Truth

It's safe to say that this week has been a struggle.

Having just typed that, I feel incredibly silly and ashamed. While I have had my own difficulties this week, nothing could compare to the struggles my friends are facing and will continue to face in the coming weeks. While health issues are plaguing one of my best friends, a young man in my year died while on a trip with a college society. I refuse to name him or go into intense details about the case: people are doing enough of that as is. I also would not claim to have ever been incredibly close to the deceased, but on any occasion I did engage with him, he always came across as a very polite, well-rounded young man.

These are hard truths we face. "God only takes the best", we are told, as hands are held and eyes are closed. We pick up our friends from the airport to greet them with smiles and warm hugs, only to be met with ashen faces and distress. Emotions run high as you realise it could have happened to any one. "Life is simple, it's just not easy" - another equally upbeat pearl of wisdom from the powers that be.

You sit and wonder why. You sit and sympathise with the family in a faraway county, who must bury their son in the most tragic of circumstances. You sit and wonder why it wasn't you. You're selfish. You cry wolf and blame anxiety for your cowardliness. You blame others for the self-inflicted panic attacks. You lay awake until five in the morning begging people to talk to you until your heart stops racing. You lie and cry after love in the dark of your room. You call others out for their selfish acts caused by their own inner conflictions. You act recklessly and irresponsibly in a desperate attempt to recapture your spirit and call yourself brave. You are no better for saying no. You are no stronger.

I've spoken briefly before about my anxiety. It's something that's stuck around, and tends to rear its head when I'm alone. Anxiety and loneliness are lovers. I've moved back to Dublin following my Christmas break, and was living in the apartment by myself while all my friends were away. I told my mam, who reassured me I could come home whenever I wanted to. But I turned her down. I saw coming at the weekend as a sign of weakness. I felt like I had something to prove. Going home would be allowing my emotions to win.

My brain became more wound up as cabin fever set in. My sheets were sweaty and I felt like I'd seen everything the internet had to offer me. So, that night, I went out by myself, in a city I am still growing accustomed to. I got drunk, and, in hindsight, put myself in a potentially dangerous position. What I had thought to be a courageous act had been hideously stupid in light of what had happened.

You have your darkest days in exchange for the brightest of nights. Often, the pieces of yourself will feel broken or shift out of place. That doesn't make you weak. Neither does asking for help. Comparing your problems to others' don't make your problems any lesser or any greater. They are still your fears, and they will feel just as real, no matter what the context. I encourage any one with the saddest of burdens to reach out their hand in the dark and take the first step. Despite how small you feel, you will always be the largest part of someone's eye, the plug in the hole in someone's heart. You'd don't go any where alone, and you don't let any one go any where alone.

You'll still over think. You will still cry yourself to sleep worrying about your future in the hands of demi-gods. Bad things will still happen. But not a day will go by when you won't be shining. You are as bright as the day you were born - for always, forever.


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Living is a problem

"Nadine?"

"Yeah?"

"Why do we have two mop buckets?"

My Christmas break was over. I was back in my apartment in north Dublin, ready to face the struggles of semester two and a laughable 10 hour week. My four house mates had moved back up earlier than I had, and I had arrived back to a pretty unclean apartment.

I overlooked this - until I noticed a second mop bucket sitting in the corner of the room, half full with dirty water. It looked as if it had been sitting there for days. The other mop bucket was on the opposite side of the room, sporting mysterious white stains on the inside.

Nadine laughed. "That's not a mop bucket - that's the bin."

I paused. "Why ... Why was the bin used as a mop bucket?"

"Well", she replied, still laughing, "I had used the mop bucket to bleach my shoes in. It was in my room, and I think Jun wanted to mop the floor, so he used the bin." Queue more laughter. (Jun is our Japanese house mate who doesn't speak to us much, mainly because he can't).

Incidents like this were becoming all too familar. In semester one alone, we had been through a kettle, two toasters and vacuum cleaner. (We had broken the vacuum cleaner as a result of using it to try and hoover up a flood in Nadine's room - it's a miracle we made it to college in the first place).

