MY BODY MY CHOICE: Should You Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries?

Thursday 24 May 2018

MY BODY MY CHOICE: Should You Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries?

Last year, I remember being sat in a toilet cubicle in an Irish airport and seeing a message scribbled on the door – “I’m pregnant n scared,” it said.

Desperation screaming silently in Sharpie. Shame relegated to toilet graffiti. Echoes of sleepless nights spelt out in secret anonymity.

Without going much further, I think you can guess where I stand on this issue. Like, I'm not crying out to keep your rosaries off my ovaries. It’s not the point I'm getting at today.

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From old Kitchen-Sink-Realism dramas to hospital documentaries, from Ancient Roman art right up to ‘Call the Midwife’, the idea of being “pregnant n scared” is hardly new. In fact, abortion is as ancient a practice as pregnancy by all accounts: you only need to look to the history books. Ancient Egyptians had the Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus. Medieval English women used Tansy. Thuja, safflower, scotch broom, wormwood, yarrow – the examples are almost endless.

And then you get to the stuff we shiver at. We squeeze our eyes shut and purse our lips at the mention of the word ‘alleyway.’ Our shoulders tense when we see the word ‘gin-bath.’ ‘Coat-hanger.’

I don’t want to talk about the effects of these methods. What’s important to talk about is that they existed. They continue to exist. Ancient art, herbal recipes, dramas written in the height of the sexual revolution all show how women have desired to control their own bodies since the beginning of documentation. It’s hardly a modern revelation. Irish women today are throwing themselves down stairs; they are drinking bleach and overdosing on pain killers – but so did their predecessors.

Abortion is not the product of a new relatively sexually liberated society. It is the product of a powerful desire to be a master of choice. To decide what happens to your own body.  

I’m not writing to persuade you to swing your vote one way or another. Vote yes, no, whatever. Just know this: Abortion is going to happen regardless of how you vote on Friday. It has always happened. It always will. No amount of ‘No’ votes can change that.

But a ‘Yes’ vote can take desperate women out of dangerous situations. It will begin the process of making amends to the ladies whose bodies are not their own in the eyes of the law. It will begin to erase the scared toilet door scribbles once and for all, one cubicle at a time.

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Being Your Own Light

Monday 14 May 2018

Being Your Own Light

It's Mental Health Awareness Week: let's talk, shall we?

At certain points in our lives, we feel pain. Our brains throb with stress, our lungs burn with the fires of anxiety and our eyes droop under the exhaustive weight of insomnia (I like to say that my under-eye bags carry suitcases at the best of times!) We might hurt with an inexplicable pain; we might feel things we can't define. All we know is that it just doesn't feel ok.

Accessed via themindsjournal.com

I 100% believe in the idea of creating the life you love, the life you want and to be the person you want to be. But, often, limiting beliefs can hold us back: ‘I am not good enough' ; ‘I can’t do this.' These beliefs, if we let them, take over our entire lives.

I'm saying it is time to unpack these limits. It's time to question them, confront them, ask ourselves why we feel this way. Because it is only when we learn and grow and move forward, that we will find our inner confidence, our inner light.

It is incredibly important to be true to your own real, authentic self. It is only by showing up and showing our light to the world, ourselves, that everything can flow from a place of who we really are. 

Whatever you love, pursue it. Follow your passions - whatever that passion is. Don’t be afraid to be the person you are and the person you want to be. Act ‘as if’ and it can happen. Just don't forget to look after yourself, too!

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What To Do When You Can't Stop Doing

Monday 7 May 2018

What To Do When You Can't Stop Doing

I’ve been trying to focus this entire afternoon.

It’s not as though I have work to do. I have no deadlines; no commitments. I’m literally trying to do nothing.

And it’s the hardest thing in the world.

I need my hands to keep busy: typing, tapping, fidgeting, flicking through the pages of something I’m hardly even seeing –  never mind reading – because all my eyes can see are soft-focus shapes. I hold my phone but I need to reply to emails, texts, comments, swipe, tap, double-tap - all now, all at once. People are waiting on me and I feel like I owe something to them. Reply now, tap now, delete now.

I can't stop. LOL. Great.

I could cop out with an easy answer, blaming it on the buzzword of the century: social media. Because of course, like everything, it's always social media and the bandwagon of ailments that have made us this way, craving the instantaneous. Because we're the Millennials who want everything and “we want it now.” But I think it's deeper than that. It must be.

I feel guilty when I'm not doing something. Even when I don't want to do anything, there is something to be done. Even if there's no work, I feel I can always find more.

I never want to be relaxing, to be having ‘down-time’ or ‘me-time’. I work. It’s what I know how to do. More importantly, it’s what I know how to do well. It’s what I’m comfortable with. I’m in my element even when the thought of multiple deadlines and shifts at work and rehearsals and one thing after another pile up and keep me awake at night and press me to obsessively make mental lists upon lists upon lists (love me a good list!) that I will no doubt forget. Futile lists. Messy thoughts. Unaligned. A literal mind-map.*

*shout-out to a previous history teacher who labelled me a “lovely girl…very scatty…but lovely.”

So is that it? Is my mind that muddled? Am I just scatty?

Mind over matter, you say. Busy yourself with something else. Well, I am, and it's not working. Exercising doesn't work. Reading doesn't work. Scrolling through social media doesn't work. It doesn't work because they all have an end. They all have some kind of a full-stop. But thoughts don’t; they're perpetual and hardly fixed. I'm writing this on the evening of my final essay hand-in of second year: people have told me to celebrate, to relax, to chill out. But I can't. Not when working is something that I kind of like.

My mam says I move too fast. Too fast. That I needed to slow down. I guess she’s right. But hearing something and telling yourself something are two very different things.

And today I’m telling myself to simply stop. Slow down. Life is already too fast (I’ve just finished my second year at uni – NAH WTF???) and with time too sparing and moments too fleeting, working at 100% capacity every single second of every single day probably isn’t helping.

I guess I’m scared of wasting days doing nothing when, in actuality, I am wasting time trying to keep busy. I could be productive by simply just living, ya know? To stop expecting so much from myself and taking time out to just be. Easier said than done, really, but I think it’s worth a try. Everyone needs a break from time to time. I just need to remember to not feel so guilty about it.

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