I woke up today in a country that doesn't feel like home. Something has shifted, tilted into an alternative universe that everyone contemplated but no-one predicted: Britain has voted to leave the European Union.
I'd never actually felt European up until now. Until today. The UK has fought for hundreds of years to rid itself of the small island label – the Victorians did it by building a global empire; our grandparents and great-grandparents did it by fighting two world wars – but today's referendum result shows over half of us still retain that small island mentality.
It's a mentality that says when danger rears its head, you should climb to safely and pull up the ladder behind you. A mentality that thinks small, short-term and scared.
It's a mentality that looks upon the different and judges it loathsome and scary.
We're not even 12 hours into this brave new world, yet already the Leave campaign's lies have been laid bare. Nigel Farage even admitted this morning that the £350m of NHS funding promised by his side would not be forthcoming. And now we're stuck on our small island, isolated from a continent that can quite rightly dismiss our political moves; isolated from a world that is ever-changing and progressing.
The worst thing about the referendum results? That they are completely fair, totally legal and 100 per cent democratic. We each were given the right to have our say, and we said it.
That's why my heart feels so heavy today. Because we cannot complain. Because this is what the majority – 52 per cent – of voters in this country genuinely wanted.
Or at least, what they thought they wanted.
Over the course of the last century, Britain has done its best to move with the times – we've voted for ever-more advanced workers' rights, for women to hold their own within the workplace, for equal marriage – so this feels like a bitter blow to that march of progress.
I cried watching Farage giving his third speech of the morning, surrounded by smug besuited men and peppy handheld Union Jacks. I welled up again walking past the group of foreign exchange students gathered outside the train station, as they do every morning in the summer. I felt like apologising to them on behalf of all of us who want them here, who know with every fibre of our being that is it good for our country to be open and welcoming to other nations.
What will happen to their right to study here? To our right to move around the continent with freedom? To the thousands of migrants who see a sunny opportunity on a rainy island and uproot themselves in order to better their lives and our economy?
Because one thing's for sure: we depend on migrants for so much. We owe them so much – who else props up our building industry, strengthens our nursing community, enriches our culture with their food and literature and ways of life?
What will happen next? Nobody seems to know. We'll all be feeling our way in the dark, groping for meaning in a country that can no longer define itself by its neighbours and comrades.
We are adrift on our small island, and we are all alone.
Emmeline is the Deputy Editor of heatworld. You can follow her on Twitter at @Emm_Saunders