Grief at a time of Advent

It is the first of Advent and a procession of light and song fills the room. I hold the hands of my babies, almost too old for this now, reluctant to sit still on the floor of a dark room for what seems like an odd sort of slightly underwhelming concert – but I insist. I know all the songs; I’ll never forget them. Not after years and years of rehearsals starting every August and continuing all the way through autumn leaves and dark afternoons, culminating in this very experience: me as a child, then a teenager, dressed in a white gown, clutching a candle (not too close to your face or you’ll faint), performing for parents, for nursing homes, for corporate functions to celebrate Lucia – the bearer of light. Every melancholic melody takes me back, each debated syncopation and ‘s’ held too long, and it’s strangely bittersweet – isn’t it?

There’s a new Advent countdown candle this year. Instead of the numbers one through 24, printed vertically across the candle are the names of the 24 women who were murdered in Sweden last year, most of them by men they knew.

It is the day before the second of Advent and a video call comes in from IKEA: What do you want? Oh, I want it all: the gingerbread biscuit dough, the glögg, the coffee, the gingerbread-flavoured Dumle, the pickled gherkins and the Christmas cola. I don’t even like fizzy drinks, but when you put it on the table it will all be right – a perfect Swedish Christmas, like the tradition says, like it always was, won’t it?

Someone mentions in passing the girl who was raped in a restaurant toilet for five hours straight and I don’t hear where the conversation goes next or what anyone really knows about this event because that image, the girl, five hours, it makes my bones hurt and I can’t hear anything anymore, but the ache fills every cell of my body until it all overflows and I can’t stop crying and my head hurts.

It is the second of Advent and Agnetha Fältskog is singing about Christmas mice with her daughter, who’s really too young to be singing on an album, but that’s how the perfectly Swedish Christmas is done right, and so I insist. It’s a tradition at this stage: this is what we listen to for the annual gingerbread baking session, and it’s a bit silly but I get to decide, because that’s what I did with her for the annual gingerbread baking session all throughout our childhood – and now they’re part of it, sort of, aren’t they?

It’s the second of Advent and today’s name on the candle is Dana.

It is the eve of the third of Advent and Lankum sing:

“When the young people dance
They do not dance forever
It is written in sand
With the softest of feathers
It is not writ in stone
Like the walls of the chapel
And soon it is gone
Like the soft winters at home”

I try to imagine her there, in the audience with us, and I realise that I can’t. I don’t know what her body feels like now, what her presence in 2022 would be. If she was there – if she were here – would we put our arms around each other, like we did the last time I saw her on the first of Advent 2006? I don’t know who she would be now. She doesn’t know who I’ve become.

A pandemic happens and the impossible is suddenly possible. Systems we’ve always been told are untouchable, run flawlessly by the invisible hand of the market, are touched and controlled and stopped. People’s freedoms are restricted, just like that – not without a fight, but it happens. For a period of time, the world stops. Offices close. Schools close. Pubs close. Even sport, games, matches grind to a halt. (What’s going on behind closed doors, we know now, never stopped – an invisible hand of another kind, but equally untouchable.) And now we’re back, the magical market doing its thing, because you can’t just stop life, stop businesses and capitalism from doing their thing just because women die, can you? Five hours.

It is the third of Advent and she’s been gone for 16 years. Every year, it hits me by surprise, the grief, but now it all suddenly makes sense. Approaching the tenth anniversary of her death, I wrote:

“That’s the funny thing about emigrating: as you move away from those you love, escape the things that annoy you, and run away from all that which you can’t quite put your finger on but which gets under your skin, you also leave behind all the places and smells and memories that would otherwise remind you of your past. Along with the chance to reinvent yourself comes a life without all those people who know who you were at 15. At the same time, grief goes into hibernation and you never know when it might strike.”

Now I know when it strikes. It strikes when the smells and the memories come out of hibernation. It strikes when, through melancholic melodies and tireless choir traditions, you travel back in time to when she was alive, and you’re reminded that she only exists in past tense. It strikes when you buy all the things for the perfect Christmas and it hits you that something’s always missing. It strikes when you share the memory of her with her nephews, because your memories are all they’ll ever get. You can joke all you want about emigrants pathetically insisting on attempting to recreate a past that no longer exists. But it’s when I relive that past that the hole shaped like her is suddenly so painfully gaping and obvious.

He sends me a screen grab of a tweet: Grief often reveals itself as rage.

We booked a first-class flight to Sweden on the 12th of December 2006 – first-class, because that’s all that’s left when you book your flights the same day that you travel – and the first thing I heard when I woke up the following morning on a mattress on the floor of my parents’ sitting room and it dawned on me why I was there, was the sound of Sankta Lucia coming from the TV as the nation woke to celebrate an Italian saint.

Advent
noun /ˈædvent/
A coming into place, view, or being; arrival.
The fact of an event happening, an invention being made, or a person arriving.

This is what it is, grief at a time of Advent: rising and swelling at the most wonderful time of the year; the anniversary of the loss of my sister just a few days before the serene celebration of Lucia, the bearer of light; the darkest of days during the darkest of times in the northern hemisphere, as we light the stars and the fairy lights and I light a candle for you, baking like we did, singing like we did, at the most wonderful, aching time of the year.

