In April 2014 I enrolled for the first three days of a fourteen day cycle, with Cycle Against Suicide. I had a general empathy with the focus of the cycle but if I am to be honest I enrolled primarily because I am a cyclist and I wanted to get some bike miles in. 700 of us left RTÉ in Donnybrook on a Monday morning in late April. By the time we got to the first stop in Naas I realised that this was not about the bike. I was seeing and hearing a simple but powerful message “it’s okay not to feel okay and absolutely okay to ask for help”.
This message was resonating. Its words were echoing in my head. This message was being received not just on an intellectual level, it was being felt by a myriad of senses. It was playing havoc with my emotional being. When I dismounted the bike in Naas, I knew that my life would never quite be the same again. I wished with every fibre of my being that I had known this message decades earlier.
At the age of twenty I became the youngest ever elected local public representative in Wexford and went on to become Wexford’s youngest ever Mayor. I knew everything that was wrong with the world and I knew how to fix it. There was something however I didn’t know, I didn’t know that it was okay not to feel okay and absolutely okay to ask for help. We didn’t talk about these things. I didn’t even know the name of the darkness that would overcome me and steal away my hope, my confidence, my self-belief and my very desire to live. This darkness had already caused me to drop out of a law degree. I walked away from politics too.
I tried to drown these feelings, to self medicate with alcohol. Alcohol became my life. It was my strategic objective, the next drink my goal. It was my day and night, my weekday and weekend, my celebration and mourning, my regret and hope, my seasons, sometime all seasons wrapped in one. I won’t deny that there were highs. In time the highs became harder to reach. Eventually the highs were assumptions based on the level and extent of the memory loss. I was running away from a darkness I didn’t understand and stumbling in a drunken haze towards an almost inevitable early grave.
Somehow, eighteen years ago I heard the song without the words that Emily Dickinson calls hope: “hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the song without the words and never stops at all.” I walked away from alcohol. Slowly, one foot in front of the other I began to rebuild my life. In time I shed four and a half stone. I returned to cycling. I cycled the Alps and Pyrenees, I started to run, I ran marathons. I found a release, a comfort in this physical activity. I discovered the life giving power of each and every breath.
When you are propelling yourself up a mountain, or trying to achieve a personal best or to finish a marathon every single breath becomes important. When your next breath is the difference between success and failure you will inhale every last particle of oxygen, you will feel it breathe energy and life into tired limbs and muscles. This is the one of the most powerful feelings in the world. It has the power to overwhelm, to deny the desire of the dark intruder for you to breathe your last. Your breath becomes your success, your story. Your story doesn’t have to be the story of the sub-three hour marathoner, or the strongest climber or the winner of the 10k race. I for one am none of those things. Your story is the breath that brings you to where you can go.
I discovered these things and I was learning more. I went back as a mature student and achieved the degree that had eluded me, first class honours, first in the class. I added a masters for good measure.
I was learning other things too. I learned to trust again, to look people straight in the eye, to communicate, to touch. For the first time in my life I was capable of a real, meaningful and sustainable relationship. I was learning human love, how to give it, how to receive it. I was learning to love life, to LUST For Life, to hear its music, to smell its fragrance, to see its beauty.
Depression doesn’t go away, the dark intruder still intrudes. I find the run up to Christmas difficult. I lost a brother at the age of 34 on New Years Eve and my father suffered a fatal stroke on Christmas Eve four years later. The magic disappeared from Christmas. A few days before Christmas a year ago, I sat in my office looking out at a red brick wall and I was in despair. I began to sob, that sob that begins deep inside and seems to leak out, taking control of every moving part , every muscle until I was a heaving, throbbing, sobbing mass of distress. At that moment I wanted to end it, I even considered how that might be done. When I got home it was written in my eyes. Sinéad held my gaze for a moment longer than normal. I told her I was in a dark place and asked her to help me to get to Christmas day because I knew the siege would end. She did and it did.
Do you remember the song without the words? I want to give it words; to shout them from the rooftops, until everyone, everywhere knows that it’s okay not to feel okay and absolutely okay to ask for help.
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