It's a beautiful, sunny day. I am healthy. I have a new job, which I love. I also love my DH and kids and I am loved by them. We own a good home, a 'machine for living in', with room for everyone, and we can afford food and occasional treats such as days out and holidays. We bake bread, make muffins (which sometimes turn out to be edible) and go support our local football team. We are all reasonably educated and articulate, fully tax solvent and in socially meaningful professions (that's me and DH, our kids are in education).
And yet, there is a definitely low mood in the house today, and this is not just because I am recovering from clinical depression. Today, even if nothing seems different, is the first day of my life as an 'outsider'. I am no longer a EU citizen in my own country but officially an 'other'. An immigrant.
I am now somebody who needs to prove their right to be here, in their own home. Another layer of bureaucracy, more practical struggles. But it's the change in my 'status' that breaks my heart. I am no longer part of this country which I have made my home for the last twenty years.
Yes, I have 'settled status', an invisible document, which I have obtained in a much less easy way that the government would like you to think (for instance I could not use my iPhone to register as it only worked on android phones). An invisible document which proclaims to be valid until it's valid. No doubt in the future there will be more hoops to jumps, more papers to fill and i just hope these hoops and jumps will come when I am fit, young and tech-savy enough to be able to jump them.
I will, of course, snap out of this, but at the moment I am, I think not unreasonably, heartbroken.
And my biggest heartbreak is not for me - Katie Hopkins compared immigrants to cockroaches for our resilience and, ultimately, I am resilient. When I realised the industry I was in was getting destroyed by Brexit and austerity I got another job. I have qualifications and skills. I will survive in my immigrant-coackrochy ways.
No, my biggest heartbreak is for Britain itself, for the people who have been interviewed on TV who are celebrating Brexit without being able to articulate one single benefit of it to their life. I have lived in this country long enough to have seen another Britain, a multicultural, vibrant, accepting country, where having an accent and coming from somewhere else was considered an exciting, interesting thing. I can still see that in some enlightened places, which are increasingly engulfed by the darkness of 'patriotism'.
I guess I am heartbroken because I had not only imagined a brighter future, I had seen how great things can be, and now the lights are going off.
We are discussing moving to Scotland or Ireland. It would be easy for me and my DH but harder on their kids. They are born in England, they are English. What to do - stay and resists? Move?
I do not know yet. I will know soon, we will talk and make plans.
But today I am heartbroken.