On how you can’t win as a feminist in a capitalist patriarchy – or, the right to choose not to play ball

I remember very clearly the first time a friend of mine, a self-professed feminist, mentioned in passing that she uses Botox. At first, I was just really surprised. Soon enough, I realised that I felt disappointed. Worse, I felt deceived. I’d thought we had an unspoken agreement, a feminist pact not to engage with the bullshit inventions of patriarchy. But she mentioned it with such poise that I quickly realised she knew something I didn’t, that I was the one being naïve. What was this slippery slope I’d missed? Were we going for labiaplasty next?

I have internal battles about shaving. I know that I’m modelling a lot of things for my sons, and if I shave my armpits, that’ll be what’s normal to them. Then I cut myself some slack, knowing that this, too, is a conversation starter. They too will face all sorts of external pressures, and talking about the things people do and why they do them is probably not a bad thing. I justify wearing make-up, if far from every day, but I’ve vowed not to discuss my weight or talk about body fat as a bad thing. I draw lines in sometimes arbitrary places, justifying them to myself as I go, knowing that perfection is a goal that would break me but that, as a feminist, I have to try.

My body, my choice. It’s a pertinent slogan, utterly non-negotiable. And yet, like I’ve argued before, choice is a funny word. I’m not alone in that shower, removing body hair; I’m enveloped by every single message I’ve ever been fed by the patriarchal capitalist world that raised me. I’m self-aware and self-critical. I know that, deep down, I wish I wouldn’t feel the need to – but I only have the energy for a certain amount of rebellion, a certain number of battles. Not all of them. Not this one. Not today.

Can you use Botox and call yourself a feminist? It’s a ridiculous question, of course. I’ve yet to meet a feminist whose every action is a feminist one, and I’d hate to live in a world where we set the bar that high for each other. We’re already scrutinised by patriarchy itself and put under immense pressure to conform to beauty norms, and then judged for trying too hard and called shallow when we care. Injecting a neurotoxic protein into your face is not a feminist thing to do – but a lot of feminists do it. Their body, their choice.

On the other hand, minimising the issue by framing it as one about choice alone is both naïve and counter-productive. We make choices about scalpels and needles because we’re forced into corners. Some are left in those corners without the means to choose. Others can afford to buy their way out but are left worse off than before, already paid less than their male equivalents before they even begin to splash out on beauty treatments to stay in the game. And those who come after us start younger and younger, playing catch-up in a culture where refusing to play ball comes at a huge cost.

The takeaway? I don’t believe in shame as a catalyst for change, but I think we need to dare to consider the connection between the individual and the structural. The question isn’t whether you can have Botox and call yourself a feminist. The question is how we can break the cycle – because if we don’t, more and more of us will feel the need to play along, inadvertently perpetuating the beauty norms that got us here in the first place.

Ultimately, it boils down to this: I don’t want the right to choose whether or not to inject Botox into my face. I don’t want to have to choose either to spend money and time on beauty rituals and treatments in order to just about scrape in as good enough, or to blatantly refuse to conform and end up an outcast. For as long as that’s the choice we’re given, we’re not all in this together.  

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***This post follows on from a Bits of Me podcast episode, in which I spoke to Gillian Roddie of @evidentiallyyou about body image, ageing and Botox. You can listen here!***

Be grateful and stop moaning – or, why we need to talk about home-schooling

You know the professor whose kids gatecrashed his BBC interview, causing him to panic repeatedly, resulting in the whole thing going viral? Well there’s a spin-off version that shows what would’ve happened if the professor were a woman and a mother. You guessed it: she’s grand. She comforts, feeds and entertains her young children without for a second letting her focus slip or losing her train of thought - because mammies are brilliant at multi-tasking. Hilarious, eh? Dads are clueless and mothers are superheroes. Except I don’t find it hilarious; I find it infuriating.

I guess it’s hit a nerve during lockdown more than it would’ve before. The reality of video calls featuring home-schooling intervals, meltdown backdrops, accidental coffee spillage and the repeated need for cuddles and snacks is just that bit closer to home right now. But as thousands of households all over the country are grappling with this new normal, the narrative of maternal super powers isn’t helping. Let me tell you, I feel nothing like a superhero. I feel exhausted and sad and insufficient a lot of the time.

Last week, journalist Jennifer O’Connell wrote a piece arguing for staggered school openings before the summer holidays. (We could laugh at the notion of any such thing as ‘summer holidays’ at all at a time of social distancing and months-long school closures, but that’s for another post.) On Twitter and elsewhere, words like ‘eugenics’ and ‘mass murder’ were thrown around, because naturally, unless you’re willing to live under strict lockdown for a few years, until this thing has fully gone away or we’ve found a sustainable vaccination solution, that’s clearly what you’re advocating for. 

Having been mostly off Twitter for a long time until recently, I made the mistake of adding to the stream of voices suggesting that it’s not all that black and white and maybe she’s not in fact a psychopath, whereby a kind troll quickly checked my bio to make the connection with my Swedish roots, concluding that it’s unsurprising that I’m up for Nazi-style extinction strategies like those in place in my heartless home country. Most interesting, though, was the growing, confident choir of those pointing out that parents these days don’t think before they procreate, and they just want the schools to open because they hate spending time with their children. Case closed.

