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.

 

 

 

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.

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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.

 

 

 

 

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.

My Story (Animated)

I wrote this post over two years ago when I first started to emerge from the darkness and you know what I was right, I was okay. Infact two years on those two people have more differences than similarities and yet to her I owe so much. To my mental illness, even more. Suffering is as important as happiness and sometimes it the most important part of life. But you are not your mental health. You are so much more than your anxiety, so much more than your depression or your eating disorder. Believing that is your first step to overcoming it.

Becoming Fearless

We all have a story. Everyone you meet is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.

This is my struggle with anxiety. My story.

It started here, 6 years old panicking over the sudden realization that one day I would die, I would cease to exist. I remember some things from this time in my life but the most potent is sitting with my head on my mothers lap, her stroking my hair. In my fear it was her I ran to. It was her I clung to. I still love that innocence of children, that belief that your parents can keep you safe from anything, fix any problem.

When I was a teenager my anxiety disappeared altogether. It was just a distant memory. I used to remember joking with my friends that the office still kept a brown paper bag in my medical file incase of…

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Vulnerability is strength

For most of my life I have considered strength as holding it together. Being resilient. Showing as little emotion as possible, dealing with things alone. Not something I necessarily ever achieved (ever) (ever ever) but definitely what I was striving for. In my mind that’s what bravery looked like.

I recently started Bikram Yoga, the art of practicing yoga in 100 degrees heat for 90 minute intervals. For those who know me or have seen me dance I am a gawky, unyielding person (in more ways that one), so you can imagine how far from graceful I look. Something like me with a bright red face and a muffin top trying to touch my toes while I sweat from my finger tips and ears and places I didn’t even know could sweat. The other day as I was doing precisely this, our instructor said “vulnerability is strength”.

Vulnerability is strength.

I couldn’t shake it. It was so far from my idea of strength. Two seemingly conflicting ideals and yet, something about it just made sense.

For those of you who used to read my old blog you’ll know anxiety used to kick my ass every.single.fucking.day. Everyday my family would watch me fall to pieces at the dinner table or my friends would hold me as I screamed in my sleep. It was killing me from the inside out. But everyday I got up and brushed my teeth or went to uni I refused to give up. Everyday I searched for the “cure” in meditation or counselling or reading or writing, I refused to give in. It was in those moments of my life that I was at my strongest, whether I felt it then or not.

My word for the summer is Vulnerability.

To remind myself that it’s okay to just, not be okay. It’s okay to need help. It’s okay not to know who you are or like who you are, you definitely aren’t alone. It’s okay to be nervous without your Iphone or your beauty products or whatever other crutch you’ve given yourself. It’s okay to say I love you first, even if you never hear it back. It’s okay to get hurt. It’s okay to let down your guard and be embarrassed. (I’ve even heard it’s character building) It’s okay to trust again and again, even when people keep letting you down. It’s okay to fall in love again and again, even if all you get back, is your own heart. It’s okay to tear down the walls you’ve spent 21 years building, the only person you’re ever really shutting out, is yourself.

Yesterday as I lay gasping for air dripping with sweat or tears or both I could have swore for the tiniest second I felt my fingertips touch the top of my toes. Some hope that as my body yields and changes and grows through it’s weakness, maybe so will I.

I have no pictures which relate to this post but look how cute these kids are that I spent every day with! They’ve taught me more than anyone about how to be vulnerable.

All my love,
Maeve

The truth

I think its fair to say I’ve always been an over thinker. My mum used to say I was searching for “the truth”. Some kind of colossal truth about the universe and life and our purpose that greater minds had overlooked. And 21 years on, I think its safe to say I’m still looking.

I used to want to know it all. What we were made of and were we came from and if god was real and if aliens were and what happened when we died. It took a long time for me to realise that I should probably focus on life first and deal with death after. That I should probably think about my purpose before I worried about lifes. But how do you find the answer to a question you don’t know. And the truth is, i don’t know. The truth is that sometimes I feel further away from finding it than that neurotic six year old girl. The truth is the amount i still don’t know or understand about life paralyzes my brain so much that I’ve stopped asking, I’ve stopped searching. The truth is I can’t handle it.

In a way everything I’ve ever done has been part of this search. Every passion was a potential purpose, an answer to that unanswerable question. I searched in new houses and new boyfriends and new friends and every time it led me right back to the beginning. And yet in all of them, I found some truth. Some piece of the puzzle I’ve been building my whole life, still too unclear to read.

In 12 days I will officially be a social worker and the truth is, I don’t know if I’m ready. The truth is I don’t know what to do without my pre set plan. The truth is I don’t know if  I want to grow up yet, or if I can. And the truth is, I don’t know if it was the right choice.

The truth is I’ve never felt closer to the truth than when I’m writing. Even if what I’m writing is useless. Even if nobody ever reads it. And sometimes, I feel like writing might be that truth.

All I can really be sure of is that whatever I’m looking for, it isn’t in my past. And yet again life pushes me forwards, onto new things. New homes, new adventures, new loves.. And for the first time, I intend to embrace that.

The truth is, I owe that much to the truth.

Bon voyage Liverpool.

 

A photo of Liverpool the day of my Social Work Interview at Hope

2011

Here comes the summer

I can still remember that day as clear as ever. Taking the ferry from the North Fork to Shelter Island for the first time. I wore a white top and denim shorts, had a cowboy hat on and sunglasses which always hurt the sides of my head. Like they were begging me not to miss that moment. I’ve played it again and again in my head. I had my feet perched up against the glove compartment, resting neatly in place of the steering wheel.

We were strangers then, all of us but somehow the silence never felt awkward. Would it have scared me then to know how attached I would one day become. Would I have regretted the constant inscription of you etched around my right ankle, almost as real as the sound of your voice across a crowded dining hall. This is the problem with travelling you see, it doesn’t just broaden your mind, it stretches your soul. It leaves pieces of it scattered under the coconut trees in puerto rico, or buried below the sand at K-rock with our old cigarette butts.

If I knew then how much I stood to gain and lose on that tiny island, would I have turned back. Would I have rewinded it back to my first night, drinking cocktails in your back garden, arguing with your dad that true love exists. That I’d felt it, I’d lived it. Or back to the night we skinny dipped at k-rock, back to them nights on the roof watching the sun come up. So free. So free it was almost frightening.

Or maybe back to the first night at camp. Would I be willing to give up this me for an easier ride. Would I be able to say no, say I’d meet you another time, down by the waterfront or at the drinks machine queue. Would I place my hand over yours, close that gap on the sofa, fast forward the inevitable. Would I take the bus out with you to chase that thunderstorm, you always were braver than me friend. Or maybe I would just get drunk with some friends, watch a girl in cowboy boots get sloppy. Enjoy the details my mind may someday not remember.

This is our first summer since that day apart. Sure we’ll see eachother but it won’t be the same. It won’t ever be that first day. It won’t ever be that first ferry ride, silently gazing across the still water. So unsure about what this adventure would hold. So unaware of the effects of that small patch of land on our lives and so ignorant of the potential a group of “20 something year old kids” might hold.

ps Bryan, this ones for you..