Proud?

When I was 17, my mother and I sat on my bed in my room in Ankara: the wall was covered, corner to corner, with fine art prints. It was the backdrop to my mother as we chatted casually, on some weekend morning. “What would you do if I married a woman?” I had asked, not even aware of not being straight at the time; it was genuinely a hypothetical question. She paused, took a breath, and looked aside thoughtfully. “Well”, she said, “I’d be sad about two things: one, the way that the world would treat you. And two, that I wouldn’t have natural grandchildren.”

And that was that. Two perfectly reasonable fears, one of which doesn’t even apply (Mum you doknow that IVF exists right?). That simple answer, which she probably doesn’t even remember responding with, ensured that I would live my entire life free from insecurity about my sexuality. It cemented itself deep in my brain, and I knew without a single wavering doubt that my mum would accept that part of me unconditionally. And that’s exactly what happened when I accidentally came out to her last month. We were talking about a queer arts event, when my mum offhandedly said ‘but wouldn’t you be the only straight one taking part?’.

Turns out the countless hints I had left over the years never hit home. I have always been content with the idea that I have never had to really ‘come out’, that I just dated as I pleased, and dropped enough hints or casual mentions that everyone probably knew or guessed and that was good enough for me, and if they assumed I was straight I wasn’t really bothered either. For me sexuality has always been more connected to my dating life than an intrinsic part of my identity, so I genuinely have never really cared, or thought much about it. But suddenly here I was, lounging on my sofa in the middle of a conversation with my mum, about to come out. I paused, chose my tactic, and went for it.

“Oh no Mum, I’m not straight,” I replied, with a casual smiling condescension.

“Oh right,” she replied. “But you’ve had so many boyfriends?”

Later I would look back and wish I had replied with “Just because I’m not straight, doesn’t mean I have good taste,” for extra comedic retelling value, but instead I just went, “yeah I know.” I then moved the conversation along swiftly as if we had just discussed what I was planning to have for breakfast. This was exactly how I would have wanted to come out: casually, with no anxiety, no big deal. But my casual demeanour dropped as the conversation came to an end. I blurted out, “Mum! Before you go I just want to say I didn’t tell you because I never bothered to because you never gave me a reason to be scared about it, and that’s why I’m so ok about it, because of you, thank you, I love you.” She paused again, and as I was halfway out the door to let a friend in, she finished with “But you know I would always love you anyways, of course.” And I did. Of course I did.

My mother happened to be visiting my godparents at the time, a gay couple, who called me some weeks later. They told me how she had come down the stairs, sat down at breakfast slightly dazed, and relayed the conversation back to them. “Just like that?!” They had asked her, incredulously. “Yes, just like that.”

‘Just like that’ is how I planned to continue as well. I didn’t like the idea of one one or two people knowing, because now it felt like a secret. I decided to suck it up, and consciously come out to my aunt as well. I did this while putting on liquid eyeliner, with her on speakerphone. “Oh by the way,” I added at the end of a conversation, “I told Mum I wasn’t straight because it just came up, and I didn’t want it to be a secret, so now you know too.” My aunt didn’t even pause before saying “Oh, I kind of figured.” At least someone in my family has a gaydar. I completed a perfect wing-tip, and hung up. Two down. That would do for now.

That casual tone, that implication that it simply isn’t a big deal or interesting enough to warrant a conversation, is how I have always viewed my sexuality. For me, it simply isn’t. Perhaps pride is something that comes from struggle, and I hadn’t struggled. I didn’t feel like I had earned something that I was just born with, and hadn’t fought for. And I suppose that’s why, after a lifetime of safely not caring about being bisexual, I finally encountered the one thing that would shatter that comfort:

Other queers.

I have spent my life moving country, on the periphery of all communities and groups. With the exception of my university friends, who I cemented my heart to in a way I haven’t with any other groups of people, I generally keep at the edges of everything. Last September, in a Facebook thread, I mentioned that I had written a poem about how inconsequential it was for me to be bi. I was surprised that this led to me being immediately booked to perform said poem at the annual Bi+ Ireland Bi+ Visibility Day event. I was even more surprised when, at my first ever queer event, I won the award for bi visibility. Me! The person who at the time had no coming out story, and spent my life comfortably under the radar! I remember meeting new people who I immediately liked, who made me laugh with terrible puns, and with great taste in tropical shirts. It felt strange, being in a room with people ‘like me’. I didn’t really know what that even meant.

After that initial dipping a toe in, I went a step further and joined the Bi+ Ireland Facebook group. I suppose that’s where things started rubbing up against insecurities I didn’t know I had. The group itself is lovely, and supportive. I was drowning in a sea of posts about bi colours, and queer in-jokes, and flags I didn’t know existed. It reminded me of how when I was in the bathroom during the Bi Visibility event, I overheard two people talking about queerness, with a confident and casual hold over terms and references and in-jokes that I didn’t understand. I didn’t feel a sense of joy whenever I see the colours blue, pink, and purple. I couldn’t relate to the jokes, the stories, the coming out tales, or the relationship structures most people seemed to have. It came as a huge shock, after being so quietly confident about this part of myself, to find out that I did in fact have fears about queerness. It was the same fear I’ve had about joining any community. It was the fear that, after all that, after finding ‘my people’, I didn’t fit in at all. Even though the group does everything in its power to reassure people that no matter what, they are queer enough, now that I was in a pool of people ‘like me’, I felt like I wasn’t anyways. My deepest insecurity that informs most of my life is the fear of not being ‘enough’. Suddenly this was tapped in a new way, and ‘not queer enough’ became my new obsession. I finally found something I could relate to with other queers: the feeling that I hadn’t earned my queer stripes.

And I suppose that’s where pride comes in. I’ve never felt proud of being bisexual, because I’ve never felt anything about being bisexual. For me it was like asking me to be proud about my favourite colour. But of course, I’m aware it’s nothing like a favourite colour. It’s intrinsic, and something you choose to act on. The same applied to my nationality, my ethnicity, my womanhood. These are all things I was born with, and so I’m not proud of them. I didn’t work hard to be bisexual, or Indian, or a woman. I worked hard at making a career in the arts, at being an immigrant, at supporting my friends. THOSE are the things I am proud of, because I feel like I have earned them. When I am finally Irish I will be overwhelmed with pride, because I would have fought 8 long years to earn that title. And perhaps I am just that little bit prouder of being a woman since Ireland repealed the 8th, because I knew that despite my mental health and inability to vote, I fought. I put up posters. I wore Repeal merchandise even though I knew it made me a walking target. I still wear an Abortion Rights NI tote bag, because the fight isn’t over. During the Marriage Equality referendum I was deeply unwell in my old job, and so I felt like I absolutely didn’t do enough to canvas, or help, or fight for that glorious outcome. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? The fight? How could I be proud of something I didn’t fight for?

So here I am. On Pride morning, in 2019, trying to figure out what I am proud of. And I think I am starting to figure that out. Yes, pride seems to come from coming out the other side of a struggle, and I realise, there are fights I haven’t fought yet. I am not proud of my nationality because I haven’t begun working through my cultural identity issues and insecurities. I’m not proud of being bisexual because I still am so distanced and a little baffled at my own sexuality that I don’t feel ownership over it. I haven’t done enough work on the things I was born with because I feel like I didn’t earn them. And the fight in this case isn’t on the streets, or with facebook posts, or by canvassing strangers. It’s a conflict I haven’t resolved in myself, and I suspect once I am on the other side of that struggle, a sense of pride will come naturally. I may be very late in the game coming to terms with myself, but better late than never.

In the meantime, I have a very bright pink pair of trousers and a tasteful tropical shirt to put on, and a March to attend. Even that small step might be something to be proud of.

Katie Roche

Photo by Ros Kavanagh

Katie Roche: a play with a ring of salt and soil around it, a gangling guffaw and a slice open from your neck to your navel. 