College teaches you a lot of things. It is slowly teaching me how to live amicably with people that aren't blood relatives.

Your days of reaching into the cupboard knowing they are overflowing with food are gone. I returned knowing that my meals would have to be made up of three ingredients - porridge, pasta and rice. Delicious.

"We HAVE to go food shopping", I said to Brid, who temporarily moved in with me last week.

(This resulted in us not going food shopping and eating at the college bar almost every night. Or just not eating).

We don't have a dishwasher apartment, nor do we have a mother that miraculously swoops in every time you leave a tea-stained cup on the draining board. Slowly, the washing builds up, forming a budget Leaning Tower of Pisa.

I mean, sure, every one was great for cleaning at the start. I even went the extra mile - I went from not lifting a finger at home to taking out the bins, doing the wash-up, hoovering and mopping the floor (this was prior to  the Bin-As-Mop-Bucket saga). Old habits die hard, however. Jun, who used to do all of the wash-up even when the delph wasn't his, soon realised that we had no intention of ever touching a dirty plate again as it was assumed he would clean it. I'm pretty sure this was the point when the entire house broke down.

We had a house inspection a couple of weeks ago. Tired and well-worn from college, naturally, we'd left all cleaning until the night before. The house was hoovered hourly, I used bleach for the very first time and cleaned all surfaces without baby wipes. Defrosting the freezer turned into a bizarre house-bonding exercise, as we all tried to remove it from the wall, unsuccessfully. Jun and I must have looked a sight, hacking away at the ice with whatever clean cutlery was about.

Living with strangers teaches tolerance ... Or lack thereof. Dealing with my house mate's girlfriend has proven unbearable. She doesn't clean up after herself - and then precedes to make snide comments about the state of the apartment. (Hey, I know where it's clean - your own apartment!)

She's also quick to apprehend us when we're being 'too loud' and when we 'keep her' up. (I mean, that's cute and all, but I'm pretty sure you don't live here).

I'm one to talk though really: I regularly have people over (not like that, refrain from making jibes please) and I'm usually the one that has parties. This was no exception during exam time - much to my house mates dismay. They usually put up with it, without much complaint. However, this week, things came to ahead.

Living with other people will teach you how to deal with conflict within your house. A discussion I had initiated over cleaning and the starting of a cleaning rota resulted in a full-blown argument and tension between my house mates and I. I had come back, and after, seeing the state of the house, begged and pleaded for something to be done about the Great Wall of Washing-Up. I left notes, which got responses of, "I didn't use these dishes, I'm not cleaning them."

Relations were poorer than America and Russia's. I was in despair. I'd ruined our fantastic house dynamic by playing tyrant and by allowing my innate housekeeper instincts to overrule me á la Macbeth. Then, a letter from campus residence came in the door.

Each of my house mate's was to be fined €50 because I smuggled Brid into the apartment during exam time. If I came forward, a €100 fine would apply to me and only me.

Well, shit.

I hid the letter from my other house mates, fearful that they would drive me out of DCU after being fined through no fault of their own. I decided I would own up in the morning, and sit down with house mates and apologise about the cleaning issue.

I sat down with Nollaig the following morning, wishing to clear everything up. It was agreed that a cleaning rota would be drawn up to avoid confrontations.

"You know the fines?" Nollaig said. "Well, they're fake. They're not real. We made them up to get back at you."

I stood there, baffled and speechless. No wonder they'd been barely speaking to me! They'd been plotting against me! For asking them to hoover the kitchen! How had I even fallen for it? They'd pull it off immaculately - the sheets bore the college's logo and all of the college's contact details. Imagine I had gone down and admitted that Brid had been staying with me - they would have laughed in my face AND I would have been out of 100 quid, for no good reason.

Initially, I was angry: fuming, even. But then I realised that really no harm had come of it, (and I was acting like Queen Bitch). I had four lifelong friends in my very wonderful house mates - all gorgeously funny people who successfully managed to pull the wool over my eyes.

Plus, I got my cleaning rota. Dishes on Tuesday, anyone?

Definitely maybe

"Everything happens for a reason".