I committed a social media faux pas and deleted my tweets, not because I changed my mind but because trolls are annoying at the best of times, and during life under lockdown they can make a woman lose her shit. But no matter what strategy you believe in, the reality of home-schooling while working full-time is an impossible equation. You have to work until midnight and manage on extremely limited sleep, broken by strange nightmares and anxious children, and keep answering 2,987 questions an hour as your children figure out what the coronavirus is and whether famous people are always good at things and whether bumble bees like dog poo. You have to show which way to start to write a lower-case d and help pare pencils while you’re in the middle of creating yet another spreadsheet, and then you have to make snacks, endless snacks, after which you have to try to write while the Body Brothers are singing in the background. Then you have to try for the fourteenth time to add a new entry to a task on a buggy school app that needs refreshing every few minutes, while your children’s attention spans wither away and you accept, reluctantly but realistically, that you’re not going to get through anywhere near half the school work this week either. And when your kids can’t sleep at night because everything’s strange and they are human too, you have to be patient and try not to think about the emails you have to deal with before you call it a day, because children can sense anything, everything, and if you’re stressed and thinking about work they simply won’t go to sleep, ever.

Then, you have to cheer for childcare workers on the back of the government announcement of the new wage subsidy top-up scheme, because you agree that their job is one of the most important jobs in the world; and then you have to do the childcare, with no pay and in no time at all, while acknowledging and feeling urgently grateful for your own privilege, which is genuinely very real indeed. And the memes in your feed that said ‘Reach out – don’t suffer in silence!’ for World Mental Health Day only six months ago have been replaced by ‘Safe at home, not stuck at home’ and endless gratitude practices, because actually, unless you’re in intensive care or your parent is dying or you’re about to lose your home, soldiering on and suffering in silence would be preferable, thank you very much.

We’re at the end of week seven, and in our family, we’ve sort of found a groove, not because we’ve figured it out and are past the shock, but much thanks to the fact that one of my biggest clients from the past few years has gone out of business. Like most parents, I love being with my kids when I’m not actually meant to be doing something else and don’t have to prove to someone at a laptop with a shaky internet connection many miles away that I’m indeed still working and not in fact taking the piss just because a kid is having a concert in the background and another is on the toilet shouting for help to reach the loo roll. I really enjoy chatting to them about the SPHE curriculum strand of citizenship, and I love perfecting my goalie skills as I pretend to be Lindahl, the Swedish women’s national football squad’s goalkeeper, in an attempt to give them a tiny but important piece of Sweden as our Easter trip is cancelled. But that’s the thing: in this perfectly impossible mess, I’ve lost a huge chunk of work – and I’m the lucky one. 

My children are lucky, too, even though we’re never going to get through all the school work. There’s no getting away from the fact that the government doesn’t have a plan for the kids who are safer in school than at home, nor for those who were lagging behind before all this started and whose parents are simply unable to even begin to decipher the templates and curriculum notes teachers send them. Moreover, our elected representatives (I’m genuinely too tired to take the debate about the dubiousness of the word ‘elected’ in that context since the General Election we can all only just remember even though it was less than three months ago) also appear to be relying on some form of parenting wizardry, gifted, as if by an invisible hand, to parents the moment their children are born. Enter multi-tasking superhero mammy! She doesn’t need money or time to be everything a child needs at all times, even when she’s working an intense eight hours a day. Handy. And here’s me thinking I’m lucky; maybe I’m just flawed and stupid and a terrible mother and if I was only good enough I would’ve been able to do it all, work and teach and play and care and feed, for six months straight without losing focus or burning out.

It’s not, of course, working parents who are the greatest victims of this crisis. From healthcare workers to single parents and those immuno-compromised and scared shitless that they might catch this thing, there are endless people bearing the brunt of both financial and anxiety-related fears right now in a way that many parents like myself can’t even imagine. But this soldiering on we’ve become so keen on, this insistence that you’re not allowed to complain as long as you can still breathe, where will that get us? How can we build a sustainable, if temporary, new normal if we insist that our gratitude must silence us? I don’t accept that this is the best we can do. I won’t accept that the government gets to bang on about the importance of the childcare sector that’s been in freefall for years, and then send the kids home for months on end with no plan and no support. I refuse to pretend that it’s good enough. 

I can pause my social life and survive without hugging my friends. I can cancel my trip to Sweden and miss out on seeing my parents, cancel my gym membership and stop going to the playground. It’s hard, but needs must. But children’s lives can’t be paused. Their development continues one way or another, and it needs guidance and hand-holding; their bodies need movement and fresh air, and their need for love, attention and closeness is constant. As Philippa Perry says, it’s impossible for children to understand being with someone in a physical space and them not being available. What will six months of normalising that do to a child? What will six months of being forced to do that to a child do to a parent? 

Here’s a funny one. Have you read the Irish Constitution? There’s a widely debated article in there about the work within the home “without which the common good cannot be achieved”. Talk about us all being in this together – we’re bringing the kids home, caring for them and teaching them at home, all for the common good. Article 41.2 states that “mothers should not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home”. It may be sexist, but at least, for those of us lacking super powers, it’s there in black and white. Perhaps we’ll all leave our jobs and let Leo foot the bill. I’m not saying I’m in favour; I’m just saying this ain’t good enough. 

How I cried my way to a free smear test

I started International Women’s Day by having a smear test. I guess insome twisted, far-fetched way, it is a form of self-care, after all.

