Letting go

I was 14 when I decided I was going to be a Social Worker. In hindsight it seems like a pretty strange decision to make as a young teenager but I guess some needs are so deep that when there is no other way, we are forced to meet them ourselves. I was as longing to be saved, as I was to save others.

Ten years on and I am a qualified social worker who has just quit my first “real” job after only four months. The job that I had dreamt about and worked towards relentlessly for ten solid years. Less a job and more of a vocation. I was made to be a social worker and because of this every shitty experience I’d ever had was okay because I was training. Gaining valuable experience for my future self. Every experience I’d wished I’d had would be fulfilled through these beautiful, cathartic moments where I would become the person for these kids that I had always longed for myself.

In reality the four months were hell. Weeks and weeks filled with sleepless nights, debilitating stress and an overwhelming sense of helplessness in the daily pursuit for hope. I’ve never felt like I couldn’t do something before but leaving this job was not a choice, it was necessity. And just when I’d had my life all neatly tied up with a bow at last, it came undone. And the whole fucking mess came spilling out. When I quit my “dream job” I lost not only the ideas I’d had about my career but the ideas I had about myself too. That I was capable and strong and tenacious. A social worker. A wounded healer.

Life is funny like that, isn’t it? We can plan with precision and care how the entirety of our lives will pan out but it is as useful as a daydream. I am quickly sobering in my new found knowledge; that my life may never look like I thought it would. That our lives rarely do and that there is beauty in that. That our real character will be shown in how we faced the challenges and the U-turns, not how we predicted them. In how we were able to grow and adapt to our changing surroundings. In how we were able to hope, amongst our pain and our dying dreams.

Some of the most beautiful experiences of my life were mistakes. Completely unplanned, unpredictable moments and chances which I am thankful for everyday. Life really is more complex and more creative than we could ever comprehend and it is our responsibility to ensure we never limit ourselves to our own imaginations. I might get a new social work job and continue my career or I might not. I might be a teacher or a writer. I might not be the person I thought I was going to be but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop trying. We don’t always have to succeed to win. Success won’t always look like we’d imagined but it doesn’t mean it’s not worth having.

Sometimes the greatest strength is not in how hard we hold on, but in how gracefully we can let go.

Rebirth

“I’ts always darkest before the dawn” – Florence and the machine

If you could take away any pain you’ve ever experienced; heartbreak or anxiety, would you? This is the question I’ve been asking myself frequently. As anxiety slips it’s way back into the forefront of my mind I am once again forced to confront that maybe our lives were not meant to be simple. That contentedness was not meant to be our ambition. Once again forced to confront what about my life makes the most primal part of me feel uncomfortable and uneasy. What am I telling myself. 

The easy thing would be to wish it away as so many do and have done. To deflect and drink and smoke and forget. I know because I’ve played that part too but when I made the decision to travel alone despite my anxiety I made a bigger choice. That I would choose bravery, that I wouldn’t run or hide anymore. This isn’t really about anxiety anyways. That’s just the name I’ve given to my own demon but the truth is everyone has their own version of it.  Everyone has wounds and over the course of our lives we will be called to them again and again and again, relentlessly. This suffering is not a hindrance to our lives. It is as necessary as love and joy and vitality. It’s where growth and change have the space to happen. Suffering is not something we should avoid but instead something we should embrace. And every time we make the choice to visit these wounds they get smaller and smaller. We have the power to heal ourselves. We only doubt our capability because we’ve never tested it.

You know they say when a baby is being born it cries out because it thinks it’s dying. It’s afraid because it doesn’t know whats happening only to be born into a whole new adventure, one it could never have anticipated. We’re still like that. We hold on desperately to people because we fear the pain of loss. We deflect from our own pain and fear because we can’t yet see what lies beyond it, what great changes it may prompt. We long to stay warm and safe in our bubble forever but that isn’t life. We have a chance to live but in order to take it we have to let go of the idea that it’s going to happen inside our safe cocoon. It seems like it’s the end, but actually it’s the beginning. Don’t be afraid. Come out into the world. It’s time.

 

Being happy

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself” Andy Warhol

Post last blog I received a number of messages from different people about what was wrong with their lives and asking “How do I change my life?”, “How do I change myself” or “How do I become who I want to be”. Essentially they were all asking the same question, how do I find happiness?

I have no idea but let me give you my two cents anyways because I think about happiness and how to acquire it frequently. First let me start by telling you what I told these people. You’ve messaged me with a recognition that you are not happy with your current life and with a real desire to change it. That’s the hardest part. Next all you have to do is change it. You do that by making changes. 

