Adapting and not new beginnings

A shambolic post of life updates and mixed metaphors

I’m back on the pier looking at the sea. All summer, this pier has been full of campervans and swimmers. During the school year, I often have it to myself. I sit in my car with my computer and work. I walk along the tideline and try to identify the oyster catcher, cormorant, and curlew calls. I watch a seal bob its head as it swims lazily in the post-dawn water.

In the winter I’ll bring coffee. This proximity to nature –such a modern concept, the world being divided into natural and unnatural– makes me feel calm, in the way the insignificance of being one in a global cycle does.

Enough of the sappy sincerity.

This morning I watched a teenage leveret dash about the field beside the house. The grass was recently cut, and by the way the young hare crouched down repeatedly in inch long grass I guessed this had been his field, and he was new to the concept of cut grass. His ears stook out, stark against the luminous green, and reminded me of a toddler who thought he was invisible when he covered his eyes.

It’s hard enough to be a young animal, there’s a lot to learn, and he’s doing everything right, but the rules changed without him knowing. How much adapting these animals have to do because of us.

*

Hello and happy September. I spent the summer swimming and cleaning. Well, the first half I spent on a massive grant application which two days ago was deemed ineligible for an omission so minor I - I won't get into that or I'll set something on fire.

Once that shit show was done, I spent the summer doing a major declutter and clean in my house. Neglecting the domestic for nine months of the year means a laborious summer.

Hottest day of the year: not spent at the beach.

It's still not done exactly, but it's closer. A neurodivergent family need systems and consistency and maybe a housekeeper or at the very least the domestic version of this guy from Run Fatboy Run:

When I wasn't doing housework I spent time with my son. We swam in the ocean, played with friends, painted many pictures, watched movies, and made plans for the coming year.

I didn't think about work at all and I needed that.

I'm supposed to be coming back to the desk refreshed now. Ready for new work. But the truth is, I'm not. I'm not ready. The last few years have had some of the biggest professional disappointments of my life. The aforementioned grant application was at the end of a very very very long road that had finally seen some light at the end of the tunnel. I don't have it in me to keep chasing.

I feel a bit like that leveret, crouching down in the grass as I’m supposed to, just managing to learn the difficult hoops of life, only to find that the grass has been mown.

*

I’m happy to be back in the routine, but truthfully, another friend moved away and I want to scream. It’s strange to have lived in a place for the majority of my life and still only have streams of inconsistent friends.

When I moved here a few years ago, I briefly had a group of friends that came together organically. Then one of them moved, the rest of us got busy, and just drifted.

People leaving my home county is hardly new. Let's not diverge into a whine about emigration in Ireland. What I mean is when I was young we all wanted to leave. There was nothing HERE. College and life and everything after was far away. My friends and I would never dream of staying.

So we left.

Then I came back. The friends I had for years, when I was young, didn’t. They still raise their eyebrows at me for choosing to live here. They can’t shake their own youthful prejudices, not that I manage to completely myself.

In some ways it's a different place now. We have indie bookshops and brunch and tolerance. It could almost be mistaken for Dublin in 2010. But with that gentrification that makes it desirable for us sheltered millennials comes the dreaded specters that haunt our generation: landlords.

It's all very well and good living in a place, loving a place, putting down roots, until your housing is unstable and you're forced to move away from the life you've built. I'm fortunate, without my unique and precarious living arrangements we'd never be able to afford the town we call home. Making friends as an adult is hard. Pushing to find a community when it feels like the state has made that impossible for at least the last generation is frustrating.

It’s a constant state of flux, adapting to the changing surroundings. The rules we were raised with —do well in leaving cert, go to college, get good job and never come back and you’ll be secure— they no longer apply.

*

After a summer of reading books purely for pleasure —the sort of books I don’t write, the sort I just wallow in like a literary equivalent to a pot of ice-cream— I’ve started back on my usual reading habits. I’m currently reading Fun and Games by JP McHugh.