In many ways, today was far from an ideal day for me to do this thing – not because it’s International Women’s Day, but because it’s my monthly deadline in work, a day I when I’m responsible for quality checking in excess of 120 pages of printed content, all while responding in a reasonably diplomatic way to more or less concerned emails from a number of other people invested in the content of said 120-plus pages. This monthly deadline, needless to say, is typically preceded by two or three equally full-on days, causing me to enter what one could refer to as print-deadline mode – a state that makes anyone who knows me run and hide. It is not, to be clear, the time for hanging around a GP surgery – but as you know if you’ve ever booked in for a smear, these things are best done at certain times of the month, and menstrual cycles don’t care about print deadlines.

This particular print deadline, as it happens, both my husband and my children had indeed run and hid, and I had a rare chance of an ever-so-slight lie-in – or I would’ve had, had it not been for this appointment to get a medical device similar to, but larger than, a garlic press shoved up my nether regions. I would’ve also had an entire evening to work on the aforementioned quality checking and maybe just chill with a bit of Netflix on my own for a while, had it not been for the fact that Virgin Media had just dropped off a new router, which apparently they do sometimes, causing the WiFi to go down and the smart TV with it – something I of course didn’t realise, because their service is so unreliable anyway, until after about an hour of phone tethering and desperately trying but failing to send huge files. This left me staring at the box with the new router, feeling like a bad, bad feminist, thinking that if I couldn’t get this thing working, then was it even International Women’s Day tomorrow at all? It was 10pm by the time I finally sat down, determined to watch something rather than going to bed, just for the hell of it and to celebrate my new status as good, self-sufficient feminist.

Back to the smear: in I went this morning, tired but armed with advice from my women’s health physiotherapist about the breathing I should be doing in advance of the procedure and the requests I should be making about the tools used and manners applied. To those who’ve had a smear test, this might sound a little excessive – but suffice to say I’ve had enough going on with my lady bits recently, and I wasn’t going to take the risk of causing further damage just to sample some tissue that would most likely end up getting lost on the way to the laboratory anyway.

I was brought in to a tiny room where a nurse took my details. “Say that again, sorry?” she said, staring confused at the screen. “Oh I’m sorry, you’re not actually due until the 16th, which is… oh that’s next Saturday! But you can just come back then, or if you want you can pay €50 and I’ll do it now?”

Take a week’s worth of stress, a dose of tiredness, nerves about the procedure itself, a bit of PMS and years’ worth of rage about the unacceptable state of our healthcare system, then add a few months of bad pelvic health news and a nurse asking me to come back during my period, after her colleague had specifically advised me not to book in for that particular time – and I lost it. I lost it, and I cried, and I knew it wasn’t her fault but it was the final straw: it was yet another piece of evidence of a broken system that fails women every day, one that failed women who are no longer with us, and their families, and every woman who has since lost faith in the system. It was the last tiny little poke that pushed me over the edge, and I was so angry I couldn’t even talk to her; I was angry about how I’d been dismissed the last time I’d been there, about how I’d been nervous for nothing, about the lie-in I didn’t get and the deep breathing I’d done in the waiting room – and I was raging over the absolute cheek of her to ask me for €50 when the smear test I’d had done three years previously might’ve never even had accurate results in the first place.

But just as I stood up and walked out, she said “Wait!” and she apologised and begged me to come back. “Let’s cheat the system. Sometimes you have to.”

The breathing was fine. The procedure was fine. It was all fine – bar the risk that the swab will be refused and I’ll have to go back for a repeat test in the summer – but I felt mortified. I had cried my way to a free smear test a week early, and it felt petty and unnecessary and deeply humiliating. “Oh, and if you don’t hear from us within three months, give me a call. These things have a tendency to go missing,” she said as I walked out the door.

Happy International Women’s Day, Mná na hÉireann.

Angry in company

The question was posed many times in the past few months: What will we do with all this time when we repeal? Rest, was one of the obvious answers from many: sleep for a week, rest for a month, take a year of just living. These were women who had spent every free moment talking and thinking about the campaign; mothers with ulcers and babies who didn’t sleep, who in spite of it all drove around the towns of Ireland distributing leaflets, recorded video tutorials and messaging workshops while minding sick children, spoke at events with babies in slings and hanging off their breasts; women who have been at this for decades, since before the 8th amendment was inserted in the first place; students who don’t yet have the right to vote but would rather fail their exams than wait another generation for a chance at bodily autonomy. When we repeal, we rest, they said – for a while at least.

But the announcement was not even out long enough for the tears of relief to have started to dry when the restlessness set in. Where next with this broken world?

Of course, a certain anti-choice spokesperson, who shall remain nameless lest his ego explodes, had us diagnosed within hours. “Your unhappiness will never be fixed by a vote, folks,” he tweeted. “The problem is the 8th amendment was never what was making you angry in the first place. It’s not the schools or the hospitals, or the ban on euthanasia either. No social reform is going to make you people happy. You’re all looking in the wrong place.”