In its copper-worn architectural birdcage, a woman tries so, so hard to be her best self while biting at her own leash. She is tethered in five directions by love: From the well-intentioned but emotionally tone-deaf husband; the boyish lover too flippant with her feelings unable to be brave for her; the docile employer who can never articulate the light she sees; the sounding board and anchor who walks through the fields; and the soil itself of the land she grows in. 

Caoilfhionn Dunne’s Katie Roche is searing in her natural ability to spread a character across her own surface. Physically she is all elbows and knees, a simultaneous rage and joy simmering as she bruises herself in a space that too tightly constrains her. At first displayed as light and childish, we soon see that she only wears herself like her dust-drenched clothes, and that blinding openness is so alien to us that we, like her husband, find it hard at first to appreciate the humanity it represents. She is not childish: she is simply a woman in dire, urgent need of being. 

We try so hard to be good, so hard to be amenable to all, at the expense of ourselves. We try and scrape and kick and smother ourselves, and too late find that we have signed up for a journey with no end and no return. In her quest for greatness, for Being, for Goodness, she pours herself into every opportunity and is met, like many of us, with less enthusiasm than we offer. Every fibre of her body screams LOOK AT ME, and we wonder, briefly, why we condemn that sentiment so much. 

As for the person who has always looked at her, when a connection is finally maid, the sadness of her warmth fills the stage. Siobhan McSweeney’s Amelia is played with the perfect thickness of clotted cream, a smoothing over and a constant easy acceptance peeled back at the last minute. A softly comical character, she cracks through the concrete at the last minute as a wall becomes both a window, and a guillotine descending. 

The earth was in every pore, wet and dry: the rain drenched the room as the tea missed the cup; the hearth crackled when summoned and the wind was on everyone’s tongue. The elements stewed together around an echoing prison, with characters eyeing a person on a pedestal, a decoration amongst the scones. 

We see the men who love Katie, and fear her. Her roving confidante, in a space created for understanding, throws down a war cry demanding her humiliation. Don’t we all know that feeling: the jolt of betrayal when we realise someone we love is nowhere near as brave as we are. And bravery is no badge here: it’s a virtue, and a chain. 

“Be brave, Katie, and it can be grand.”

Katie Roche Written by Teresa Deevy Directed by Caroline Byrne The Abbey Theatre 26 Aug - 28 Sept 2017 https://www.abbeytheatre.ie/whats-on/katie-roche/

Moving Day

I can hear the whistle-clean chirp of birds calling out in the middle of a heavy drizzle. It echoes cleanly through the rustling leaves, that paper-dry sway dusting a wet balcony. The water drips loudly down the drains, and I can hear a gently swell of traffic in the distance. I have my last cup of tea, listening, writing, planted in my usual spot dead centre in the middle of the generous sofa, for the last time.

The thing about the New, is that it’s hard to find the line between running away from one thing, and running towards something else. If I had moved out a year ago, it would have been a charge from a wounded bull, dazed with pain and anger. It would have been the muddle of depression and paranoia pushing me off of my own doorstep and I would have stumbled onwards, bitter, self-isolating and vengeful.

 Although this final decision was ignited by a knife-flame of pain, it followed through in a sea of understanding. Therapy has given me the flashlight to navigate through my own brain, sifting, filing and separating the tangle until finally the realisations set in, for the first in their rightful cabinets. The ‘why’s’ all lined up, sizzling with clarity. I could finally see, searing in its truth, why I had to go it alone once again, with the residue of hurt still slick along the walls. It’ll take time and distance to rinse off a fog of misunderstanding and resentment but that’s what it means to move on, to really move on.

I invest a lot emotionally in a home. To me, people are home, and the walls that contain them are real, and alive. When I used to live alone I’d open my door every day and say “hello home, you’re looking well.” Even when I moved in with someone else, the habit continued. To me the walls both absorb and reflect my emotions back at me. It’s why I feel that extra warmth curled up with tea and a book. But it’s also how a room can be poisoned, and no matter how many saccharine mornings are spent waking up in the hug of a duvet, the echo of wretching sobs and cut hands still lives in its pores. A room becomes a prison; a shared space a battle ground; a kitchen an angry sanctuary for a turned back. 

A room of one’s own, to drain half a salary, shines with the glamour of independence a 20 minute walk away. What is the price of feeling whole again? Just ask Daft.ie. It’s a sting to the wallet but after weighing out the pros and cons I know that after the meatgrinder of experiences I put my brain through, that only-ness of living alone is the way to rebuild, no matter what the cost. Yes, I easily forgot how I thought living alone aggravated my depression in the first place. Yes I forgot the deep breathe of a large, beautiful flat, initially flooded with love. Yes, I forgot how every day I would pass my old building on the bus and flip it off, naively thinking ‘ha! That’s all over now. Things will be better’ (spoiler alert: they weren’t.) And yes, I’ve ended up going back to that very same street, in a different flat. But this time with a different brain and a patchwork heart.

Tomorrow I will wake up to the sound of busses instead of birds; chatter instead of wet leaves. But I will wake up to new walls, a new skin for my life. And before the swell of time washes over and repeats history again, I will enjoy that moment of victory, of newness, while I can. With a cup of tea in one hand, listening to the world through a different open window.  

Love

It runs like an undercurrent; in the background, a river whose voice becomes a mumble at the back of your mind while you check your phone and write emails. When they call you hang up quickly, you get annoyed at the inconvenience. They sometimes become a chore. 

But when I turn around and look right at it, the mumble became a roar, and the love that they gave me since the day I were born breaks the banks of my veins, and it’s overwhelming. How would I know how to handle it? I have ever loved anything that much. 

I don’t remember when it happened: When they stopped being gods and started being mortals, flawed and broken like the rest of us. When disappointment stopped hurting. I don’t remember the year I stopped crying everytime he left, when I started filling myself with concrete. 

Sure don’t we all have daddy issues.

And when she scared me, with her diagnoses and phone calls, not once but twice, I boarded myself up some more. There’s a way we’re all supposed to act, isn’t it? Supportive and caring and understanding, always there, look don’t worry I’m right here, whatever you need, it’s all going to be fine. But when one pearl of anger pushed through the cracks it popped and poisoned and I hurt and hurt and hurt and hurt, myself and her and everyone in a 5 meter radius. 

The second time, years later, I just drank port and stayed up all night alone watching 50/50. It is a terrible movie, but it did the trick. 

Don’t we feel so alone, in those moments? With the weight of childhood like a lead armour and the taste of metal and tobacco in your mouth.

They’re still here though. But some aren’t.

Sitting outside my grandfather’s hospital room reading The Agony and the Ecstacy by Irving Stone. It was about Michaelangelo. 

Frozen at one of the computers in the university library, reading my Uncle’s account of my grandmother’s funeral. He focused on the architectural aspects of the church. 

On the bus to Longitude, I get an abrupt phone call from my father. His mother was the only light in that dark, sad house.

With each death more bricks and mortar instead of hot blood, with each new fear and disappointment more clay and steel, a constant construction project to keep the river at bay, the deluge must not touch me. I will remain strong. I will remain untouched. 

But I was always made of flesh, as much as I wanted to deny it, and my neurons chose their own path by erasing years of happy memories, hiding the people I loved behind locked doors in my mind until I couldn’t remember where they sat at the dinner table, couldn’t remember 8 years of goodnights. But then therapy turned a key and...

They were always there. I just didn’t want to find them.

I think the thing is that, real, overwhelming, powerful love, the kind my parents and grandparents felt when they first held me: The ferocity of it, the ocean of it that exists, contained in our fragile paper bodies is terrifying. It’s so far removed from my everyday emotions, from my daily nothingness, it’s so full of pure happiness and joy. It’s the way they look at you in photographs, like you are the only sun they have ever seen.

“You don’t realise what you mean to people sometimes,” a friend said. A friend who is turning the pages of a family album, a friend who is currently spinning threads of sorrow into gold and holds a pen like a spear. A friend who writes, because writing is love. She looked at the ocean and unlike me, she wasn’t afraid, and so she turned it into ink.

