25

I wrote this post as a series of microsections, chronicling random experiences up to now. Some could argue that the format mirrors my unstructured days and lack of direction. 

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At six, my first class teacher suggests that I go and see a Speech and Language Therapist. "He needs help pronouncing his Rs and INGs," she explains at the school-gate one day pityingly. My appointment is every Thursday evening at half-five in Galway city, and it quickly becomes an idyllic little date night between my mother and I. We always go shopping together beforehand and get in for early bird specials in cheap restaurants. We study our paper-menu place-mats in silence, ultimately ordering the same thing we've had before. It's heavenly, I discover a new quality in her - a friend. I have a special folder filled with games and activities teaching me how to move my tongue in a certain way to create and digest basic sounds I have not yet mastered. I tirelessly practice them at home with my siblings. "Listen to me say Wobber, Dad!" I demand, perched like a King, triumphantly upright at the head of the dining room table, tooting my own horn. On the fifth or sixth visit I tell the HSE professional I love her, whilst simultaneously handing over a drawing I sketched of a camel smiling. The work-of-art is a dazzling emblem of our relationship. A keepsake of our colourful time together. She smiles and tells me she'll frame it. After that episode I never have to go back again. "His speech impediment is miraculously cured," she cheers gloriously down the phone. Go figure.

At nine, I become addicted to British Soap Operas. They pull me in and keep me there. They are a fantastic form of escapism, allowing me to slip away into a dramatic, theatrical, passionate fantasy for thirty minutes. My favourite characters are on at the same time, same channel most nights. There's no slot changes, and the actors rarely leave, sticking around for years continuing to cause chaos. Storylines don't conclude, they blur into new ones. I get a comfort in that. Comfort in the familiar. The cliffhangers take me right to the edge and then leave me dangling. Another coma? Another affair? Another serial killer? The suspense is like a drug to me. The evolution of particular plotlines, how new characters affect the regulars, everything about it has me glued to the screen. I update myself with all the associated magazines, obsessively reading about the various love triangles, buying them religiously to devour the spoilers, before tuning in. My aunt is over one Christmas, watching television in our living room with her husband and my parents. "What's happening on Corrie these days?" She openly asks the room. Sprawled on the rug in front of the open fire, I turn around, look at her matter-of-factly and say, "Tracy and Steve are sleeping together behind Karen's back." She instantly bursts into hysterics. Young and naive, I think it's because of the sheer ludicrousness of these television stars' behaviour. "That Tracy is trouble with a capital T," I persist, confident in the knowledge I'm in on the joke. The woman waves away my contribution, bladder in jeopardy, producing louder and louder laughter. 

At ten, I take up karate. I go to a special kids-only class in the local community centre. I'm going through that awkward pre-teen era where puberty has yet to hit. At this point in my life, Kit-Kats and Jaffa Cakes are my best friends, I've been gently accumulating extra pounds for the last few months and the weight has piled on. The only karate gi that will fit me is an adult's one, size medium. I have to roll up the sleeves and legs. The circumference of my thighs is so gigantic that it looks like I'm decked out in women's leggings. The jacket bit resembles an off-white bed sheet being awkwardly wrapped around me. I'm very poorly constructed Toga-wearing-Roman meets Mediterranean-housewife-sipping-wine-on-the-riviera. But I think I'm proper bad ass. "People think they can mess with me, they're lucky if I don't straight out murder them," I say to my father, staring directly into his eyes, in front of his friends. Facial punching is overrated, cold-blooded, straight-to-the-point murders are my preferred form of threat. I might've mislaid my moral compass. I wear the gi everywhere. To the shop. To my grandparent's. On walks around the village. I showcase martial art moves in the front garden, and cars slow down when passing by the house. "That's fear," I sneer to my sister. She draws her eyebrows together and darts me a look. 