The man’s got a point. I mean, he’s wrong in a million different ways that he won’t even begin to understand, but he’s right: I was angry long before I even knew what the 8th amendment was. Generally speaking, ironically, I’ve always been a reasonably happy, well-grounded person – serious, yes, but happy. Yet I suppose you could say that I have a propensity for anger. It seeks me out, or I grab it with both hands the moment it shows its heated face: on the streets of Chennai in India, where children’s limbs had been amputated to make them more profitable as beggars; when men who admit in court to having sexual intercourse with a woman without her consent (that’s not sex, by the way – it’s the definition of rape, folks) walk free because no one is willing to step up and say that yes, it’s absolutely definitely certain beyond doubt that they are guilty; when single mothers tell me why they’ve given up even trying to get maintenance off their children’s fathers, and people in comment sections on news websites spew vile hatred of these supposed societal leeches; when fellow Swedes put on an impressive show of historical amnesia with regards to the importance of financial redistribution and a solid welfare state for their own cosy quality of life, and suggest that maybe we can’t afford to welcome more refugees after all. I’m a ticking anger bomb watching the world, constantly waiting to go off, continuously magically relit. The nameless anti-choicer gets this.

What he doesn’t get is that, to people like us, there’s no looking in the wrong place. We may have been focused on repeal quite blindly for some time now; that’s how campaigning works. But we don’t suffer from tunnel vision – far from it. Alongside knee-jerk responses like ‘rest’ to that post-repeal question was a list longer than my arm of other places to look: direct provision, housing, homelessness, education equality, separation of church and state – you name it, we saw it. You see, our vision is three-dimensional, and we will attack a flawed society from every angle. Do we see problems everywhere or do we see potential for improvement? Is the glass half-empty or half-full? Anger can be fiercely productive; it doesn’t have to be a negative force.

I’ve come to realise that activists have a lot in common with artists: an affliction of seeing potential everywhere, of not only being unable to ignore the suffering, but knowing that there is another way – and being unable to live with that knowledge without fighting for that better place. We don’t rest while women and children and migrants and queers and homeless people suffer.

I said the day after our victory that it felt like we’d been to war. That we’d won, and I felt immensely grateful and relieved – but we were a wounded army, and we should never have had to go to war in the first place. Roe McDermott hit the nail on the head in the Irish Times when she explained why she wasn’t feeling joy after the referendum, drawing parallels to the #MeToo movement and the fact that abuse victims don’t suddenly heal overnight and celebrate when the abuse stops; instead, “we demand that they acknowledge the depth of the pain that they have inflicted, that they examine the attitudes and misogyny that led them to feel like they had the right to abuse others, that they surrender some of the power that enabled them to do so”.

As women, especially radical women, we can’t win. If we celebrate, we are insensitive, indecent, repulsive and unpleasant. Yet if we’re not happy, a nameless, high-profile anti-choicer calls us “the angriest, craziest people in Ireland”. He wrote: “The movement you are in won’t leave you fulfilled and happy. It will just leave you all angry in company. […] A momentary feeling of togetherness.”

You know, I celebrated. I cried and I danced and I hugged and I drank – the most exhausted, bewildered sort of celebration I’ve ever engaged in – and I felt all those complex, conflicting emotions: the elation and relief, and the rage and hurt over the fact that those attitudes were there in the first place, that much of that entitlement still lingers and will linger for a long time. And the comedown was rough as hell, but this much I know: the togetherness was anything but momentary. It had carried me for months; it had taught me who I am and shown me who I want to be. Of all the lenses through which to experience life, I’d take angry in company any day.

Love thy neighbour

She’s a lovely woman. She often stops by to chat when she’s on her way somewhere and my two sons are playing in the front garden. She tells me they’re adorable, such a gift. And she’s right – they are a gift. She means it in a slightly different way to how I see it, of course; she thinks of them as gifts from God. But we agree that they’re a blessing, if in a non-religious sense for me.

When we first moved in, she asked if we were renting or had bought. She wanted to know if we were truly settling, I guess. She told us she’d grown up around the corner, one of 11 siblings. They’re tiny houses, even tinier back then. Eleven of them! That would’ve been cosy – at best. And she loves the area, loves seeing new families settle and make it their home.

And so today she came to my door and called me a murderer. She said there was a special place in hell, waiting for me. And I knew she wasn’t trying to hurt me; her intent was someplace else altogether, wrapped up in gory images of babies branded as aborted foetuses that in reality never looked that plump and fully-formed, in notions of motherhood as holy and children as gifts from God. I don’t know why I even opened the door. This was a no-win situation.

Nor do I know why I asked that we remain respectful to each other and leave it be, our ‘Yes’ sign proudly on display in the window. Of course she couldn’t respect a baby murderer. Of course she wouldn’t hear me when I said I lost a baby, I lost him. Those images don’t wash away that easily – I get that. And I wasn’t trying to convince her, I wasn’t trying to win her over. I didn’t want to lecture her, nor to make her feel uncomfortable or upset. So I stood on my doorstep, a lovely old neighbour repeatedly accusing me of being a murderer.

And yes, we’d bought – we were hoping to settle here.

What has the Catholic church done to us as a society? What has it done if we can no longer talk to each other, listen and disagree, hold the hurt and pain and still live side by side without calling each other names? How did the teaching of loving thy neighbour so utterly fade away?

I grew up in a religious family – not a religious family like the one she came from, and not of that same religion, but one where faith was present, however unorthodoxly. And in everything I saw, in everything I was taught, there was one sentiment that overpowered them all, an omnipresent message that came to define my values and politics long after I left the church: we all have intrinsic value, and we all deserve to be loved and respected and treated as equals, regardless of where we come from and what we look like and how we choose to live.

