Bríde

La féile Bríde shona daoibh! (A day late as we’re still in post storm signal days and so Happy World Wetlands Day too)

I live far more seasonally than a city girl has a right to really, sinking into family in December, and then into rest and contemplation in January. It can easily turn into melancholy stagnation, or less flippantly, truly predictable depressive episodes. It used to frustrate me, how January always seemed to become a lost month, despite all my best intentions. I let it happen these days, having mellowed significantly in my thirties. That could be the effect of not having thought I’d ever be in my thirties, though.

Spring beginning on the first of February in Ireland can be controversial abroad, but we aren’t alone in it. The Chinese define spring along similar dates just a few days off and the old Roman republic traditions were the same.

Irish springs aren’t necessarily the things of pastoral poetry. They are often cold and unromantically damp. That isn’t say that there aren’t gems to watch out for. I love February. I love seeing my first snowdrops, my first catkins, the first early bumblebee queen crawling out of a hibernation hole with a sleepy buzz. It’s the lesser celandine by the muddy edges of paths and sound that grass fields make after rain that lets my body know what my brain tried to convince it of a week earlier. It’s time to wake up and do things again.

Frogs start to come to my parents garden. Some from the parks and gardens nearby, others that spent the winter buried in the thick mud under the lily roots and hornwort. Sometimes there are up to fifty frogs breeding in the six foot space at once. They haven’t come in numbers yet this year, but I know that they will. Like every year before. Then we will have tadpoles through the summer to show children who visit, eyes wide and delighted and it is a little like seeing them for the first time yourself, every time. That’s what spring is like too.

I write more around this time of year, though not all of it goes anywhere productive. Plenty of spaghetti getting through at the wall and not all of it will stick. I’ve written poems about beginnings and endings that could be beginnings with a little faith. It gets a bit jumbled sometimes.

Lá Féile Bríde, cutting rushes and folding, folding, folding a bit of borrowed faith into a kind of grim optimism.

On a fairly unremarkable day when I was seven years old, I first thought about dying. I was just crossing the road to my house. We lived on a bad bend and you had to cross quickly because sometimes people drove around the corner too fast to stop. I was wearing one half of silver best-friends forever necklace my older sister gave me. The memory is just that: clutching the pendant of that necklace tight in my little fist, convinced in that moment that I was about to be hit by a car and killed. Accepting this, I at least wanted them to find my body holding that pendant. In that moment, I truly believed that with the same certainty that I knew my own name. This was just an early example of a diverse genre of mildly delusion convictions that would be a feature of my whole life, going unspoken until adulthood and long-term psychiatric treatment forced me to voice them.

The idea that I was running out of time would end up defining a lot of my life. It meant endless cycles of ambition or impulsivity before crashing and burning out, only to start all over again. It meant pushing myself into situations, socially or professionally that I was not truly mature enough for, whatever I thought. Even while I lied about my age, joined political parties, got jobs, ran events, ducked in and out of school, drank too much, got into messy relationships with anyone within arm’s reach, I only ever thought it was my depressive episodes that were strange. Facing my diagnosis of bipolar disorder meant facing up to all the ways I’d hurt myself in the name of living my best life.

Despite it all, I remain fairly proud of that part of my life. The last few years have felt like I’ve shrunk in on myself by comparison. In order to care for myself, I had to make myself and my world smaller and more manageable. On the bad days that feels like just expecting less of myself and desperately encouraging others to expect less of me too. My fits of wildness and ambition were boxed in until it all spilled out the edges in familiar self-loathing. So when the ticking of that lifelong count-down clock got loud it seemed less like the footsteps of a predator in pursuit and more like the overdue arrival of a very tardy guest who was expected, but too late to be excited about now. I think I owe it to that manic seventeen year old, trying to be all things, to all people to be a bit less ready to jump on the grenade with such relief.

I’ve said before too, that people are not story-shaped. We are not starting over. We are where we are. Things are what they are and we have to face the accumulations of the banal street-sweepings of ever day endlessly, until it ends. And the ending and beginning won’t line up neatly and won’t tie off all the loose threads because being a person in a society is 90% loose threads. Our resolutions will not always resolve anything, but that is no excuse to ask for less.

It’s spring and listening to the sap rise in the trees makes me feel more like a person than nearly anything else on offer.

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My worst habit is I get so tired of winter

I become a torture to those I am with.

If you are not here, nothing grows.

I lack clarity. My words tangle and knot up.

How to cure bad water? Send it back to the river.

How to cure bad habits? Send me back to you.

When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools,

Dig a way out through the bottom to the ocean.

There is a secret medicine given only to those

Who hurt so hard they cannot hope.

The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.

Look as long as you can at the friend you love,

No matter whether that friend is moving away from you,

Or coming back to you.

– My Worst Habit Rumi