I’m not sure why it bothered me so much. All I can say is that it did. Waking up last week to the news that British cities would no longer be considered as hosts for the European City of Culture cast me into a gloom that I found hard to shake.

Perhaps it’s because I, like many of you, retain fond memories of Glasgow’s spell in the sun in 1990. The award seemed to give the old place an injection of spirit and the civic confidence to grab a role in the modern world. It got the city talked about globally for virtues not always previously ascribed to it. Today’s effervescent Weegie splendour owes something to those times.

Perhaps it was because the decision was a side-effect of Brexit that wasn’t (much) to do with our wallets, but rather spoke to our coming estrangement on a more elevated plane. Proposing the City of Culture idea in 1983, the Greek politician Melina Mercouri said it would show that “culture, art and creativity are not less important than technology, commerce and economics”. Amen to that. But even culture, art and creativity, it seems, must fall before the careering, driverless Brexit juggernaut.

Anyway, from the depths of my Thursday morning grumpiness I committed a pompous tweet: “Not coming round to Brexit. Not making my peace with it. Every day I grow to loathe it more. My lip curls and my heart grows colder with every Brexiter bark of jingoism and hollow, self-serving argument. The stunning lack of humility – the swagger! – as this catastrophe unfolds.” I thought for a moment, then added a second: “I think what I struggle with most is that my country, which has usually been a builder of things, has been turned into a wrecking ball.”

I knew what was coming; and come it did. I was a fool, a gimp, a crybaby, a hysterical drama queen, and much worse, according to Twitter’s perma-outraged Leavers. Fair enough. But not everyone thought so: by yesterday, more than 15,000 people had retweeted or liked my original post. A common theme accompanied these responses: “You’ve put into words exactly how I feel.”

How I feel. That, I think, lies at the heart of the mental and emotional distress the decision to leave the EU continues to cause many of us. The details, the pounds and pence, matter, but our personal associations, our constructed identities, matter more. One tweeter, the Scottish lawyer Manus Blessing, put it beautifully: “Identity was never part of my politics. Brexit has changed that, to a degree, feeling I need to pick. It’s not what I am, so much as what I’m not. It’s mainly about how I view myself, rather than specific things.”

What I’m not. Brexit continually requires us to forgive or even support positions to which we are fundamentally opposed. For example, what I’m not is someone who is willing to push Ireland around. Like a significant proportion of Scots, I’m the product of relatively recent emigration from that country and retain a natural affinity with it. To see hardline Brexiter politicians speak of Ireland like some errant child, accusing it of “blackmail” as it seeks to find a workable future relationship with a post-EU United Kingdom, to watch them gamble with the success of the Good Friday Agreement in pursuit of nebulous visions of sovereignty, leaves me nauseous. To read a Sun editorial in which the tabloid tells the “naive young prime minister” Leo Varadkar to ‘shut your gob and grow up’ is not an uplifting experience.

As the Irish writer Fintan O’Toole put it in an article at the weekend; “So what is the Irish Government supposed to do? What happens with the border is a vital national interest. Ireland is desperate to hear what Britain has in mind. Instead, it has been told not to worry its pretty little head about it, but trust in the reassurances of its betters. It is being placed in the position of a 1950s wife, whose husband is betting the house on a horse race while he tells her, with increasingly irritation, to stop worrying because the nag is sure to romp home. Behind this reckless arrogance, there is an assumption that Ireland is an eccentric little offshoot of Britain that must … stop asking awkward questions. It is, in fact, a sovereign country with the full backing of 26 other EU member states...”

The jolts keep coming, some little, some large. Theresa May’s speech back in May, in which she accused the European Commission of attempting to influence the General Election outcome against her (she did a pretty good job of that herself), with her aides licensed to single out Germany as an aggressor, rather set the tone. We must watch Boris Johnson and Liam Fox tour the world delivering swaggering yet usually unjustified statements about Britain’s global weight. We are forced to nod and smile as Donald Trump daily stains the reputation of the United States and undermines the Western Alliance, on the basis we need a trade deal from him. That deal itself is likely to mean a further separation from the EU market as we are forced to accept American rules and standards.

Our diplomats report that they have slipped down the pecking order in foreign countries – it’s not so easy to secure the key meeting, these days. There’s the (inevitable) loss of the European Medicines Agency to Amsterdam and the European Banking Authority to Paris, with more to come. The Budget growth forecasts were the poorest in our history. Stories about companies pulling investment or plotting relocation flood in. And yet, say the Brexiters, it’s going to be brilliant, because… well, it just is. Freedom, or something.

When you stand back, each little crisis adds up to a whole picture. Brexit is changing Britain: its place in the world, its prospects, how we look out of ourselves, how others look back in at us. We’re being diminished in front of our own eyes, in real time. What I’m not is someone who can reconcile themselves to this. I am not coming round to Brexit. I am not making my peace with it.