Success.

In our play ‘The Family’ which is coming back to axis, ballymun this month, Louise and Lauren try to make a dinner for the rest of the family. 

They are gonna have peas & carrotts, and fish, because it’s Friday. 

This week, fresh from Limerick - I woke up on Monday morning and headed straight out to Ballymun to start our audience development programme out there. I met up with an old friend, a ballymun local who was helping me work out where i needed to visit and who I needed to talk to/at in the community to spread the word about the show. I met her when me and Barry did a workshop programme with The Star Project, women recovering from addiction, when we took HEROIN to axis in 2011.  She told me that since I had last seen her, about a year and a half ago, she had gone into treatment and detoxed fully from metadone and tablets. She told me that she was the happiest she had ever been in her whole life, and that she could finally see things clearly. She told me that she had fought hard to get into treatment, and that it wasn’t easy. She had the worst withdrawals ever, and there were days when she wanted to give up. But she wants to tell others to go for it, fight for it and make it happen because the difference it makes to your life is unbelievable. She had been on metadone for 18 years. Nobody asked her if she wanted to come off it, or if she wanted to detox, and for years she worried about what it was doing to her body. The woman I met two years ago was talented and vivacious and inspired me and Barry right to the present day for the performances she gave in the drama workshops at Star. The woman I met on monday was just as inspiring, as warm and as beautiful for a different reason, overpowering strenght. 

I left Ballymun galvanised by that. I would say galvanised by her courage and strenght. 

Last week in Limerick, I felt invincable, and this week I have been struggling to hold on to that. 

Today I was thinking about SUCCESS. I want this blog to be about success. 

So what have I done this week. What have I achieved, I sent some emails, did some costings for touring for the future, spent a day working on HISTORY, had a meeting about the revival of Confusion Boats, (the show I did with Ger Kelly in the fringe) cleaned our offices/stores in Amiens st with a team of clubbers like an 80s movie, back to ballymun, back to the com-mun-ishy, walking the streets with Lauren thinking about the time we were there before and what’s changed. I told Lauren a story about a woman I heard about in Limerick. She called up the community detox team, which is a new thing where you can detox from benzo’s or metadone in the community, at home, with your GP and the community detox team. She met the woman from the team in a car park of a shopping centre in a residential area. She got in the back of the car and she said that she threatened with electric shock treatment if she didnt take benzo’s in 1982. She is now addicted, and when asked how many a day she took she said “Just if I am doing something” … so when she makes a cup of tea, when she hoovers, when she makes a dinner… she didn’t sign up for the community detox in the end. I loved walking around the projects in Ballymun with Lauren, I love being in the company of those who make a difference… 

I wonder is that a successful week. How do I measure that? Have I achieved everything I set out to achieve? I am happy with that? Is that success?

It’s and up and down isn’t it. It’s hard and its not. You can live in two worlds at once, and something in the entrophy of the facebook feed is telling me something about how we are always in simultaneous cycles of crisis and flourishment, success and failure. 

I was in hospital last night, I have a nut allergy and I accidentally ate satay sauce… Me and Emma sat in A&E, listening to the cries of “I’ve been here since 7am this morning” and watching the drug users come and go, and all the while I was at risk of analphalactic shock, effectively, I could have dropped dead any minute, a sobering thought really. Life is fragile. 

Thankfully, I survived, weak and covered in hospital stickers and plasters, I woke up in my flat this morning and leaned over and kissed my boyfriend. 

We got up, ate porridge and talked. I haven’t washed a cup this week, or swept the floor, or made him a cup of tea. Have I failed there? 

I decided I wanted to cook him dinner tonight. That was the goal. I enlisted the help of Roise and we got talking and before I knew it it was getting late. He arrived home just as we were leaving to buy the messages, and he was understandably disapointed that the dinner wasnt there. We went and got the shopping and I resolved to make the dinner anyway, despite that he had to get a ready meal because he was too hungry to wait. 

The dramatic crux of our play The Family is when Louise and Lauren come back from the shop with the peas, potatoes and pastry ready to make the dinner, they don’t have the fish (or a fridge or a cooker). They try to make it but they can’t because today is not a good day, today is not a day when dinner’s can be made. They can’t make it because all the other women on the road can make a dinner, because they couldn’t feed their measly excuse for a dinner to a family, because every time they do this Lauren makes a mess, and because Louise would obviously rather be out with her friends so why doesn’t she fuck off then! We placed the downfall of the Irish Family on whether or not two women could make a dinner for a family or not and just how significant that is in Irish life. Sometimes a woman can’t make a dinner, and what happens then. Louise and Lauren can’t make the dinner because women can’t make dinners, they can’t make it because they are so intent on making it, and the pressure gets all too much, because such a small task is overwhelming them and they just can’t do it today.

Success? Failure? In the end Barry & Shane bring in a bag of chips, and Ger goes to the metaphysical pub. But who knows, maybe one day they will get it made. 

When I asked my boyfriend was she angry that the dinner wasnt ready when I said it would be he said a small part of him always knew I wouldn’t have it made. A small part. He stresses. 

That felt like the biggest failure. It didn’t matter about the rest of the week, the survival from the nut attack, none of it. I couldn’t make a dinner if my life depended on it. 

I persevered. I kept going. I went into the kitchen and I made baked chicken and tarragon, steamed potatoes and vegetables. I washed the cups. It’s the small things. I can climb what feel like mountains, walk into the offices of politicians, speak to hundreds of people in a theatre about addiction, but its the small things, like making a dinner, that is where success and failure sometimes rest. 

It was beautiful in the end and he ate it anyway, despite the ready meal. 

Would he have responded the same way if I had said I didn’t think he would make the dinner anyway? Did this affect me so much because I am an Irish woman, and somewhere deep inside me do I feel like I am validated only by my ability to make a dinner and not by any artistic output or work i do in any com-mun-ishy or any kind? 

I have been very moved this week by the stories of Chloe Kinsella & Gerry McCann… I felt compelled to write here open and honestly about success… especially when it comes to em… i suppose what I am getting at is mental health… 

Some people may say I am 'successful’ I know that, although it even feels odd to write that, for fear of displaying some arrogance, maybe? At the same time I know that is irrational… haha

So some people see me as successful, and I thought that my experience with the dinner tonight was worth sharing. It’s the small things, like making a dinner, and the big things, like detoxing from metadone after 18 years, that make up every moment. 

And that is what makes life beautiful, within the trauma there is the potential for great healing, within the failure there is success, you and suceed and fail at the exact same time and actually you can’t succeed unless you fail… Everything is actually happening all the same time, and everything is running in parrell… 

We all struggle.

All

the

Time.

Even those who we think are the most successful.