That's my typical response when something goes wrong in my life, or someone else's. "One door closes, another one opens ... " I'm some woman for clichés, especially when they're the last things you need to hear. Up until quite recently, I believed it all.

But what about the doors that don't close? What about the ones we leave ajar? 

I feel like nothing's certain any more. Recently, I've been second guessing myself on decisions I made months ago; on thoughts I believed I couldn't be more set on. Now, I feel like someone's yanked the rug from under me. 

I've always been level-headed. I've always relied on logic, and have never been spontaneous. I'm cautious - perhaps overly so - and indecisive. I'm not brave. I'm scared of my own shadow, and even more so of the unknown.

Open doors bother me. What I don't know bothers me. I need certainty and clarity in my life and right now I don't have that. I need someone to come out from behind the door and tell me whether I made the right decision or not. 

But that's not going to happen: not now, not ever. It's just a matter of waiting to see how curious I get before I coax the monsters of my past out from open doors. I just want to know ...

... What if?

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Legacy

"Oh, you're the one who puked all over herself at Christina's!"

While I was doing my best to cheer up a girl I barely knew in the bathroom of a club at the weekend, she quickly remembers how it is that she knows me - being an absolute mess.

I have written about said-puking experience before - if you haven't read it, allow me to redirect you.

What she said got me thinking. You're probably aware having read previous posts that I am extremely conscious as to what people think of me and it affects me a lot. I stopped and asked myself at that moment - what will I be remembered for?

The saying goes that the good you do is never acknowledged, and the bad you do is never forgotten and I can't help but feeling this applies to me. I obsess over the things I have done wrong or am doing wrong. The good pales in comparison to the bad.

Didn't Beyoncé sing something about 'leaving footprints in the sands of time'? I mean, that's all well and good if you're Beyoncé, but in case you haven't noticed, I'm not actually Beyoncé. What about me?

Will I be immortalised as 'the girl that puked all over herself at an 18th she was invited to solely because of her boyfriend'? 'That girl that kissed too many boys in one night'? 'That attention-seeking girl who asked about ass tattoos on Twitter'? 'The one who bit that girl in Senior Infants, who broke someone's heart on New Year'a Eve, who constantly told lies, was an awful friend and who laid her dignity on the line for the sake of being liked by shallow spiteful people'?

Maybe not. Maybe I'll be 'the girl that got the highest results in her Junior Cert that one time'. Or 'the girl who loved people to the point of no return'. 'The girl who would do ANYTHING for her friends and family'. 'The one who sang Ave Maria, made stupid Batman impressions and never forgot anybody's birthday'.

Maybe.

Maybe it would just be better to be forgotten.

'The girl that never was'.

My Life In Pictures #1 - My friends are scumbags

Little

I've made no bones about the fact that I have no idea whether I want kids or not. 

I go through phases when I do - when a family member has a baby and it's cherub-like features tug at my maternal heart-strings.

I go through phases when I don't - when that same family member's little angel turns in to an absolute little shit and progresses to ruin its own life and everyone else's. 

I mean, how could you live with that? 

Children themselves put me off really. I pass a primary school every morning on my way to school. I witness, first-hand, as mother/fathers send their little darlings off with kisses, cuddles and 'I love yous', only to get nothing in return. Not a goodbye. Not even a wave. Off they scamper into school - the ungrateful little prats. After that man/woman just woke you up, dressed you, wiped your cereal off your manky face, made sure you had all your crap for school and that you weren't late, and you basically give him or her two fingers at the gate. I don't care if you're four or five and can barely form a sentence: you tell your mammy or daddy you love them! Every single morning! There's many a child I have wished to kick for their cheeky behaviour - just think what I'd be like if one of my own did that!

The toys would wreck my head too - the noises, the flashing, the small parts which 'may be a choking hazard'. It's all well and good running around a toy shop when you're five or six or seventeen pressing all the 'Try Me!' buttons on every single toy in sight to annoy the shite out of every employee and customer. I can't imagine how amusing it would be being on the other side. I mean, there's only so many times you can hear Elmo sing a song before you want to punch him repeatedly in the head.