For me, that’s what this referendum is all about. It is about the right of that woman whose baby is dying inside her to be surrounded by her family and non-judgemental medical professionals when she grieves. It is about the right of a woman whose health – mental or physical – is at stake to be treated with respect, whatever decision she makes when she discovers that she is pregnant. It is about the right of a woman in an abusive relationship to be trusted when she says that she is not safe if pregnant, and of a mother of four whose contraception fails to be met with compassion and support when she realises that there is only one decision her finances and family are able for. It is about the right of a student who always wanted to be a mother to give in to the feeling that it couldn’t possibly come at a worse time, that it just can’t happen right now – and to own that decision, whether she ends up regretting it or not.

This referendum is not just about abortion, but about those core values we as societies and communities owe each other to uphold, even when the posters we display in our windows don’t match. In some ways it’s not about abortion at all, because abortion is a fact of life and always has been; but it is about how we deal with it and how we treat those who need it – with trust and compassion, however reluctant, or with promises of a special place in hell.

She’s a lovely woman, and I don’t need her to agree with me to think that about her. I can see beyond the God that promotes silence and shame and sweeping secrets under the rug and crying behind closed doors, see that beyond that, we share a faith in defending what we believe is right. But this referendum isn’t going away, and one of us is going to be at the losing end.

It won’t be easy, but I’m hoping that – with time – we’ll be able to smile at each other in the street and she’ll find it in her heart to compliment my children again and ask how we’re finding the neighbourhood. Because I can accept and respect differences of faith and conviction, even reach above and around them, celebrate them – but I can’t let you walk up to my door, call me a murderer and yet claim to ‘love them both’.

No woman is an island

“Happiness is within,” they say. Within you, within that cup of herbal tea and a gratitude journal and deep, deep breaths. You should try yoga. We’ll all have our 15 minutes of fame – if we just find that strength within. We’ll all be somebody, more than just selfless mothers – we’ll make our lives into works of art, copyrighted, patented, and with no one to thank but ourselves.

One for the gratitude journal: we’re safe from floods and earthquakes. But calm as the waters may be, the 8th ships us across the Irish Sea, sweeping secret upon secret under a rug woven of intricate age-old lies. “I’m drowning in post-natal depression,” says one, as another numbs guilt with a bottle of Tesco’s Finest. A third perfects the art of covering bruises with concealer and a new fringe, while 12 a day are exiled. Shame – our greatest export.

“Happiness is within,” so the self-help books say. But what is self-help if the self needs help, reaching out and away for respite, for togetherness? Sure happiness must be within when the outside and beyond is cold and lonely, bills unpaid and children hungry, wombs a battlefield and homes hollow as ghosts. You must find strength within to get up early in the morning, pay your taxes, look after your own, never complain – good man. When there’s no such thing as society and Thatcher rests in peace, take a deep breath, try yoga. Down by the Central Bank, placards of blood and flesh make religious icons of grotesque purity, flaunted by big, strong men who know nothing of hormonal battlefields but are certain that a heartbeat is a heartbeat because God tells us so. Four of them, maybe five, the placards huge like altarpieces. Just a couple of yards away is a woman, alone, red tape across her mouth and a small hand-written sign asking the big, strong men to mind their own battlefields. Then a stranger walks up, joins in silence, grabs her hand. Up by the Dáil, another man with a sign – on strike for that same heartbeat, demonstrating his right to refuse to eat so that others can be force-fed. Up walk 25 handmaids, all dressed in red, a long line of white bonnets. Solidarity in silence. Yes, there is such a thing as society. There’s a soup kitchen just around the corner, serving mugs full of steaming hot care and smiles, and three lads on Facebook offering free grass-cutting services and hugs to old, disabled, sick people and single parents. Hope in a social media post.

I don’t think happiness is within, but in between, in what holds us together – in showing up and grabbing someone’s hand. I think it is in marching side by side, 20-30-50-thousand, unapologetically through the streets that are our own, refusing to throw another woman under the bus and in the sea, turning the streets of Dublin from battlefields into a weft of compassion and solidarity. I think hope is in drinking that tea together, taking a deep, deep breath and listening to each other – disagreeing, maybe, but respectfully, without judgement. Marching, stronger together, until the ideas of ‘mind your own business’ and self-realisation for 15 minutes of fame no longer shape our policies and our dreams and our health; until we refuse to swallow our pride along with guilt and shame and tears, and admit that some days giving up feels easier than leaning in and reaching for what was once a seed of happiness within; until we can say out loud that today it hurts, and I need help. It’s not your fault.

This, to me, is self-care: surrounding myself with other people who care, mothers who haven’t slept in years but spend every free minute writing down facts and engaging in debates and finding pills for those who need them; women who have been abused and ignored, who are scared and hurting but won’t stop talking; and those born with all the luck and privilege in the world, who would give it all up in a flash if it meant those born without could be heard. No man is an island. No woman is an island. When I despair, I put my faith in community and I seek out these warriors. And then, together, we cry the world better.

Police brutality and punching down

I was standing in the airport security queue at Heathrow Airport when a group of middle-aged women started laughing, indiscreetly, at a trans woman just in front of me in the queue; and I wanted to say something, yet I didn’t want to cause a scene, didn’t want to make the experience any worse for the woman in front of me than it already was. Then we approached the security belt and staff started laughing and pointing, even less discreetly than the women had done, and I couldn’t contain the rage. I ended up telling them off; I ended up in tears, shaking. The woman informed me that she was fine – this was her everyday life, after all. She was used to it.