That’s it. That’s how you change your life. You actually have to go out and change it. I’m not trying to be sarky but it really is that simple. I guess these people want me to message them back with a few inspirational tit bits or some secret they’ve been missing all this time but there isn’t one. Change isn’t cute Instagrams of your slightly smaller stomach or a repost of some inspirational quote, it’s you dragging your fat ass to the gym on a rainy Tuesday because you aren’t happy with how you look. It’s quitting your job and finding something that makes you feel alive everyday even if that scares you. It’s breaking someones heart even when it means breaking your own too and trusting that it wouldn’t feel wrong if it was right.

Happiness is like this too. People talk about it like it’s something we are born with and can lose. Happiness isn’t a prerequisite to life. You have to fight for your happiness. You have to figure out all the different things that make you happy and then you have to follow them no matter how impossible that seems. You have to be truest version of yourself you can, even when that doesn’t feel like it’s good enough. You have to willing to give yourself to experiences. You’ve got to ask the right questions but you’ve got to be willing to look for the answers too. You have to invest and work and be brave and keeping being brave, even in the face of impossible loss and fear. You have to try, you have to give it all. And some days, even though you’ve done all this, you still won’t be happy. And you’ve got to know how to accept that. That’s all part of it too.

Happiness is available to everyone but we are not entitled to it. It evades us only to draw us closer. Only as a ploy to get us to engage with life.

How do you change your life? How do you become the person you’ve always wanted to be?

You change it. You become it.

 

 

 

Making my bed

I’m 23 years old, 24 at the start of the new year. I work as a barista in a coffee shop, in a job I neither hate nor love. I’m at a place in my life where I’m neither happy nor unhappy. Not anxious, not depressed or heartbroken, not broken at all and yet not happy either. I suppose I always believed that happiness was just the opposite of unhappiness. I work in a job that I believe uses less than 10% of my creativity or skill as a person and maybe even less of my attention. That brings me no closer to who I really am or that lets me explore that. One of my new years resolutions for 2016 was to stop working dead end jobs and I am really no further than when the year began. And the more I settle into this routine the more I think that there are two types of people in the world, people who are content with this kind of life and people who aren’t. The people who will get out and the people who never do.

So I made a list. 25 things I want to do before I’m 25. Things which range from learning to play my banjo better to learning how to drive. The smallest most insignificant things like making my bed every morning, because that what I thought successful people did, to

Number 12 on my list: Climb Black Mountain (03/10/2016)

getting my dream job within the next year. Because those people who are neither happy nor unhappy, the ones who live largely unfulfilling lives, the ones we all know and think we will never become, they were just us once. Just some 23 year old girl with a degree she wasn’t using, writing some amateur blog and thinking about how far away those dreams seem in reality.

But you don’t need to be the person you want to become tomorrow. That’s the kind of thoughts that keep people immobilized. That its too far away, it’s too hard, its too unrealistic. It probably is. You don’t need to get your dream tomorrow if that’s not actually feasible. You can only get there when you get there. You just need to take small steps in the right direction. You just need to do one small thing that brings you towards it everyday. You don’t need to write a novel, you just need to keep writing. You just need to keep your dreams in your sight.

All you have to do today, is make your bed.

The ordinary

Some days I wake up and go to work and don’t return from work until it’s time to go to sleep again. Some days I just watch TV and do laundry and buy a new toothbrush from the shop. Some days I spend just sipping on beers down by the lake with friends, and some days I don’t even do that much.

I finally priced my flight home and because I’ve started thinking about leaving, I’ve started thinking about why I came at all. What have I achieved? Why do we travel? And sure I’ve done the other side, the solo hikes amongst the amazing scenery, the american road trip, backpacking alone through Australia but the majority of my time away has been scarily similar to my life at home.

I believed before I came that fulfilment would hit me like a steam train. That one day I would just wake up and feel satisfied and whole and that all the questions would be answered. That it would just click one day. But the reality is our lives are so often made in the ordinary. We are so often defined by the most mundane of moments. Travel does change you. And so does staying at home. We change constantly, we grow in every context of our lives.

I didn’t find myself in America or Australia or at the top of some New Zealand mountain top like I thought I would. I didn’t find myself in hostel life or when I was making new friends. I didn’t even find myself in Asia and that shit was real. You see we are not the people who post skydiving pictures on Facebook and pictures of us riding elephants and holding koala bears. The person you really are is made in the most insignificant moments. When we choose not to use all the milk because we know somebody else might want tea. When we find a way to surprise people who know us better than ourselves. When we do something simply because it makes us feel alive and not because it makes us feel popular.

DCIM179GOPRO

If you truly want to find yourself then you need only look at your everyday life. By the people you choose to surround yourself with. By the way you choose to treat the people who would still stay, and how you allow yourself to be treated.

