necessary, that I should even have to consider such risks at all. I wish that the club in Orlando could just be a club, as meaningless as any other club on earth, but it was not. It was a sanctuary, a mirror to the place I went and to hundreds of other places the world over, and one man was able to walk in and tear it to shreds with bullets and with hate.

In the face of such hate and such horror, I give you what I can: my emotions, my memories, my experiences, my love – a part of myself. And in the face of such hate and such horror, I struggle not to despair at how little that seems to be.