I don’t have it in me any more.

The Conservatives have romped home to a thumping majority with nearly 60% of the seats in parliament, despite having less than half of the votes of the country. Over half of the people in the country voted for Remain or Second Referendum parties. Even so, we’re going to get that damn Brexit, good and hard.

Why did people vote the way they did? Brexit seems to be the primary factor, though Corbyn’s peculiar unpopularity appears to have also played a significant role. This along with people’s scepticism over Labour’s manifesto, despite it being relatively modest in a European context, and despite the Conservative manifesto being laden with threats.

I’m no real supporter of Corbyn. Still, it seems to me that a well-meaning far-left government is, by far, the lesser evil compared to the Conservative Party. A Conservative Party that will continue to drive away hardworking immigrants. That will starve the poor, sell off the NHS, mistreat the sick and disabled and reshape our democracy into an authoritarian bully-pulpit.

I wish that were hyperbole. Read the party manifesto. Look at what they’ve done in their nine years so far. If we’re lucky, they’ll kick us in the bottom rather than the balls from now on, but that’s not exactly an improvement.

I live in a relatively affluent area. If you pinned a blue rosette on a donkey, it would get elected here. My vote has never meant anything and likely never will mean anything, especially after the triumphant Tories gerrymander the boundaries (read their manifesto).

People assume because I have a relatively plummy, middle-class accent, that I’m somehow well-off myself, or ‘one of them’.

I’m not.

I’ve been poor, I’ve been better off, I’ve been on unemployment, and I’m currently on benefits due to mental health issues. I’ve held down jobs, and I’ve set up in business for myself. I’ve lived in a shared rental, I’ve inherited property. I’ve lived, for more than a year, out of a single room, with most of my possessions in storage.

It took ten years from my mental health diagnosis to overcome the shame and judgement and to seek help. Getting that help took over a year, and I was fought every step of the way by the unfeeling and uncaring DWP – and this was before Universal Credit was rolled out in my area. That financial support has removed a tremendous amount of stress from my life, but I still feel the shame. Many people never let you forget it.

I have crippled friends, I have friends with mental health issues. I’ve lost people I have cared about to drugs, suicide and health conditions. I know people in crushing poverty and people who live on the edge of suicide, a temptation that still whispers to me almost every day.

People are going to die thanks to this government’s lack of empathy. That’s not hyperbole either, an estimated 130,000 people have been killed, unnecessarily, due to austerity and hostility.

Our social fabric – what remains after Thatcher savaged it – is going to dissolve. Even before they carve up the NHS, we’re already at the point where I have had to run a charity fundraiser to get a good friend a wheelchair they desperately need. This is all thanks to hostile and inhuman bureaucracy.

Expect more of that to come.

At school, I was horrendously bullied for many years. I learned, quite quickly, to suppress my feelings and upset. If you show weakness, you just become more of a target. You can only contain it all for so long, however, and by the time I got to college, I suppose I had my first breakdown.

Rationalisation, detachment, objectivity, suppression, endurance and stoicism are how I have survived.

Sometimes things smash through. A bad break up, a parental divorce, a particularly savage beating from a bully, or waking up to realise that half of your country are ignorant bigots.

Hold your horses that is not prejudice. That is ‘post-judice’ (if there is such a thing).

You’ll have to excuse me if I’m out of patience. After five years of trying to find common ground, trying to lay out the facts and trying to correct misunderstandings. Well, I don’t think there are any fig leaves left to hide behind.

I have tried, imperfectly but at least attempting to bridge this divide and to inform and correct. To caution the increasingly unhinged pseudo-left and to debunk and soften the inhuman attitudes on the right.

What has been my reward?

Slander, attack, high personal and professional costs. I have been caught in a crossfire between two increasingly polarised camps and punished for trying to understand and respect their points of view, while also deconstructing them.

I don’t know that I can do it any more.

I can’t stay detached and respectful while children are going hungry, while our country is impoverished, while our NHS is being carved up and sold off. I can’t stay detached and respectful while people who claim to be progressive engage in the most egregious racism, sexism and other prejudice.

I’ve tried to understand, and I can’t. There has been no payoff from it, other than the life lesson that people are shit. Facts don’t persuade anyone, empathy doesn’t convince anyone. So what’s left? Nothing. At least nothing I find morally acceptable in this calculous.

Raising money for my friend’s wheelchair made me think that maybe things weren’t so bad after all, that people could be kind, considerate and loving. Well, aren’t I just a bloody idiot? I was so wrong.

I can’t stay detached and rational when a young couple I know have to break off their engagement because we won’t be part of the EU any more. They’re artists, they’ll never get settlement rights without Freedom of Movement.

I can’t stay detached with starving friends in ice-cold flats, facing down the winter.

I can’t stay detached when disabled friends lose their benefits for five weeks at a time because the DWP phoned the wrong number, or not at all.

I can’t stay detached when what you have done, by voting for this shower of cunts, threatens my life and my income.

It’s personal now. My defences are overwhelmed, my emotional armour is reduced to scrap. I just don’t have it in me any more to try and fight. What’s the point when people don’t care about what’s real, can’t be persuaded and consistently take up arms against themselves?

You tell me.

We need a new politics, a new ideology, a new approach. Damned if I know what, or if it’s up to me though.

It’s remarkably little comfort to know that the people who voted for this are going to get the worst of it.

All I do know is that if we don’t hang together, we shall most certainly hang separately.

Zang.