Little kids are strange. And grubby. Realistically, I'm not exactly one to talk here, as my clothes seem to attract stains, (and my hair food), but they really are dirty horrible creatures. A former friend of mine once had a three year old stick a lollipop in her hair. Having said that, she was manhandling the child like it was some sort of handbag, so, in hindsight, I don't really blame the little thing. She deserved it.

Scenarios have played out in my head of my little son or daughter having miserable lives. Being friendless weirdos and myself being able to do nothing about it (it's not as if I could be their bestfriend - can't imagine that would do much for their 'street cred'). I'm perfectly aware that I wouldn't be able to live their lives for them, but when I imagine circumstances like that, I almost wish I could. It would honestly kill me, and I would hold myself utterly responsible. When it boils down to, it is this fear that holds me back ultimately. 

But then there are other things ...

It's the little crayon house with the little crayon windows, proudly pinned to the fridge. Little crayon mammy and daddy stand outside, holding the child's slightly disproportional hands. Smiles on all their faces.

Little laughs, at the things you now consider insignificant. The 'peek-a-boo', the 'aeroplane', the bizarre children's TV shows with their cringey presenters. The very first joke they tell that isn't all that funny and makes little or no sense. You'll still laugh. Even when they say it over and over and over again. 

The ones that say those four little words that make you feel like the best person in the world - "I love you mammy".

Little hands. Little fingers. Little feet. Little toes. 

Little tears stream down little cheeks. Little smiles light up little faces.

Watching them go from 'little' to 'not-so-little', collecting memory after memory as you go.

After all, it's the little things in life that matter most, isn't it?

Version

One of these days, I'll write a list. A list that I already take with me everywhere I go - though not in the physical sense. It's a long list. Everyone has one of their own, I'm sure. They won't compare to mine though.

One of these days, I'll write a list of everything I wish I could change. It would take up reams and reams of paper: from my appearance, my traits, my words, my actions, my abilities. I'd look at it every day and ask myself:

What would it take to be the best version of myself?

To be honest, I have no idea. But I'd love to meet her. It would be like meeting someone famous. I would be gushing over her and hanging on her every word.

"How do you do it?" I'd ask her, "How can you be everything that I'm not?"

She'd have all the right words. She'd know exactly what to say at the exact time. She could comfort in you ways that I couldn't possibly manage.  She would never be afraid to speak, in fear of causing an argument or offending someone. She wouldn't run when she had no idea what to say. She would be open to everyone, and utterly transparent to you.

She would listen. And I mean, really listen. She'd remember everything about everyone to a tee. She'd concentrate on every single word that left your lips and made a point of never forgetting a detail. She would be conscientious and considerate.

She would be reasonable and fair. She'd know when she was wrong - and, more importantly, admit it. She would be gracious in defeat and realise that not everything's about her, or having it her way. She would understand the difference between selfless and selfish.

She would not be immature, nor would she allow herself to be controlled or hemmed in by her family, her peers, or anyone else. She would be her own person, while still effortlessly dividing her time between everyone. Everyone would love her.

She would be everything you want and more.

Everything that I am not.

"One of these days", I would tell her, "one of these days, I'll be just like you. I'll change myself for the better. The way I act. The way I behave. I can do it. It's easy. In fact, why have I waited until now to be the best version of myself and make everything better? I'll be a different. Just you wait".

And you know what her response would be?

She would laugh.

One of these days ...

G-string (*)

You don't realise how good you are when you play.

That's probably not very reassuring, coming from me - someone who likes shit music and can't recognise any of the songs you play. But you are. Trust me.

I love how passionate you are, and how much you immerse yourself in it. You fit the image of 'broody musician' to a tee, (I think you're aware of that yourself though, you cocky bastard).

I wish I could afford to buy you a new guitar, or your own piano to play when you've had too much to drink and you think you're Beethoven/Peter Griffin. They're bloody expensive though - I'll have to set up some kind of fund for you, my impoverished musical prodigy.

I'm about as useful to you as a guitar without a G-string -  but I'll always be listening. Always.