The blurb describes it as set ‘on an island off the west coast of Ireland’ which I find funny, because that it’s set on Achill. My suspicion is that the ‘island off the west coast of Ireland’ was a publisher’s phrasing, because any Mayo person, hell, Irish person, would just say Achill. Sure, it’s an island, but it’s got a bloody bridge. In the book placenames are mentioned regularly, the surnames are all very Mayo, and even the accents are so specific to noughties Mayo that it feels like being a teenager again.

When I enjoy a book, I nerd out, I read reviews and interviews. One review that popped up read “feel like it's almost anachronistic. Maybe this is just what it MEANT to be a young man. Concerns about getting to college, but we now have LLMs coming for us. Girls? Who has time for that? Zoomers don't drink. Read it now to get a glimpse of a long lost world.”

That had almost escaped me. This is a very specific time and place. And isn’t that the curse of every writer/artist/person? That as we mature enough to be able to execute our ideas well our stories are no longer relevant? I’m very lucky that there’s books like this and Normal People that happen to be written by writers my age who grew up in the same area. The intimacy of having a world that you know so well presented in books is grounding. It reminds me, when I look around at the gelato bars and ‘sale agreed’ signs, that I didn’t just imagine it all.

While doing that for this book I came across this question McHugh answered.

Am I still an aspiring writer? Maybe every writer is just that at the beginning of each new book. Either way, it was just what I needed to read.

I've learned that I can't be public facing and creative at the same time. I can't be writer, editor, publicist, blogger, teacher all at once. Especially not while also being a mother and homemaker (roll your eyes all you want, I've tried not being a homemaker and my house turned to shit, doing all the domestic work needs a name too).

I'm pressing pause on all nonessential areas of life for a bit. I will have new ideas and I will smack myself down because I get excited and overcommit.

I had so many ideas last year. I worked intensely on several projects. I spent every day thinking if only I had more time. And I stand by that, if I was a full time writer I’d have two, if not three, manuscripts from last year. Ones I really believe in. But I’m not a full time writer, not really. I also teach, self-produce, run a home, raise a child, and spend more time than I should trying to figure out social media despite my introverted technophobe nature.

These books that could have been will never be if I keep at it the way I am.

I'm trying to practice what I preach.

Capitalism: boooo. Community: yaaaay.

*

It's been almost a year since I started writing on substack. 40 posts, surpassing the 24 I'd vaguely intended.

Why? Because pressure and capitalism and feeling like I wasn't giving it my best shot and all that stuff.

I realized that I was letting the format do what I'd managed to avoid thusfar in my writing life, it was dictating what I wrote and how often. I'm a slow writer. The first draft is always fast, but then the redrafting can take years.

It took me a full decade to be happy with a poetry manuscript and publish it. It’s quite good, I have done approximately zero PR for it and don’t see that changing any time soon. (You can buy it here if you’d like, Kenny’s ship worldwide and free to Ireland.)

And yet here I've been, writing posts with ideas I think are worth pursuing, publishing them almost immediately, and forgetting about them. Counterproductive, no?

I teach creative writing to adults. After exploring schools and third level, I decided what suits my temperament and schedule is arts centers, community groups, and (very rarely) online. My writer self and teacher self inform each other, but do not mingle. If they did, I'd end up robbing lines from students, or giving terrible advice. Yet for some reason once I arrived at Substack I started writing like a teacher. Not all the time, but certainly sometimes. What the fuck was that about?

I suspect it was the noise. Substack is so noisy. There are so many newsletters. What should I be doing?? Am I doing it wrong?!

That old voice, knock a knock knocking in my head.

I knew it would take a while to find my feet here. I'm a slow creature, a slow creative.

With ALL OF THAT in mind I'm turning off paid Substack subscriptions. The pressure isn’t working for me. I'll try to keep it more like an actual newsletter, and less chaotic. Which is a lesson I'm trying to apply to most of my life. When I post it will be to connect, and not due to a fear that I must post. I do have plans for it, and a longer post outlining said plans, but that can wait. It can all wait, because a seal is bobbing in the bay and I want to watch its puppy like nose before it ducks below and swims out of sight.