And for her, and for the ones that left, and for one that almost did, I’ll try and do the same.

My Best Friends’ Weddings

Yesterday I was at my fourth wedding this year. At every one so far I’ve felt a range of emotions: from a warm but comfortable indifference, to full on sobbing holding two gin & tonics, to feeling surprisingly emotional about people I barely know. But as a single person, one thing I didn’t feel was empty.

I recently did a gig called Mortified, where I read out my teenage diaries on stage. It has been a fascinating experience to delve back into my teenage mind, dredging up old emotions that I previously didn’t have access to. One thing that was very obvious is that I was desperate for a boyfriend: god knows why, but that seemed to be my ultimate goal. I got my first boyfriend when I was 16, and have pretty much not been single since, with the exception of a few months here and there. And during those times I was certainly still looking.

This year, for the first time in my life, I am genuinely content with being single with no intention to change my status anytime soon, and a huge part of that is the friendships I have cultivated over my life. Interestingly it’s also the year that I attend seven weddings, and the combination of these two things provides plenty of food for thought. It’s a good time to process emotions and create theories: how have I felt over the years? What makes me happy? Who makes me happy? What is love (baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more)? And as I sit through the vows and the speeches and the officiating of these weddings I realise something huge:

Even though I’m single, I’m already married. 

I watch couples gaze into each other’s eyes with wobbly grins cracking their faces as they promise to take care of each other in sickness and in health, and I think of the messages back and forth as me and my best friends go in and out of hospital and therapy and drown in the wrong meds. We have taken care of each other when we are richer or poorer (mostly poorer) as we supported each other through the recession, as we watched our hopes and dreams and numerous degrees dissipate into thin air, and years later celebrated our first paychecks together. We have had each other to love and to hold for years, and every second of it was treasured and cherished, and in the years of distance we yearn for it until the next moment that we can be in each other’s presence. 

As I listen to people talking about love behind podiums, not for one second do I feel that I don’t have what they have: I’ve had that kind of love for years. A steadfast friendship is a commitment with no expected end: there are ups and downs, negotiations, fights and forgiveness, and a million unexpected challenges; there is emotional distance and physical distance; there are misunderstandings and tribulations. But there are more importantly moments of shared clarity; hours of belly-aching laughter and waves and waves of unconditional love. We create a chosen family and we are fierce with our affection and dedication to each other. We understand that it’s give and take, and when we’re needed, we’re there in a heartbeat. 

Next week I’ll be at a wedding with some of my best friends in the world who have flown in from Turkey, Mexico, North America, Brazil, England and places inbetween. We haven’t been in the same room for a year and a half, and before that 5 years. Even though we have to make do with the digital versions of each other on a day-to-day basis, we have tried our best to be there for each other over the years, no matter what. 

For better, for worse, in sickness, and in health, until death do us part.

Home

I knew I was going home. Even though I only know bits and pieces of the language, even though I didn’t know my way around the city, I still felt like I was going home.

A week after the Istiklal bombing, I went to Istanbul to see my best friend for her birthday. From the moment I got on the plane to the moment I returned back in Dublin, my head had been filled with a background noise of danger. Nothing immediate; not so much a sense of paranoia but rather a sort of white noise at the back of my mind, running emergency scenarios in my head and subconsciously checking out everyone in my immediate vicinity. You know, just in case. 

But even with that buzzing in my brain I still felt an enormous sense of relief to even just be there. Despite the fact that I am in many ways an outsider, I was accepted as an honorary Turk by my high school friends when I was 17 and have been privileged enough to hold the title until now. It’s a title I don’t treat lightly; creating a national identity for yourself from scratch requires a level of ferocity and tolerance for exhaustion. But this weekend in particular, I realised that people felt I had earned it just by being there. Some were impressed by the fact that I didn’t cancel my flight this weekend. Some were terrified and taken aback that I had taken the Metro. But everybody, absolutely everybody understood why I was there.

The simplest answer was, I was there because I wanted to go home.

Even though I have made a home for myself in a few different places, Turkey has always been special. When I first moved there with my mother, we ended up staying in the same house that her father lived in when he was Ambassador to Turkey. 30 years later I was staying in my aunt’s old bedroom. I’ve never lived in a house that my family owned, so this was really the closest my mother and I have ever been to having a house with both childhood and adult memories.

Three days before my seventeenth birthday was my first day of school in BUPS (now BLIS) in Ankara. After my experience in Sweden, I was prepared for it to be difficult but I knew with only a year and a half of school left before graduation I had to make a bigger effort to make the most of it. I needn’t have worried: on my first day I was pretty much fought over by different cliques, and on my birthday I was taken out to a Turkish café and taught about Turkish food, how to drink çay and how to smoke nargile (shisha). Most of the people in that now-closed café that day were in the same room as me this weekend, drinking whiskey and making 11-year-old in-jokes with me that somehow still haven’t gone stale.

In Ireland, there is literally one person on the whole island who has known me from before I moved here. In my best friend’s bedroom in Istanbul, a handful of us drank tea the evening after her birthday party, snuggled into each other, discussed politics and played on our phones, cushioned by our shared memories. For me, home isn’t a house where I grew up. It’s the taste of fresh bread with honey and clotted cream and the habit of putting yoghurt in everything; it’s the endless glasses of hot çay and fortune telling with coffee dregs; it’s the fullness of a Turkish vowel that fills your whole mouth and the sharp edge of an insult;  it’s filling a room with people who know how to do nothing together who know each other so well that what is unsaid is more important than what’s said; it’s comfort, it’s food, it’s love, it’s trinkets and postcards on the walls and so much more.

And that’s why Turkey was worth going to this weekend, even though I knowingly put myself in danger. Because Turkey is a place that makes me fearless while scaring the crap out of me, because the things I love the most are suddenly at stake. It’s a place filled with memories and future plans. It’s a place where my best friends and their families live.

It’s a place worth seeing, a place worth loving, and a place worth fighting for. 

Celebrating my best friend’s 28th birthday in Istanbul with the same friends I met 11 years ago

In Fear

“Love you”, I typed, as she left the conversation to go to a meeting.

I paused. A tiny part of my mind said, what if it’s the last thing you ever say to her?

“So much,” I added. “More than anything.”

In Dublin, I sit frozen in fear, and hope against all hope that a bomb doesn’t go off in Istanbul today, a city where my best friend and some of the people closest to me live. 

In Istanbul, the main square Taksim is being cordoned off. The crowds are thinner than usual. The news has picked up on a possible threat, targeting the German Consulate just off the square. German schools have been evacuated. 

In Dublin, today is St Patrick’s Day and the city is a pulsating ocean of green and orange. There’s a muffled screech of foreign accents and the shouts of British stag parties drenched in beer. People are laughing, drinking, lining up along the parade route, wandering from pub to pub. “Town’s going to be crazy”, I’ve heard over and over again. “Best to avoid the city centre”.

In Istanbul, I hope my friends are avoiding public places. I hope they stay where they are and I hope that luck is on their side. I hope that the threat isn’t real, and that nobody there will die today. Or tomorrow. But I can’t even try to hope for any time beyond that.

In Dublin the thought never crossed my mind that there could be a bomb threat during probably the busiest day of the entire year. I’m sure there is danger that we are blissfully unaware of, but it’s certainly not the first thing that comes to mind. I have the luxury of not worrying about being teargassed during a public gathering, or killed waiting for my bus home. 

In Ireland the country has its own history of fear, violence and destruction. It has it’s own terror-filled past, it’s own civilians dying in the streets caught in the crossfire. It has had its own cycle of fear, oppression and retaliation. It has had it’s own casualties, and the scars that never quite fade. We can commemorate a fight for a cause, we can paint murals of women who tucked guns into their bustles. We can look back knowing that we can look forward, and we know that we can fill the streets with people without fear.

