My past week has been spent in great excess: eating, drinking, laughing, building great friendships, forging professional relationships and helping to tell amazing stories in the name of digital entertainment. It's a celebration and gathering of brilliant people that I look forward to each and every year. It's a celebration well-deserved, achieved through hard work and the desire to profess the love we have for something close to our hearts. And now as I wait at the gate to board my flight home, I can't help but fail in my attempts to push back tears. These are tears I've shed everyday this week, from the privacy and safety of my hotel room. They're tears that come from trying to make sense of the events that took place in Orlando earlier this week, and the gut-wrenching realization that the victims could have been, and are in fact, me, my friends, my family, my community, and took place in one of the rare spaces that we can call our own. It's all hitting me at once now that I have a moment to think inward. I rarely post on social media. Perhaps it's being in the business of shaping the image of others that deters me from feeling the need to shape my own. Or perhaps it's a fear of being oversimplified and generalized by whichever voice I choose to project for myself online. But right now I feel the need to look beyond all of that, not because I have a strong statement to make, but because I find that saying something is therapeutic, and saying nothing amidst a week of spectacle would imply that everything is okay. Everything is not okay. In the moment of calm I have now after a week of holding my wall in place, I let all of these realizations hit me at once, knowing too well that my brain will eventually force itself to move on. I can't wait to go home, give my boyfriend the biggest hug and kiss and tell him I love him after what's felt like an eternity apart (it's only been a week). I feel warm inside when I think of my friends who took a moment to show their support, whether through personal messages, safety reminders, social posts or even the simplest rows of rainbow hearts. We will still celebrate and we will still love in the month of June as we always have, maybe more than ever, albeit with heavier hearts.