With hindsight, perhaps it wasn’t the security staff that broke me. With hindsight, I was definitely already sad, probably already broken. What broke me was the story of the woman who killed herself, the activist whose mental illness episode ended in police arrest as she wandered the streets of Dublin naked – an arrest that was videoed, shared, watched on Facebook by 130,000 people before, just a few days later, she took her own life.

More than upsetting, frightening and enraging, the behaviour of the gardaí proved a point, proved that she’d never been a real, valued person in their eyes, having grown up in an estate they didn’t touch but sneered at, a world they didn’t care for – one they protected the privileged classes from, despite exclusion being the heart of the problem in the first place. From being ignored to being abused, she was worthless to them. And people are offended when they hear people say that all cops are bastards. That’s what broke me.

All cops aren’t bastards, yet everything they touch turns to muck. Records of millions of imaginary breath tests; false allegations of sexual abuse, leaked personal information, lives ruined. Once entangled in a system of corrupt power relationships, even the most well-intended citizen will struggle to tell right from wrong. But what breaks me is that those who know that indeed all cops aren’t bad are so busy defending them that they refuse to see the abuse by those who are, refuse to see how one thing leads to another, how police brutality is killing working class people, literally.

All cops aren’t bastards – just like #notallmen, indeed #notallmedia. But try to tell the same people that not all travellers trash hotels, that not all muslims are terrorists, and they’ll insist that it’s hard to see the wood for the trees, that when you see it happening more than once it’s hard not to come to expect it. The good and righteous should take responsibility for their tribe, they say. But who takes responsibility for the gardaí when they share footage of a distressed woman at her most vulnerable?

‘I don’t get it,’ some say about transsexuality, as if their ability to empathise and identify with others writes the rules, as if ‘not getting it’ equals forgetting everything they’ve ever known about human decency and thinking it’s OK to point and laugh at a person who is never allowed to feel normal. There are a lot of things to feel sad about in the world right now, but perhaps that’s what’s worst of all: the fact that so many so often will fail to stand up for other people who don’t already have the upper hand, fail to empathise with anyone but those already in power. That so often, people are willing to tar everyone with the same brush as long as they’re already oppressed and powerless, to play along with Varadkar’s game of ratting on those most desperate in society, those already left out. That #notallanything only ever punches down, never up; that it only ever serves to silence.

And that’s what breaks me – that I’m only really feeling this now, protected my entire life by the privilege of boredom. That I’m crying in an airport while the security staff roll their eyes at me and keep on laughing, and the trans woman soldiers on – because this is the world she’s used to.

On reproductive justice, the failures of neoliberalism, and why ‘choice’ is complicated

It’s a funny one, the word ‘choice’. I spend so much of my time promoting it, explaining it, demanding it – yet whenever I stop to really think about it, I realise that it’s a word I’d much prefer not to have to embrace.

For as long as laissez-faire or economic liberalism has existed, ‘choice’ has been one of its most important buzzwords, second only to ‘freedom’. In fact, the Swedes, keen on optimising language to become its most functional and least wasteful, would talk about a combination of the two: ‘valfrihet’ – freedom of choice. In the name of freedom of choice, neoliberalism has torn down many a welfare state in the hope that the free market, as an invisible hand, would bring us all greater utility by way of rational choice.

In the context of present-day Ireland and the current discussions around reproductive rights, I am unequivocally pro-choice; yet if you tried to twist my words into some sort of neoliberal utopia, I’d cringe.

I grew up in a society steeped in social democrat heritage, where parents shared generous parental leave rights and state schools taught all children from the local area regardless of faith or socio-economic status. I grew up in a country where the school canteen served up free lunches for all, complete with a side serving of the notion of ‘folkhemmet’ – a vision for a society resembling a small family where everyone contributes and everyone’s looked after – and a glass of milk for strong, healthy bones.

Then, in 2006, the liberal-right alliance won the election and neoliberalism swept through the country, the since privatised trains stopped running on time, and finding a good school became all about social capital. Maternity wards got over-crowded, sending women in labour off to the next town or city and midwives home on sick leave due to exhaustion. Many school kitchens stopped serving milk.

I spent a good few years in London, watching the shift from Ken Livingstone to Boris Johnson and hearing David Cameron speak of the ‘big society’, which soon enough turned out to be a cowardly rhetorical device to describe what Thatcher had so bluntly asserted years before him: there is no such thing as society.

I don’t drink milk, yet I liked ‘folkhemmet’ better than what slogans about choice brought about. More often than not, choice-based policies turned out to be get-out clauses for governments who didn’t want to carry any responsibility, for leaders to be able to point to citizens and blame them for choosing wrong instead of providing choice in the real sense, along with care and support. Choice appeared to be to modern-day liberals what the big society was to Cameron – an empty promise, a chance to walk away.

But what’s in a word? Choice can refer to ‘the action of choosing’, ‘the power of choosing’, the sheer ‘fact of having a choice’. At first sight, it seems pretty simple: you either have the right to choose or you don’t. But the action of choosing requires a lot more. I’ve heard campaigners, especially lawyers, point out when pro-choice representatives insist that healthcare and abortion rights don’t belong in the constitution that, in fact, the right to reproductive health should absolutely be enshrined as such. Without a guaranteed, positive right, many people don’t have any right at all.