In Turkey, there are the echoes of violence from the day everyone went to stand in a park, and yesterday, today, tomorrow and next week. There is fear and there is numbness. In Kurdish territories there is ‘cleansing’, and the hurt and fear of oppressed and violent people begin a cycle of revenge. There are alerts on embassy websites telling people to avoid public spaces, public transport and certain areas. There is blood drying on the streets of my city, and a premonition of death that covers the whole of Istanbul. There is fear, acrid and wringing, choking people as they try desperately to get on with their everyday lives. 

I need to say this and make it clear: This is the new normal. Turkey is not a warzone, these deaths are fresh and new. The country is full of cities just like the one you’re in. There isn’t debris everywhere and there aren’t any bombed out buildings. It’s a country filled with cities steeped in a recent and urgent fear. This fear began a few years ago and now runs in the veins of every Turkish person I know. First the biggest worry was being killed by riot police during any gathering; now it’s a lot scarier. 

In Dublin I sit and start writing for the first time in months, because there is literally, and I do mean literally nothing else I can do about this situation. My best friend has come out of her meeting and tells me what English-language news isn’t telling me: That there have been threats all through the weekend and Istanbul is at this very minute in very real danger. 

In Istanbul my friends write Facebook posts warning about which areas to avoid, and for everyone to stay safe. They write posts about how angry, sad, frustrated and terrified they are about this new way of life. They make music, they write articles, they get politically involved, they express themselves creatively to try and do something, anything that can help even though they sometimes risk their own safety by typing a sentence and clicking ‘post’.

In Dublin I think about my flight to Istanbul next Friday. I think about how my friends will feel, and the fear they may experience knowing I am going there. And in a small way I need them to feel that fear, so that they know what I go through every day. At the same time, I hate that fear, and I hate that we are drowning in it. I hate that even if a bomb doesn’t go off, the fear remains and the stale stink of it never leaves the air. 

In Istanbul, she makes plans to create an international music project about peace. She wants to sing about this.

In Dublin I wait until the crowds die down before venturing in to a storytelling event. I want to talk about this.

And we both wait. 

In fear.

Istanbul from my friend’s balcony. 

News sources http://www.dw.com/en/germany-shuts-embassy-consulate-and-schools-in-turkey-on-very-concrete-tip-off/a-19121618 https://www.rt.com/news/335929-german-consulate-turkey-closes

The Song Went on Forever

Aladdin Sane photo shoot and outtakes by Brian Duffy, 1973

A thing explodes. You wake up with a sentence and it repeats all over your day. You think, this is the time and place for this album and you play it. You remove your earphones in a shop and find the same artist playing. And in the next shop as well. And the next. The thing keeps exploding because suddenly, on a day in history, millions of us care about the same thing.

Collective grief about someone iconic is strange, but stranger still when it’s a musician. When Robin Williams died we were all hit hard because he was a huge part of my generation’s childhood. But you don’t walk into a shop and see his movie playing on a screen. When it’s music, it eats a city. It plays from every earphone and every speaker, and it’s all encompassing. It swallows us all in it’s enormity, and it seems mad, crazy, impossible that it’s the power of a single human being. 

The last time I experienced this was at Glastonbury 2009. My friends and I were walking down the old railway tracks, a long muddy stretch that bordered a campsite. Suddenly it felt like there a rustle: a funny whisper. I overheard the sentence ‘Michael Jackson died’ and we looked at each other, thinking, what an odd thing to say. What a strange joke to overhear. We kept walking and people start looking at their phones (this was during a time where some people had smartphones but at a festival like this, most people kept off of phones in general). My friend’s Nokia beeped, and the news was said out loud. We stopped. We didn’t believe it. As we walked further the whispers became loud conversations, and we heard it over and over again. Someone with us had gone very quiet: he had tickets to the big Michael Jackson concert. He had been talking about little else for months, and the news was settling in that the idol he had been waiting to see, the greatest show on earth, had just crumbled to pieces. Ten minutes later the news had spread through the whole festival, to all 200,000 of us in our muddy bubble in Somerset. We reached a music tent and it was already playing songs by Michael Jackson. A thing had exploded and the world cared, all at the same time. 

What is it about that person, that iconic music maker, that makes us stop and think? It’s different for different generation: mine didn’t grow up with Bowie. My aunt is the one who introduced his music to me for the first time, in my grandparent’s house in New Delhi when I was about sixteen. She had just bought a DVD of his music videos, and a new Bowie tshirt. She was the real 80′s girl in the family. She was very possibly one of those impressional teenagers who spent hours in the mirror perfecting their eyeliner and their Aladdin Insane lightning bolt across her face. Part of the generation who looked at this androgynous fearless spaceman and thought, yes, I want to be unafraid too. I want to not fit in a box. I want glitter in my pores and I want to fly amongst the stars in tight silver trousers and be celestial, gorgeous, a genderbending sex god. Who wouldn’t?

Watching Velvet Goldmine all those years ago in a freezing cold student house ignited that feeling in me and gave me that tiny glimpse of the glamour Bowie and his glam rock peers offered his young fans. But for me, my context was different. I fell for the songs, not the glitter revolution. I fell for the lyrics because I discovered them decades too late. I fell for the timelessness of good music; for the soul, the yearning, the victory that pulses within it. 

When a star like David Bowie dies, we all look back to our first encounters of that musician, that maker of memories. For someone so prolific those memories span generations, decades even. And for people like me, we are removed from the rock star memories; we just have the music. And in all our collective distant grief and borrowed nostalgia, amongst the Facebook posts and Spotify tribute lists, why shouldn’t that be enough? Because those songs are the great equalisers, and no matter what our experiences are with that artist, those songs that will play on into eternity continue to love us all back, just the same. 

The Long Apology

Nobody tells you what to do once it’s over. Not that I’m arrogant enough to think that I’m completely in the clear; I’m sure it will return but the trick is to be mentally equipped to handle it. At the moment, the fog has finally cleared. That cruel unwelcome stranger has vacated my head, leaving me to stretch back into the corners of my own mind, staking claim in every synapse. I have control over my thoughts, my hands, my words again. But clarity has its own price.

Like waking up after a particularly disastrous night out, I am now able to clearly see the trail of wreckage I have left behind. Except it’s not just enough mistakes to fit into a night, but into a year or two. And nobody’s laughing about it. It sounds like a cop-out when I try to explain myself: “No it wasn’t me, there were two people in my head and one just took over and made me act like someone I’m not.” It sounds too crazy. Lazy even, pointing the finger at some invisible demonic entity. How do you sincerely take responsibility for a thing you honestly feel you didn’t do? It feels, as whiny as it sounds, unfair. While making a years worth of apologies, there’s always a voice trying to tell you that it isn’t your fault. And yes, I’m lucky enough to have this sentiment echoed amongst friends. But I continue to be torn, because owning up and apologising is important. Things need to be mended, and the culprit that is depression isn’t going to be the one who will do it for me.

And then, there’s the issue of time. Time wasted, time spent hurting people, time blurring weeks into months into years, warping constantly. For the last few months I honestly couldn’t understand the weeks and how they fit together, but in a stranger way than the usual scatterbrained ‘time’s flying by’ kind of thing. I genuinely couldn’t. I was at my worst for 3 months but I was solidly convinced it was a year. I couldn’t tell you when events occurred. Everything was confusing. But this week I suddenly knew what happened last January, and February, and June. Events started slotting back into their assigned timelines and it feels like time suddenly snapped back into being linear. 

But then, that moment happened again. The, oh god, what have I done, moment. Now able to dissect the months wasted and relationships affected, it’s a long sobering walk back to pick up the pieces. After not being able to bring myself to send a single message, it’s an effort to constantly reach out and rebuild friendships that were tossed away carelessly. Some take longer than others though, because trust was broken and a simple ‘sorry’ won’t do it. And some sadly had an expiry date already, and instead of making the most of it while I could, that awful version of me tore up what could have been great and shredded it until there were only scraps left. It wasn’t my fault (but it was), but it wasn’t, but it was, and so on, and so forth. 