At twelve, I begin secondary school. We have navy uniforms. First year students start a prank where we draw lines of chalk on each other's backs, on the sly. "You've been chalked," the offender would declare once the attack was complete. It is the biggest gag ever. It causes all kinds of mayhem. It circulates rapidly and widely between the year. Teachers cop onto it. Letters are handed out before the last bell one Friday. "There's been an outbreak," the note boldly states, "of chalk stains on the first years' uniforms! Parents and Guardians are in uproar and can't be expected to keep up washing them. We are looking for culprits to be held accountable and an abrupt end to the madness." Students are screened and monitored in the hallway. Random spot checks and searches are carried out, in person, in schoolbags and in lockers. Security procedures tighten to track movement. Certain teachers step up and take allocated roles to locate and detect any presence of chalk in the building. Some even dare to unearth confessions. It's like we're all fugitives at the border. Somehow I manage to smuggle a packet of white crayons in. I have contraband, it makes me an instant hit - like Shania Twain tunes in a Gay Club or chocolate covered anything for dessert. I consider the option to sell it on discretely at an elevated price. Two days later in the corridor, I see the principal before he sees me, hoving into view at the top of the stairs. He's frowning vaguely, as always. He draws me to him. There's a kick in my chest. Fuck, someone must've ratted me out. "I'm innocent," I plead, pressing a tissue to my nose in injustice. "Both myself and your year-head need to speak to you at lunchtime." His tone is brisk. In his office, they engage in a common variation known as Good Cop/Bad Cop, which is based on a reversal. The principal behaves menacingly and threateningly, and my year-head appears initially to be sympathetic then, usually in a whisper, indicates his partner and tells me, "He's the nice one," line before revealing a far harsher and more threatening attitude. In the end, they're just two sides of the same coin, even if one is the 'lesser evil'. I've seen CSI, I know how it works. But still throughout it, I feel wings of butterflies brush against my belly. I'm not used to getting into trouble. "I don't know anything," I say counterfeiting a yawn to suggest nonchalance, which in turn sets him off on a genuine one. One of them smacks his hands down frustratingly on the table. I take this as my cue to take things down a gear on the confrontational front. "Sir, I have French next and I really can't be late for Ms Maguire. Y'know how she is," I say scrawling my exaggerated frailties in the air. I subside and tell them it's me. I am a washout, someone else would've made a tougher street dealer.

At fifteen, I get a part-time job in the local shop. It's great. I start off only stacking shelves, with the ambition of moving to cashier territory. As time wears on, I get to open up and close, sometimes and I relish in the responsibility. I feel like a mini-adult. The boss looks like someone has sewed a head onto a beanbag, she is the town gossip and accuses us individually of stealing on a biweekly basis. She's a small, overweight, frightening woman with pale-white skin, bright-red lipstick, and a huge, dried up comb over of hair on top of her head. The comb over is so outsized and bizarre that it reminds me of the nineteen-fifties urban legend about the woman who teased her hair so much that cockroaches moved in. Her voice drips honey, she's super camp and speaks like Bubbles from Little Britain, which makes her even more terrifying. She is either forty years old or seventy, no one knows. She wears maroon silk shantung suit jackets with gigantic shoulder pads and never is seen in trousers, always long gypsy skirts paired with open-toe kitten heels. She lurks everywhere. Rumor has it that we are tuned into channel six on her television set at home. She parades around the shop in her bare feet, eating crisps. She issues memos discouraging staff from talking to each other when she isn't here. She has a way of showing up out-of-the-blue, in the midst of your shift, and making you feel guilty even if you are entirely innocent. The business slows down, I leave before things get really bad.

At eighteen, one evening in the driveway, both my mother and I are sitting in the car. She has just finished driving me home from somewhere and the key is still in the ignition. I feel a searing stab of honesty. I'm seized by a powerful impulse to start unveiling. Before we exit the vehicle I take a deep breath and say, "I'm gay," and with it I cry heavy, loaded, sobs of relief. I deliver the news saturated in melodrama, this is a massive milestone because it's the first time I've said it out loud. Without a word, she pulls me to her. Her hug binds my arms so I can't shrug them off, her embrace is tight. She grips one of my hands between both of hers and squeezes it with a ferocity that I don't expect. "Patrick-." Choking on her words, she stops, starts again. "Patrick, this changes nothing." Her eyes are glistening, and I nod adoringly, looking up at the sunroof so that the pooling tears don't spill. She is fine with it, it was never under question, the woman is a liberal crusader, super free-spirited. She's very much of the belief that, as long as it's legal and not hurting anyone else, a person should be allowed to do pretty much anything if it makes them feel happy and confident in themselves. It had a shattering effect on me. It's still a special moment I cherish. 