Guidance

I need you to do something for me.

I know I ask a lot of you as it is. I can only hope that you will oblige me this on top of everything else.
I need direction. I need you to tell me - no, I need you to show me what to do, until I start getting things right. Until you do, I will only continue to falter and struggle with my decisions and actions.

It frustrates me that I have to ask for help; that I can't do things for myself without disaster following. I feel as young and naive as my short years. I would love to be as independent and sensible as I make out to be. But I'm not. Far from it.

You know what the most frustrating thing is? When I don't even realise that I'm doing things wrong. Which is almost all of the time. I continue to offend and hurt people with the decisions I make, and I am oblivious to the extent of the havoc I cause. I'm the idiot at the end of it all wondering why the hell everyone hates me.

I need you. You always know what to do and what to say. Always. You make good decisions. You have managed to navigate your way through life thus far without ruining everything you touch.
Is it really that easy? Is there something I'm missing here? Was I born without common sense? This elusive thing known as 'street smarts'? Greatly lacking in intuition? I am truly at a loss.

Some people flounder without guidance. I am one of those people. Show me the way, before I drown.

Home

There's something about hotel breakfasts that I love.


Maybe it's the lukewarm slices of toast smeared with those measly packets of butter, cut in to triangles to increase it's deliciousness. Maybe it's the wide array of fruit juices that would never be available to me in my own home, (it's water, milk or tea on offer, and you'd be lucky to get that even on a good day). Maybe it's those miniature boxes of cereal that contain barely enough cereal to feed a small rodent. Maybe it's the fact that you have to get up at the crack of dawn just to experience the whole affair - hotel breakfasts do NOT take hungover weddings guests or screaming children into consideration.

I love everything about hotels. Everything about them reminds me that I am currently on a micro-vacation away from the stupid people and stupid stresses of my everyday life. The unnecessary bedding in the rooms? Love it. The uncomfortable lift rides with fellow holiday-goers? Just another opportunity for me to act awkwardly around human beings. The poor selection of TV channels in the room? You're on holiday, why would you be watching TV anyway?

I have many childhood memories of staying in hotels with my family. On one occasion, I stayed up until all hours with my brother, watching WWE Wrestling. On another, I ran up and down the corridors of the hotel with my brazen cousins, knick-knocking on every door we passed. Ah. Those were the days indeed ...

Yet, I think you will all agree when I say the night's sleep you have when you finally arrive home, in your own bed, under your own excessive bedding, feels like the best night's sleep you ever had.  

An open book

I've been told that my mood is infectious.

In some ways, this is a very good thing: I've been told that I'm funny, and that I have a knack for cheering people up in their times of woe. I need a license for my laugh - very loud, boisterous, often left hanging in the air long after the conversation has ended.

However, my sister made a point to me the other night that, when I am upset or angry, it is apparent. Not only that, but it affects the people around me and rubs off on them, to the point where they are put in a foul mood. Infectious? Sounds more poisonous to me.

It is not my intention to labour people with my bad moods and my issues - not at all. I can't help it. I wish I wasn't so bloody transparent. Sometimes, I'd much prefer just to be left stewing with all my angry, hormonal thoughts, unbeknownst to anyone else, without disturbance,

There are benefits, mind. Even my least intuitive of friends knows when I'm sad or pissed off, (sometimes just by how I text them back), so they can talk to me and attempt to cheer me up, as opposed to the other way around. It's reassuring to know that I don't have to struggle with whatever anxieties I am dealing with alone.

Ever since I can remember, I have been a sensitive, (some may say 'overly'), soul. It doesn't take a lot to upset me. I have a bad habit of taking other people's problems to heart and trying to rectify them as though it were my own personal mission. Prioritising is most definitely NOT one of my strong points. I am easily stressed, and, admittedly, a lot of the grief I deal with is brought entirely on by myself. It has a dominoaffect - I try to help others, leads to me getting upset/stressed, which leads to me infecting everyone else in my household with my bad vibes.


 So technically, it's everyone else's fault I'm such an open book. Haha!