I was lucky. I had very few people who were were unsympathetic, which was hard at the time because I had nobody else, but it was not their job to help. Overall, I have understanding friends who are only delighted to have me back in their lives, although I can’t help carrying the weight of knowing I wasn’t there to help any of them through what was probably an equally rough time. Whether it’s true or not I’ll always believe that I supported nobody in 2015. 

I am also lucky because even though it doesn’t feel that way, in the grand scheme of things it hasn’t taken up as much of my life as it could have. Many people suffer for years, decades. Just over a year isn’t so bad in comparison at all with only 3 months of pure rock bottom. But it didn’t happen on its own at all. I pushed myself to talk to a therapist, and even though the first one was hit and miss (mostly miss) it was a step in the right direction. Unfortunately her methods were more harmful than helpful, and that sent me into my final spiral. Finally I got the guts to try again and found a much better one, and she was perfect. I realised how important it was to not give up on therapy because of a bad therapist, no matter how hard it may be to trust another stranger with your mental health after being let down.

And I’m also lucky that I didn’t have to do it completely alone, although the downside is that the people who were the most supportive ended up as my verbal punching bags when I was at my lowest. When your brain is a constant battleground, you lash out. You hurt. You destroy. You ruin things. All while I felt the real version of myself trying to shout as loud as possibly in the corner of my mind, horrified at what I was doing, before being suffocated by that other Thing that feeds off of pain. 

But for now, it’s gone, and it’s left a mess behind that I’m paying heavily for. If this is what I’m going through after just a year, I can’t imagine how people cope after causing years of hurt to themselves and others and then recovering. This stage is hard. It’s a time filled with regret, resentment and enormous loss, and awareness of stolen time that I can never get back. It’s a time for ending things that are ending too early. But also it’s a start. It is the re-breaking and re-setting of a badly fractured mind, but once it’s repaired things can happen again. Visits, trips, dinners, phone calls, plays, gigs, chats over tea or whiskey. Good things, real things with good people that make good memories. It’s a time for atonement, and hopefully, soon I won’t have to apologise anymore. 

http://www.firstfortnight.ie http://psychotherapydublin.ie http://www.samaritans.org

Creating a Home for Christmas

It was warmer than I expected. It was 11pm on Christmas night, and I had just left my mother in my flat after showing her how to work the gas fire and TVcatchup.com. As I stood outside the gate waiting for a taxi, the door of a house in front of me opened, and two older ladies stepped out. “Have you wrapped up warm enough?” one called out as the other walked down the steps and unlocked her car doors. She grinned and shouted “oh, sister knows best!”. She ducked into her car as her sister waved. As she drove off, the remaining woman turned and I expected her to shut her door, but she left it open and disappeared into another room. An 8ft high Christmas tree lit up one of the windows, huge and impressive with a warm glow. I saw a man move between rooms through the door to what looked like a kitchen. As the family went about their business I looked up and faced the huge, full moon hanging like an ornament on a clear velvet sky. I breathed. I had never stepped outside on Christmas day before, I had never been able to see other people’s lives, like rows of dollhouses, as midnight crept closer. Other people’s families, friends, partners. Other people’s togetherness and loneliness on display from window to window. 

Earlier, while sitting in front of the fire, my mother and I experienced Christmas in my home for the first time. We streamed shows from BBC iPlayer and ate until we couldn’t eat any more. In the mornings that week I has woken up to a motherly bustle, and would pass my room to find my mother sitting up in bed reading a book. I had family, right here in my own home, a mother on call, just a shout away. It was bizarre, it was wonderful, and strangely familiar. A lot of people I know live away from their families, and having a sense of familial comfort can be disconcerting before it becomes pleasant. But then there she was, figuring out the bus routes and meeting me in town for a movie. It’s hard to understand that this is normal for so many people, but for me, this was special. Strange, wonderful and special to have someone who has known me since before I was born just...here. Present and available. 

I have learnt to create families when I don’t have one close by. My chosen family moved, spread and splintered with my adopted siblings moving away faster than I could keep up. As the people I identified as close enough to fill those gaps in Ireland left one by one, I scrambled to find replacements. We need anchors to stay grounded, to feel like we belong. We need a community, a group, a family and when we don’t have one, we make one. And sometimes they fall apart. 

And sometimes we find a family where we least expect it, like in a job that grew on me like a layer of skin. In a bar that became a second home with its own fluctuating family tree. Amongst a pack of determined drifters, some staying, some leaving, some constantly in limbo. We find them in scattered souls who are trying to make friends, even when pushed away. They have been there all along, I was just too busy grieving for the families I had lost to see what I could have gained. 

A taxi finally pulls up, and I get in with my bag clinking with cider bottles and a jar of spiced butter. I take it to an unfamiliar street, where I stand outside a gate. My heart palpitations start, and for a while I stand there until they settle, the full moon over my shoulder, waiting. It’s closing in on midnight on Christmas day and I’ve moved across the quiet streets of North Dublin from one family to another, threading through a city of other people’s stories. There is stillness, there is happiness, and there is sadness. And for me, after a very long time, there is a sense of belonging. I feel complete. Complete as a full moon on Christmas. 

Dancing Myself Clean

I wake up and decide, it’s time to listen to LCD Soundsystem again.

My last therapist gave me lots of strange advice that didn’t really help. One was to stop listening to music everyday as I walked to work, so I could absorb background sounds. I could see where she was going with it, so I stopped. I’ve always liked the sounds of a city, they’ve always made me feel a bit more grounded and I felt that it made sense for the while. 

The trouble was, I never really went back. 

I got off the emotional roller coaster that was my song list on shuffle, and left my headphones home more and more often. As the months went and by I became sadder and stonier, I never reached back out to music. Until last month I had the emotional capacity of a block of cement. Then things started happening; my friends from back home found the cracks in the stone and started reaching in to drag me out. From around the world they chiseled away, tiny bit by bit, and as foundations started shaking and cracking, I started waking up. They shouted down into the hollows and for the first time in a year, I heard them. 

As things started looking up emotionally, I was simultaneously drowning in work, trying to organise the second Irish Craft Cocktail Awards. Between glueing bottles, trying to remember how InDesign worked and shaking my fist at suppliers in addition to a myriad of other things I didn’t have time to look inwards: we were building something big. It was thrilling, that fizzy heady exhaustion. It was happening, and it was big, and it was our baby. 

And then we did it, and it was great. Standing in the Odeon amongst 200 people who were having the time of their lives, while wrapping up the last of the tasks for the night I started feeling that fizz of A Good Night Out About To Happen. I’ve felt this about a handful of times this year, having fun hasn’t been a priority for a long time. But that night I felt it, and I followed it into a white water rapid night of uninhibited dancing, copious drinking, and talking to people. Actually talking to people instead of hiding away, staying out until sunrise instead of taking the last bus home, and shrugging off the last of a concrete shell in an explosion of smiles and gin. But more then anything, there was music, there was bass in my bones and the vibrations running through the hairs on my arms, and I was filled with it. 

And the next morning, the lyrics started coming back.

In my mind I reached out through the haze to the songs knocking, waiting to get in. LCD Soundsystem has always accompanied me through the most complicated phase of my life. Their songs are like a wardrobe of clothes that fit me when they need to, and they have always created the frameworks for me to process my emotions. The thing is I hadn’t allowed that to happen in a very long time. 

“Everybody makes mistakes, but I feel alright when I come undone” sang James Murphy in ‘Tribulations’. “You will stay until the morning comes, you will normalize, don't it make you feel alive” said Nancy Wang in her clipped American way in ‘Get Innocuous’. I can hear the keyboard and drum intro to ‘All My Friends’ creeping into to mind as I remember dancing and laughing the night before. I start smiling again.