Your true self is not buried in some far away land or crazy adventure, it is right there under your nose, in your home town, living your life.

 

 

 

 

Brave

“Be on the watch. The gods will offer you chances, know them. Take them.”

Charles Bukowski (The laughing heart) 

I never wanted to travel. That sounds like a weird thing for someone who keeps travelling to say but I hated it. I hated the change, I hated thinking about how anxious I was going to feel and how hard it was going to be. I was never really a brave person. Never the first to go down the slide as a kid, never one to tell people how I truly felt. Probably the main reason I decided to leave home was because I wanted to be brave. I wanted to be the kind of person who could travel alone and fall asleep in a tent underneath the stars. no wifi, no people, no security. I didn’t want to be high maintenance or neurotic, words I’d become all too familiar with.

DCIM179GOPRO

And so off I went, first to university in England, then America, Europe, Asia, Australia and now New Zealand. Each time the trip getting a little more adventurous, a little more daring. Each time pushing my comfort zone bigger and bigger, welcoming in new people, doing things that even I could never have imagined doing. And still, when I looked in the mirror after each adventure the same cautious girl was always looking back. I was still lying in bed over thinking at night, my palms were still sweating uncontrollably. And when I thought about doing something new, I was still afraid. Change still petrified me. Travel still intimidated me.

You see bravery wasn’t some prize I collected at the end of each adventure. I had done things that people called brave, but I wasn’t brave. I never would be. It wasn’t a personality trait I could acquire. It wasn’t a goal I could achieve. It was a choice. And it was a choice that I had to keep making every single day. Not once. Not for that first trip. Not the choice to leap out of that plane but rather the knowledge that every time the opportunity was presented to me, I would always jump. That I would always choose the hard decision when I knew it was also the right one. That I would always chase the big love, the kind that threatens to tear us up and spit us out. That I would always choose truth even when it was so hard to speak it. That I would always choose opportunity.

I would always choose bravery.

DCIM179GOPRO

 

 

All my love

Maeve

 

 

Getting fired

I’ve been fired from two different jobs in my life. The first time I got fired from a burrito bar for pulling a prank on my boss. (No regrets, it was a really funny prank). The second time was 2 weeks ago just as the last year ended and a new one began to emerge.

I was working as a bartender in a casino. My boss said that he was looking for somebody more “bubbly”. I wanted to tell him about how the kids at camp call me Munter, how I’d stay up to tell them stories about made up pigs with three legs in funny accents. But I didn’t.  He said they were really looking for someone who was less cold. I wanted to tell him about why I became a social worker. That I wasn’t made to serve the wealthy their drinks while they gambled, I was made to serve the poor. That I’m here to help the people who can never seem to help themselves. But I didn’t. Instead I excused myself to use the bathroom and I laughed and laughed until my eyes were wet, delirious with gratitude, and thought about our inability to liberate ourselves from the unhappiness in our lives.

My new years resolution is to stop wasting valuable time. To stop getting so hungover that I can’t function for full days. To stop binge watching TV. To stop working dead end jobs when I know that’s not who I want to be. To stop making decisions based on other people. To stop being content with being miserable. To stop being helpless.

We don’t have the right to feel helpless. We don’t have the right because we aren’t helpless. I should have quit that job weeks before I was fired. I should have found another way. Why are we always waiting for someone to set us free? For someone to make us happy or make us whole? Why are we always waiting for opportunity to happen and when are we going to realise that the opportunity is us. It always has been. We are the potential, we are the change.

When are we going to learn that we can save ourselves?

All my love,

Maeve

Being broke

I have 85.14 Australian dollars to my name. $85.14 to get me to New Zealand tomorrow and be able to hang out and you know eat and live until I can eventually find work. $85.14 and a beer is $10 and I stopped being able to afford those a while ago. $85.14 in all the world, and yet,

and yet.. I’ve never felt less broke.

It’s not like I’ve been living it up in Australia and Asia, I’ve been budgeting hard. I just didn’t start with enough money to begin with. I worked several jobs for a the year I spent at home but I couldn’t afford to travel the world. There wasn’t enough. But here I am, writing to you on my 30 minute turn on the hostel computer in Melbourne. I remember someone asking me once how Stevie (my travelling buddy) and I were always able to afford to travel everywhere. WE WEREN’T ABLE. We went to Puerto Rico once for a week and I can’t recall now how little money we had but I do recall the week we spent camped out on a beach underneath some coconut trees surviving on tins of tuna and pineapples. We were two kids from working class estates in Belfast, with never the means or the opportunity to travel and yet, there we were

So how exactly do you travel with no money. You wwoof! (Willing workers on organic farms), you work on peoples farms and they allow you to stay in their homes and give you food. You couchsurf! You stay on a strangers sofa that you’ve met on the internet. (It’s safer that it sounds, and totally free). You camp out on a beach in Puerto Rico and hope you don’t get shanked in the middle of the night. You meet friends at camp and hope they live somewhere cool in America. And most importantly, you adapt. You have to.

