I write this post sitting in the morning sunshine, outside a co-operative cafe in beautiful Dublin City. I am taking deep, meaningful breaths. I am half-listening to the conversations going on between couples, families and friends dotted around the flowerpots and deliveries of fresh eggs. I have missed this. I realise what a simple creature I am. The feeling of a soft spring breeze, blue skies above and hubbub of passers-by almost makes this morning feel like heaven, otherworldly.
Thank god because honestly there is nothing left to watch on Netflix lol.
I packed up from Italy and headed back to Ireland in late autumn last year, having enjoyed very much a lifestyle of swimming, aperol spritz, grand architecture and a very passionate people. A tinder date kissing up and down my arm within 45mins of meeting me was a new experience and in return I felt that dark Northern humour exude from my lips - ‘would you ever catch a grip.’ Moving to Dublin in the dark and quite lonely December/January months, again I questioned the point of starting again. Another new chapter in the book of my life. What will be different?
But the realisation is that actually, I am different. Spending three years living an isolated and pensioner lifestyle on the north coast gave me time to recalibrate and cultivate my personality which being honest I had given up doing when writing a phd - becoming a cypher and malleable to the feelings and vibes of others. So now the sun is out and shining and I have a calendar full of sea swimming (with new friends!), dinners out (alone!), book launches, art to go and see. I feel as alive as I’ve ever been, open to new ways of thinking, learning and doing the thing we call life.
A fact about me. I love New York. I loved it before I ever went there, I love it still. All chapters of my life so far have been reflected in that city. The party girl who spent a fortnight there waking up at 6pm, going out and and getting to bed at 8am. The indie music fan hanging out in bars with Bon Iver, walking around Tompkins Sq Park channeling 1990s singer songwriter vibes; the postgrad student with an apartment on Mott Street, pretending I was a ‘real New Yorker,’ getting drunk and talking about how much I missed ‘old New York.’
In 2019 I went to the city I love and was disconnected. For a variety of reasons. The person I was with was going through a tough time. After a difficult few days, we went to MOMA. I wanted to be inspired. They wanted to sit in the cafe and drink wine. We stood in front of Monet’s ‘Water Lilies’ and in their thickest Northern Irish voice they announced ‘this is shit’ to the stunned bystanders and to me. If I could encapsulate what depression is, what it feels like to be dragged down into the quicksand and to feel unable to breathe, it’s standing in front of a Monet painting, wanting to appreciate the colours and the beauty and then that is interrupted by someone saying: ‘this is shit.’
Shortly after that trip, COVID hit us all and life was, indeed shit. Life was staring at four walls and watching the computer and worrying and gaining weight and then starving to get the weight off. Multiple baths every week just to feel something. Beauty extinguished. No more Monet.
I refuse to ever be in a headspace like that again. Sitting here in this sunshine, hearing the birds, distant laughter - I vow to never let the words ‘this is shit’ enter my brain again. (Unless, of course something is objectively shit lol.) I want to be sincere enough to show my appreciation for art, culture, poetry. I want to unashamedly be part of this New Sincerity movement that literature critics identified as burgeoning in the early 2010s.
Being desirous of this, as soon as restrictions allowed I went to Vienna, a city I’ve always wanted to go to. I stood and admired the basic bitch art of Gustav Klimt which was romantic and beautiful. I went to the over-commercialised cafe that Freud used to frequent and paid through the nose to eat schnitzel. I went to a photobooth and took black and white photographs of myself posing and smiling. I put the printed pictures in the crest of my bedroom mirror. In Dublin, I go to the National Gallery and spend time looking at the paintings. I do not sneer at American tourists as they jostle past me en route to instagram themselves outside Trinity. I no longer feel like a failure because I did not go to Trinity, because I didn’t get a post-doc or a job in my desired field.
I decided to stop hating myself. I decided that Monet’s Water Lilies are transfixing and transformative. I am going to New York next month and will sit in front of this painting and feel every single colour and movement and every single fleck of paint on that canvas. I decided life was beautiful. And today, sitting here in the springtime sunshine, it is.
Water Lilies
So happy for you Maeve enjoying life in Dublin Do hope New York is amazing for you
I am so very happy for you! Good for you all the things you have done and places you have been! And even better that you have reached an accommodation with yourself when still so young. Only you have been the one missing how fabulous you are, now you know. Go you! Happy swimming,, happy traveling, happy reading and writing and seeing and hearing and most of feeling. Happy being you! 🥰🥰😘😘