Walking to my new (and much better) therapist in Ranelagh a few days later, trying to process my thoughts from the week, I flick through albums on my phone. As the stone falls away, I realise I need help trying to figure out the version of me that will form in its place. As I tell her about how I’m listening to music again, she nods vigorously: “Music can be the voice of the other that speaks to us when we feel we have nobody to talk to.” The phrase is so perfect I want to cry. I do, because it’s overwhelming to talk, to be understood, to make mistakes, to throw your arms open to the world again and start shouting “I’M BACK”, accompanied by the best soundtrack the universe can provide. 

I leave the office, tear-stained and elated, and start playing “I Can Change”. 

Heart On: Processing Paris, Friendship and Music.

Things that happened between Thursday 12th November and Sunday 15th November, in chronological order:

I found out that I had missed the Eagles of Death Metal gig on Monday in Dublin. 43 were killed in Beirut bombings I started getting presents from my friends in Istanbul, Rio and London. I went to work. Over 100 were killed in multiple Parisian bombings and attacks. I found out about Beirut. I took a bus to an industrial estate in Ballycoolin. I went to a Mountain Goats gig.

I loved that band. I remember when Heart On was released in 2008 and we were living in Wedmore Street in North London. We played the album non-stop. I fell immediately in love with High Voltage, while my best friend was more into Heart On. Wannabe in L.A. was thrummy and low and great. Any band with Josh Homme is a winner really, it goes without saying that Queens of the Stone Age is brilliant and I was lucky enough to go see Them Crooked Vultures as well. Dave Grohl back in action too. What a concert that was, we got a ticket off of Ebay by the skin of our teeth because they sold out overnight.

I was sad when I realised they played in the Olympia on Monday. In another life I wouldn’t have missed the gig because my friends would have been booking tickets for it months in advance. I missed it because I didn’t see any posters. I probably would have gone alone anyways, or brought someone who didn’t know any of their songs. Things change.

It was an extra layer of sadness on an already rough week. Rough month. Rough year. Developing a new and disagreeable personality that I wear like an ill-fitting suit doesn’t make for easy living. Discomfort is a everyday experience. On top of a cancelled holiday due to Visa Issues (my least favourite and yet often used term) things weren’t great.

And then I started getting packages in the post: A graphic novel, a small Timon from Lion King toy, from my best friend in Turkey and another in Brazil. I knew I had a missed a package from my friend in London and I was going to have to go to the depot in the morning. After hiding from my friends for a year in a dark hole in my brain, one of them hatched a plan to have people send me presents to cheer me up and remind me that I was loved. I was alternatively delighted, overwhelmed, sad, joyful and numb. It was amazing. But I continuously had to force my mind to process that happy feeling. 

While on the door at The Liquor Rooms that night I checked Facebook and saw some mentions of something in Paris. I made a note to read about it properly when I got home. I managed to leave around 11.20pm and got the last bus. When I got home I started reading article and after article and the story unfolded. I messaged around to see if friends were ok, then I found out about Beirut and sent a message to another friend. I wondered when they had developed the ‘Marked Safe’ option on Facebook. Was it around during the Ankara bombings? It was a great idea. I wondered if they would ever roll it out for other attacks/disasters rather than the ones that got the most media traction. I started getting conflicting feelings between Paris, Beirut and Ankara. I wanted to process the shock of Paris but my brain was moving past it too fast. Something about the Paris attacks were sitting with me in a weird way and I didn’t know what it was yet.

The next morning I thought about death while on the 40D to the depot in Dublin 15. How many times in my life had I sent messages to check if my friends were safe? Friends in Paris, Beirut, Ankara, Istanbul, New Delhi, London, Virginia, New York City. Friends in Sri Lanka and Thailand. Natural disasters and terrorism making me reach for my phone or laptop and form quick mental lists of people to worry about. I thought about dead friends of friends. 

I smiled when I saw them bring out the package. I recognised the ‘Betty’s’ logo on the side, the name of a famous cafe in York. A slice of an old life from a good friend. I had seen her twice this year because of her wedding. I hadn’t seen many others. Standing in the rain I shuffled back and forth, desperate for a bathroom and hoping for the bus to arrive sooner. My feel were cold and wet but I held the package under my arm, triumphant, a big cardboard box filled with friendship. 

At home with the gifts laid on the table I went through the strange process of crying with happiness, that conflicting experience that makes your brain feel like it’s flicking a light switch on and off while turning on the tap until the sink overflows. An hour later the feeling was gone and I felt the fog consume me again, dull and grey. I watched Netflix and fought the queasiness in my stomach caused by anxiety and lower back aches until he came home. We made dinner. I barely spoke. We went to Whelan’s. 

Standing in the crowd at Mountain Goats, something clicked. The biggest attack happened at a gig. Concerts are safe spaces, happy spaces where strangers come together for a single, concentrated reason. For music. For love of it. To see and touch and feel that digital god, to find out if they’re real. To ignite the lyrics that we’ve always nurtured, to move with abandon, to see the sweat forming on their forehead metres away. ‘When terrible things happen we need to listen to music to get through it’ John Darnielle said to an applauding crowd. As they chanted ‘hail satan’ singing along to The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton, I felt a pinprick of fear. What made that gig a target? Would Eagles of Death Metal continue touring? How can they ever forget seeing their fans, who gathered to see them, mowed down by bullets and bombs? There were 18 year olds hiding under dead bodies, dead best friends. If I lived in Paris with my friends, I would have been there. I would have smelt blood and smoke. I would have, I would have, I would have-

But I didn’t. I didn’t even see them when they were on my doorstop. And while the world changes their profile pictures to the French flag for some reason all I can think of is that concert hall. Of Josh Homme dropping his guitar and ducking down, or running. Of the moment where that concert joy bubbling in the hearts of hundreds turns to ice-cold and white-hot terror. Of guns and bombs and screeching feedback off the monitors. Of music.

Today I try to wrap my head around everything. Around the grief of a disaster in Paris that feels far more distant to me than the terror in Turkey. Around the happiness and warmth of friendship that stretches over seas and oceans. Around terror. But instead, all that happens is that the songs of Eagles of Death Metal fill my head like insulation foam. In my brain they are the pivot, the head of a pin where friendship and Paris balance. I listen to ‘How Can A Man With So Many Friends Feel So Alone’. I never noticed that song before. I suck the lyrics into me and block out everything else. In the end, when the world falls apart while good people shine through, it all boils down to the organ behind your ribs. Fiercely and unashamedly filled with music. Heart: on. 

Sometimes I feel all alone I know it's such a strange feeling 'Cause I used to have so many friends The few I have left, I hold them close to my heart 'Cause tomorrow I might be all alone

Here are choices to make But I feel scared and I'm sad 'Cause I'm feeling there ain't no trust at all Woke up, had it all, then come nightfall I've got nothing left but heart shaken down

    - ‘How Can A Man With So Many Friends Feel So Alone’, Eagles of Death Metal, Heart on, 2008

No Use Crying Over Spilt Blood

There was a bomb threat when I used to live in Ankara. Before the dangerous days of Erdoğan these events were rare and not seemingly part of something large, sinister and obvious the way it is now. My house, perched on the edge of a valley, overlooked the entire city and I sat glued to the window in terror imagining a blast of fire and debris shooting up from downtown. I wrote a poem called 36 kilos, which was the amount of explosives found. The terror came, then subsided. On that day, the streets remained the same.

But the streets haven’t been the same for a while now. During the Gezi protests I stayed on Twitter and Facebook for hours on end, passing messages back and forth with the comfort of knowing I couldn’t be arrested from the safety of Ireland. I was sent an article with a photo of the street where I used to live shrouded in tear gas. Turkey was a home, and piece by piece it was cracking and disintegrating. What street was this? Not mine, not mine anymore.