And people are so good! In all the places I’ve been, alone or with my travel buddy, staying on sofas or allowing people to stay on mine, trusting people I didn’t know, nothing weird or creepy has ever happened. I once left a canadian guy the keys to my house in England over Christmas and then I flew home to Ireland. I told him to just lock up and post the keys through the letter box when he was leaving. And you know what he did…

He locked up and posted the keys through the letterbox but not before he cleaned the house and left a sweet note.

A guy asked me yesterday in the hostel while I was eating dinner “Do you think people are mostly good or mostly bad?” and the truth is I believe people are just good. period. People have done some fucked up things lately but over all as a race we are good.

And the more the money drains,the more I’m forced to trust and live in this community. The more I’m forced to call on traits I didn’t know I had like being pragmatic and easy to live with (That was a hard one) and low maintenance. The more I’m forced to just be grateful and keep saying thank you to the people who keep making it possible for me to be here, and to be welcome here. The more crazy and real and mind-blowing the experiences get. The more good I see in the world and in the people making it, and in myself. I have travelled the world a lot in the last four years but it was the world that made it possible.

And the more I realise that I am not broke. I’m whole.

The real question

When I began this trip I had one objective and in many ways one real question I wanted answered;

How do I stop being afraid?

I figured if I put myself in the most overwhelming and chaotic circumstances, eventually nothing would frighten me any more. And my plan was going surprisingly well. Then one night in the back of a nightclub in Van Vieng, Lao I met an Irish guy (typical) who was asking himself the same question. He said he was a “normal”, confident, popular guy. He was content with his life and yet almost sporadically he would awake in the night gasping for air.

It wasn’t until he asked me the question; “How do I stop being afraid?”, that I realised I’d been asking the wrong question. It’s wasn’t how. That’s why nothing had worked. I had drank and prayed and willed the fear to be gone with no success for almost 16 years.

It was why. 

Why are two happy, content, “normal” 20 something year olds waking in the middle of the night, after a seemingly regular day, unable to breathe. And as soon as I’d asked the real question, I knew the answer. They aren’t content.

It is said that the body knows. It knows things we don’t understand yet. It feels danger before we sense it. And once I’d asked the first right question. a thousand new questions unfolded.

What about my life am I not content with? If the body truly knows then what is it trying to tell me? Am I acting in a way that is true to my truest sense of self? That person we are when we’re small; unchanged by loss and deceit. And why here? Why did I have to come half way round the world to allow myself to ask these questions?

What exactly is it that I’m running from, or perhaps the real question:

What am I running toward? 

Are you ready?

This is the most common question I faced during my last two weeks in the states.

Are you ready? I was never sure whether they meant ready to leave or ready to go but either way I always knew the answer was no. I had planned over and over again, I had talked myself in and out of the trip for six months but at no part could I honestly tell you I’d felt ready.

Change terrifies me. I had a very chaotic life. Everything changed, all the time. I stopped counting the new houses after 30. I was always the new kid in school. People dropped in and out of my life all the time, their ability to protect me changing as they changed. There was love. Always. But there was also chaos and change and confusion.

And by the time I reached 18 I desperately craved stability and routine. I desperately craved calmness. But when I got it, nothing changed. I still felt afraid and confused and chaotic. And I realized that the chaos wasn’t my environment anymore, it was in me. It had shaped me. It had raised me. And so began this journey. And four years later, after counselling and medication and yoga and routine I decided I was bored of catering to my anxiety. And I booked a year long worldwide trip around the world. 

I decided that I would put myself into the most chaos I could imagine and I would find a way to cope with it. I would have to. This is sink or swim. And sometimes I swim and I know I’m in the right place and I know this is going to shape my whole life in a new way. Some days I am so sure the answers are here. And some days I sink. I sink and sink and sink and wake in the middle of the night in an unfamiliar hostel unable to breathe.

Am I ready?

I didn’t eat for 4 days when I landed in Asia. I didn’t sleep for 5. Of course I’m wasn’t ready but are we ever really ready? Are we ever ready to face our past, to face the person it made us and didn’t make us. Are we ever ready to come face to face with our fears, to face all the things that hold us back and tell us we can’t. Are we ever really ready to face ourselves, and decide that maybe it’s not who we wanted to be.

All my love,

Maeve