At eighteen, I move out. College happens, until it doesn't. I live with six people. Different housemates come and go. It's a battery farm of dysfunctional people. One girl enjoys pooing in the shower, another lad is addicted to riding his blow-up doll imported from Asia, who we've nicknamed Stacey. He easily spends eight hours a day on her, and the entire house can hear the pounding. At first we think it's mildly funny, the novelty wears off very quickly. There's a drug mule, and a kleptomaniac with a fondness for takeaways. There's an emigrant who adorns her bedroom walls with large posters of sexy Irish farmers, because she's seen P.S. I Love You and grew up with the myth that we're a nation comprising of an excessive amount of Gerard Butler replicas. It feels as if the landlord is casting his net throughout the land for the biggest whack jobs. The house is a vehicle for the grotesque, a magnet for the dispossessed, a carnival of neurotics. It's no stranger to scandal or the unusual. The loudest and head imbecile gathers us all round the damp, swamp of a living room one night and instructs, "When filling out the Census forms, let's pencil in 'Jackets' as our sole method of home heating. It's because," she has to stop and marvel at the adorableness of this, "our boiler is always broken." And they all subsequently break into a flash mob of hooting and celebratory air punches. One of them stands up on the couch waggling his fists and bellowing, "Rooney!(!!)" My contempt for these sort of comments and actions leads me to think that I am somehow different from these people, but the truth is I'm not. I'm still living here. (Oh dear). That squashes any feeling of superiority. Although a minority, there has been some absolute gems in that house along the way. 

At twenty, I start a blog. I don't share it with anyone for a long time. I write my coming out story, on the morning of the marriage referendum, and post a link on my Facebook wall. It surpasses 20,000 views. My inbox blows up, set alight with both men and women. I get messages from people in Australia, Canada, Brazil telling me I helped them in some way. Deeply personal emails pop on my screen, charting struggles and wars, deep-rooted emotion and doubts and fears and suddenly, it feels like a responsibility to keep on being honest about my life. A responsibility to keep telling the truth, my truth. To represent real issues, no matter how private. 

At twenty-three, I fall out with a close friend, irrevocably so, and it cuts me so deeply, so to-the-bone. I am mortified that such arguments, disagreements, confusion, can be part of an adult's world. I'm in equal parts embarrassed by my own behaviour and floored by hers. After a few attempts I stop trying to reconcile, I have to, unless I want to be the champion in the cannot-take-a-hint department of life. Fighting fire with fire is a hopeless cause. For a while, I feel like a sweet that has been in your back pocket and sat on three thousand times, and is now just whiskery mush. My sparkle is dampened. But time heals all wounds, and I make better friends, I find pals who will answer a call to arms with "Say no more, I'm here." I'm not a saint, but I'm not a monster, either. They understand that. It's a foundation stemmed from pure love and loyalty instead of from fear, guilt, obligation. Like-minded souls guiding each other and navigating our ways through this minefield called life. I make a pact with myself to only surround myself with decent human beings from here out. Better people, better energies. And if we fight, we know how to handles ourselves, as grownups, and stimulate a levelheaded response. I'll remain playing the drums to the fiery rhythm of their hearts and defend them with the ferocity of Crocodile Dundee protecting his mullet-haired woman. THIS is a knife.

I turn twenty-five. 

The past sixth months have been about surviving over thriving, walking before I run, discovering it doesn't have to be my job to keep the world spinning on its axis reinventing myself. I'm learning to accept my path and channel it into the strength it takes to get up, stand, to keep putting one foot in front of the other. I don't always need to be stopping to consider life's big questions or fretting and figuring out what the next phase will be. Because although things up to now have felt they are moving preposterously slowly it all counts. It's all part of the recipe. And I'll never be able to predict when some of my best moments are going to happen. I might stumble onto something special tomorrow, or thirty years from now. The die will still be cast regardless. I have to trust that all will be alright. That's the bit I want to take into my late-twenties. Some stuff will be messy, some stuff will be complicated, but that's the reality. The slog of it all.

However you reached out, however you held my hand when I needed it - thank you. I have no idea how I'm going to spend the next chunk, but hopefully I'll continue building an identity and capturing a transformation from a rather uninspiring boy to a confident young man. 

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