Since then blood has broken on the grey concrete slabs of Turkish pavements, drop by drop but yesterday it flowed, it spilt on the dusty autumn ground. It made the air rank with death while tear gas filled the lungs of survivors, more insult to horrific injury. As of today 96 have died in the two Ankara bomb blasts during a peaceful rally. According to reports they were holding hands and dancing and singing when shrapnel tore through hopeful, optimistic flesh. 

The government blocked social media and threatened news outlets, attempting to stop the spread of news about the bombings. A bloodied fist trying to wipe away the bodies, no, nothing to see here. No use crying over spilt blood. Friends of friends of friends lie under peace flags, growing colder than the ground they’re on, three degrees of separation but that’s already too close for comfort. 

So what now? What can my friends do when their lives are in serious danger if they go to a protest? The message was clear: give up, stop, or more death will come. But giving up is not an option. So what can they do without risking their lives?

Keep talking. Keep sharing. In the safest way possible, keep fighting. And on November 1st you can show them that you are not scared, because no matter what they do ballots will always be stronger than bombs. 

And from here, I’ll keep writing so I can fight the squirm of burning hot helplessness in my gut. My feet are not marching on Turkish streets, and my vote will not be on a ballot on the day it matters. I am not Turkish and never will be, but it was a home that welcomed me and loved me back. It was a home that gave me a family and an identity that will last a lifetime. It is a home that I am losing, and as it falls away I try my best to keep it tied to me with words.

I will write, because it’s all I can do. 

Hurriet Daily News: Protesters gather at scene of Ankara bombings; 95 dead BBC: Ankara explosions leave almost 100 dead  Independent.co.uk: Ankara terror attack: Turkey censors media coverage of bombings as Twitter and Facebook 'blocked' Ankara attacks: innocent hearts beating for peace are brutally stopped

Tastes Like Teen Spirit

Sometimes in the corner of my memories, I can taste the fizzy-fresh syrup of a Jägerbomb at the back of my tongue. I drink them one, maybe twice a year and everytime I think, I have found my time machine. Like a scene in a movie where a magic pill sparks a psychedelic montage of swirling colours, when the first one bursts in my mouth and falls straight to my gut I remember what youth tastes like. The abandon, the shouting, and singing along. The topless streaking down London streets and loud cheering when the 50-in-a-row shots get knocked in, splish splash. Sticky puddles on a wooden counter with Journey blaring through the speakers. We’re all friends here.

These days I go weeks without alcohol, and just about remember to go ‘huh, well hasn’t life changed’ before my head hits the pillow and sleep injects itself. I left the parties in London, where my friend babysits my smoke machine which has long since run out of stolen refills. My collection of €5 strobe lights disappeared years ago along with my Galaxy Laser Pod, which used to project a swirling universe on my ceiling as we lay back in a smoky haze and discussed philosophy. We all held hands more often back then, and fell asleep in drunken piles of growing friendships. We were the centre of the nervous system, rounding up a crew every single Saturday so we could shake off the spiders of new entry-level jobs for one night and drink punch from a bucket. On my birthdays we would bring sixty people over after spending a week planning, decorating and blowing birthday cash on booze and Poundland junk. We filled paddling pools with bubble bath and woke up covered in bruises. We left the student houses behind but we saw no reason to grow up yet. The clan moved en masse from York to London and we continued, pulling fresh friends and lovers into the cloud. We grew, we drank, we smoked, we broke wine glasses on the balcony and we took endless photographs. We didn’t have smartphones, and so we stared into each other instead. 

But that time has passed.

On Sunday morning I wake up and sometimes am crushed under a wave of painful nostalgia. Sad Sundays remembering how these mornings used to consist of the dregs of last night’s friends sleepily putting cans in bin bags. We turned the music up and sprayed Dettol on the floors, blackened with Shisha coal and ash. In half an hour the air no longer smelled like vomit-sugar-nicotine and like citrus and bleach instead. We threw open the doors, piled onto the dusted off sofa, and watched movies hungover after breakfast at a nearby greasy spoon. Some left in the evening, some stayed another night. 

Nostalgia’s a funny thing. I’m still plagued by those sugar-coated memories where I conflate a student house in York with a North London apartment, erasing the parts where my world was caving in. And when I go back I resurrect that rose-tinted version of me, altered but not gone, and the jägerbombs are lined up on the bar again. I stay up until sunrise with drink spilled down my top, and the next day nurse the unfamiliar hangover on a friend’s floor. I sigh. I wake up, content. I leave.

A few hours later am back in Dublin, getting on the bus home. Entering a quiet flat in the echo of jangling keys, I sit in the silence and soak up the emptiness, and try and decide if my life is better or worse here. Sure isn’t this just what growing up is? I’ve returned with a new stock of fizzy-herbal memories to use as ammunition against myself, and alone, I drink in the poison of nostalgia: If only, if only, if only. If only life were as sweet as back then. 

D&D&Me.

Arcana Fuego’s default state can only be described as Brat. She’s a headstrong, vain and stubborn 19-year-old who likes to play with fire, pick pockets and look at herself in the mirror. But at the same time, she’s also what all 19-year-olds are: nervous, insecure, lonely and of course constantly worried that she will Be Found Out. After leaving her family and being on her own for a few years, ripping off gullible shoppers in weekend markets got a bit old, so she thought she’d give adventuring a go. Gold! Dragons! Violence! MORE GOLD! Flirting outrageously with muscular barbarians! It was the perfect antidote to her boredom. 

What she got instead was friendship. They weren’t the handsome warriors that she thought she would be automatically leading. She got a Druid who would suddenly turn into a bear at a moment’s notice, an aristocratic Dragonborn who only sports a loincloth and hits on anything with scales, a nervous trigger-happy Paladin and a gruff Ranger who honestly has had enough of Arcana’s attitude. As the game progresses she becomes ever so slightly less bratty. She stops playing dumb and starts to support others. She still has her street cred to retain but the fact is that, this is the first time in her life that she hasn’t been alone and she secretly loves it. As she levels up and gains more confidence in her spellcasting she starts becoming the person she wants to be. She starts to become that anti-hero she has always dreamed of.

Now of course, I’m not a sassy teenage Arcane Trickster. Just like I’m not a chubby thieving Halfling or a scruffy awkward Scout. But in a funny way maybe I am a Rogue. I’m used to doing things on my own, and blending into the background. I’m good at hiding but also at making an entrance. After watching Jane McGoniGal’s ‘The game that can give you 10 extra years of life’ TED talk I started thinking about the connections between RPGs and creating an avatar for the real-life me to improve my mental health, and then realised maybe I’ve already been doing that for a while. 

I was invited to play in a beginner’s Star Wars RPG last summer. As someone who never owned consoles or games growing up, I increasingly felt that the world of gaming was a club that I just would never be a member of. As I grew older, I played with friends but found I lost interest when playing alone. As an only child I didn’t have someone my age constantly around to play with. I enjoyed the teamwork aspect of games, but most people just want to continue to play on their own after. I wanted to bounce ideas off of friends and problem-solve together, but when you live in different countries that becomes harder to keep up. So when I was assured that it was a beginner’s game where I wouldn’t feel like an idiot, and there would be actual people sitting around a table with me, I thought maybe this could work. 

What happened is that I was hauled out of my daily depression and thrown into spaceships, firing shots at bad guys and ducking behind walls while trying to save my friends. I relished a world created solely from my imagination that to me was as vivid as real life. I loved that we had created a parallel history of friendships between characters that we would talk about casually as if they actually happened. Stealing spacecrafts and bartender droids and having week-long parties after saving villages seemed like valid memories of real situations. For a few hours I lived a genuine adventure, and each time felt more and more invincible. A few campaigns later, that sense of invincibility seems only stronger. Perhaps I owe a lot of that to our DM who would rather see us live and create a better story than see us die. I appreciate that. 

In my experience, D&D creates a concentrated safe space where the some of the best parts of the human condition are brought to the surface: the love for teamwork, friendship, strategic thinking, and a thirst for conquering the unknown. These are qualities that I am not afraid to activate through my characters, who constantly manage to not only survive but have fun at the same time. Isn’t this how we should be living anyways?I have put pieces of myself into those characters and maybe now is the time for some of those characters live a little bit through me. Imagine if I really embraced this, and started be battling the odds with my friends by our side while defeating my monsters. Imagine if I genuinely started coming to terms with the fact that what happens to me in life is a combination of chance and purposeful action, and it’s my job to make the most of both. Imagine if I wasn’t afraid to rest and heal when damaged because I know I’ll need to be healthy in future battles. Imagine if I used that common sense I use in gaming, and apply it to how I manage myself.

Imagine what I could achieve, if I wasn’t afraid to feel invincible.

The Only Ship That Doesn’t Sink

I wont do it, I thought. 

I won’t do it because the water will be cold, and I’ll sink into the depths filled with terror instead of peace. I’ll hope to slip off into sweet oblivion but the last sensation I’ll probably feel is the sliminess of seaweed around my ankles and the panic of the unknown thudding into my ribcage. I won’t do it because I won’t know where to leave my phone after. I won’t do it because of my mother, and my best friend, and my boyfriend, and all those other people who will be devastated. I won’t do it because, because, because, because...

Look, I won’t do it, ok? But the loneliness eats away at my logic and makes me entertain those thoughts. Those fantasies of a watery escape somewhere near Blackrock. They’re all bullshit, and I won’t do it, but...

But. Sometimes I’ll think about it. 

I should get help. My last therapist fared well until a certain point and then fell short of the mark. “You don’t have depression” she said, and left it at that. “There’s something I’m missing with you, I just can’t put my finger on it.” It was frustrating, being a puzzle but with no solution provided. No cheat sheet or criteria to tick the boxes against. All it did was add to the frustration. I suppose she did lead me to a point though, that point where I started to figure out what the problem really was, what was the core. 

After some time I came to a conclusion. I reached for my phone to call someone, to talk to them, and found that there was no number to dial. My boyfriend hears all of it already, but I needed a friend. A close friend. One who will come over with wine and not need the sparknotes version before beginning the ice-cream-fueled analysis. And I realised that those people were all in other countries. They weren’t here. All I had left were ghosts of people who once knew me well. 

When did that happen? How long had it been? And why didn’t I notice sooner?

I lifted my head out of the murky waters of a long-term relationship and realised I was terribly alone. I realised how much I still cling onto those university-fresh friendships that wound their way warmly into my heart, those people so far away that I have given pieces of myself to. My Chosen Family, now scattered around the globe. They are too good, too deep, too meaningful to replace so I never bothered trying. Nothing could compare to those people who I am forever tied to, the people who know me inside out. The people who I allow to hug and hold me. The puppy-warm dogpile on new year’s eve where we were smothered in friendship, brimming with love. The Chosen Family are too hard an act to follow, and I hold every acquaintance up to the light and say no, you’re not of the same standard, you just won’t do.

And so I refuse to open up, I refuse to make meaningful connections. People try to reach out and are met with a polite smile, an amicable brick wall, and an “I should be heading home, I’m knackered.” Three years on and I’m still on the peripheries. Once the heart of a 30-strong group, I now struggle to collect 4 people in one room. People have their people, and don’t look for new people. Or I find the ones that I think can really get me, but they have that wanderlust in them that means they won’t be around for long. And they never are.

I had a group, misfit nomads like me, and they left. I found those few kindred spirits over the years and they left as well. They left they left they left they left and they left me too tired to keep trying. As I sank lower I began hiding from my old friends, not sharing what I was going through. What if they don’t know what to do with the New Me, the sad me, the me who doesn’t go out and sleeps a lot? The me with the voice in my head that buries me alive when things get a bit rocky? What if I want to preserve the Ghost of Chandrika Past, the ringmaster of epic house parties and purveyor of sunny smiles and bad jokes? What will they do when they find out she’s gone, and all that’s left is, well...this?

In a sea of what-ifs and maybe-I-shouldn’ts I sit down and decide to exorcise a happy ghost. I begin the slow painful process of taking down the wall, brick by brick. I timidly declare “hi everyone, I’m really not ok” through the constant shout of the internet and see where the chips fall. People might message me and open up and offer help and I can almost guarantee that for some illogical reason I won’t write back. But at least I make a plan, I decide that I should text back, meet for coffees, reach out and even if I don’t at least there’s an intention where there previously wasn’t. I’ll stall, I’ll bail, I’ll fall and fail but at least I’ve decided to try. Because a life of stretching limbs to reach across seas to friends no longer nearby only ends in drowning. And that’s something I’ve decided not to do.

Members of The Chosen Family on our 5 year York reunion on New Year’s Eve. Many overseas flights were involved. 

Deathtember

I noticed a post on Facebook from a small L.A. based undertaking business that started a Facebook project called Deathtember. Every day they are posting a question about death to promote understanding and conversation around the topic.

Besides being a great marketing initiative, I liked the fact that it existed. I didn’t feel the need to participate, but I liked that it was out there. People need to talk about death more often. I need to talk about death more often.

I wrote a piece called ‘Too Many Candles’ once, about lighting candles for the dead and sick whenever you visit a church. I’m not Christian but my mother is half Christian and it’s a tradition for both of us. A few years ago I stopped because I found myself lighting 5, 6, 7 candles and I was too much for me. I didn’t want to remind myself about the dead in my life. I wanted to push them away.

Sometimes it’s hard to forget them. I see a name in my phone contacts list that for some reason I can’t delete. I see photographs. I see their books. I see their facial features in the mirror. I talk to their friends. I force myself to forget the moments when I found out.

In December I’ll be taking part in Mortified Dublin, a show where people read out parts of their teenage diaries. It’ll be their first Dublin show (the story of Mortified and its roots are in a fantastic Netflix documentary). Prepping for the show means that I have to trawl through endless diary entries filled with shame, optimism, defiance, and as I grew older, sadness and loss. The deaths live in the diary so that I don’t have to live with them, so I can leave them behind in pages that I didn’t expect to flick through so thoroughly ever again. I looked for the embarrassing stories and long-winded rants, but forgot that in there was a teenager dealing with bigger things than boys and body image. 

On the 9th of November 2005 I wrote an entry in my journal about my grandfather’s death. It was full of acceptance and sadness, but most importantly it was overflowing with love. During that time I felt that I was going through the motions properly, feeling the right feelings and getting over them in time. Looking back I now realise I absolutely hadn’t. I sat outside his hospital room reading Irving Stone’s ‘The Agony and The Ecstasy’, a biographic novel about Michelangelo. I drowned myself in the story, surfacing for sterile hospital air to the beeping and whirring of cold machines hooked up to warm bodies. I was 17 years old and was determined to keep it together when others couldn’t. I wanted to be there for my mother, my grandmother, and my aunt. I measured their grief against mine and decided mine had a lower priority. I went through the motions in their most limited sense, and 10 years later I know I never grieved properly. Each year the subject gets more sensitive and difficult to deal with. He wrote books that I should be reading, but 10 years on I still feel unprepared for the way books give the dead a voice.

Death’s a funny one. In our personal lives we fear it, long for it, push it away, push it down. In our everyday lives we aren’t afraid to engage with it, with the safety of a screen between us and the corpses. A photo of a drowned Syrian toddler goes viral, evoking emotions about the Syrian refugee crisis that statistics and basic common sense can’t. We need evidence of extremes to feel something that is far away. But we share the image, we talk about it, we see it casually pop up on our newsfeeds. It shocks and desensitises. We sign a petition and donate. We scroll down.

Death is hard to talk about because there’s so much to say, and we don’t say enough. This post had no goal when I started, and it certainly doesn’t have one now. But Deathtember started an idea, and a goal for acceptance that I haven’t fully committed to all these years. There are deaths I am in denial about. There were deaths just barely avoided. There are deaths that are ready to happen. Writing this post is the first deep breath in that long conversation. We’ll see where it goes.