It struck me as I was thinking about all this that the word for choice isn’t used in the reproductive rights discourse in Sweden. A friend who works in the field explained it to me: abortion rights have in Sweden for quite some time been campaigned for within the realm of sexual, reproductive health rights (SRHR), and in that context the conversation tends to revolve more around justice, access and intersectionality. The dualism of being for or against choice doesn’t really exist.

Turns out, the reproductive justice (RJ) movement, which is growing globally, has already problematised the use of the word choice and its discriminatory and exclusionary tendencies. The right to choose to have an abortion – the fact that a jurisdiction allows for a procedure to take place, more or less without judgement – is not enough for the woman who can’t afford to pay for one, the pregnant person whose local abortion clinic has closed down, the asylum seeker without valid health insurance. And does the right to procure an abortion really qualify as choice if the person needing it has been denied sex education or suitable contraception? What about those forcibly sterilised, what good does choice in regards to abortion and maternity care do them? If the alternative to procuring an abortion, in the event where said procedure is safe and legal, is a life in poverty, judged by mainstream media and society at large – what kind of choice is that?

I’m not sure about the idea of ‘folkhemmet’ as applied to society the way it looks today; I’m not convinced it’s got the scope for pluralism, at least not in its former guise. But the live-and-let-live ideology that left trains derailed and school children discriminated against won’t be good enough. I don’t want to be handed a token notion of choice only for the decision makers to turn around and walk away. I want to prove Thatcher wrong.

“My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit,” Flavia Dzodan famously declared. Of course the right to choose is a hugely important issue in Ireland, for all kinds of historical and pragmatic reasons. And sure, before you have the right to choose, you’re not going to be marching the streets demanding access. So I will show up for every pro-choice march to demand that most basic of rights; but when the politicians think they’ve awarded it to us, I will keep showing up to try to make it real – to make it free and accessible, complete in every sense of the word, and inseparable from care and support. My reproductive justice advocacy will be intersectional – or it will be bullshit. 

Meet my sister

Dear new friend,

Meet my sister. Her name is Klara. The last time I saw her was on the first of advent 2006 on a train platform as she got on a train back to where she was studying photo journalism at the time. I was living in London and home for the weekend, and she’d decided to ‘come home’ to see me.

She took her own life just over a week later.

I need to tell you about my sister not because I need you to carry me and tell me you’re sorry. I need to tell you about my sister because she is an integral part of me, and one I adore, and without knowing about her you can never fully know me. And as much as I like you, the opportunity to tell you about that sister I had, who killed herself years before we even met, might never come.

We might hear a Jens Lekman song and I’ll instinctively want to tell you about that summer when we were both living at home and having friends over for drinks, dancing the night away. Or you might tell me I’ve lost an earring and I’ll have to explain that there was only ever one, but I’ll hold onto it like you’d hold onto a family heirloom because she bought it, and she didn’t care much about pairing it up. I might see a photo of one of her best friends on her due date, and it might shake the ground I walk on for days to come. Or you might end up talking about your sister and how nothing else compares, and I’ll cry; and that’s OK, but I’ll want you to know that cherishing it is great but that once you start to take it for granted I'll really struggle.

Meet my sister. Her name is Klara and she was so much to so many people: the funny one, and the quiet one; the strong one, and the broken one; the rock, yet completely lost; happiness epitomised, yet altogether sad. She wore the strangest combinations of clothes but managed to always look like she loved herself. I don’t know if I ever really realised that she didn’t.

She had the most amazing of friends: the kind of friendships you think only exist in American box-sets, except deeper; the kind of friends who laugh so hard they're sore for days afterwards, who love each other so boundlessly that they’ll break each other’s hearts if they have to to keep each other safe.

She didn’t really love herself in the end, nor did she see the charm with those rock solid friendships. She didn’t give anyone a chance to save her, and I’m not sure who I am to say that there was much left to save. I will forever miss my sister, always long for the auntie my sons never had. And boy would she have made a brilliant auntie.

But the memory of her is very much alive, still, approaching ten years since the day she died. In fact, the memory of her is so much more alive than the real-life impression of so many people I meet on a day-to-day basis. And it is talking about her that keeps those memories alive. It is laughing at the funny things she did, talking about the things we used to do, and explaining to people who didn’t know her what made her who she was, that will make her just as alive in another ten years’ time.

I need to tell you about my sister, because the grief has been coming at me at full force lately and I'm running out of excuses for puffy eyes, absent-mindedness and unexpected mood swings. That's the funny thing about emigrating: as you move away from those you love, escape the things that annoy you, and run away from all that which you can't quite put your finger on but which gets under your skin, you also leave behind all the places and smells and memories that would otherwise remind you of your past. Along with the chance to reinvent yourself comes a life without all those people who know who you were at 15. At the same time, grief goes into hibernation and you never know when it might strike.

This is why I need you to meet my sister, new friend. I don’t need you to feel sorry for me, but I need you to share those memories with me to keep them – and her – alive.

Why I'm marching: for real care and real respect, without judgement

I remember vividly the feeling the first time I found out I was pregnant: the magic of it all, trying to comprehend that what was there inside me was the beginnings of a new life, the beginnings of what could become our firstborn, half me and half him. One loss and two unfathomably amazing children later, I sit here trying to imagine the feeling of finding out now: the panic of it all, knowing full well what that teeny, tiny thing inside would be the beginnings of and how life-changing it would be.

We hear the anti-choice campaign talk about the right to life. I’m marching on Saturday because I don’t think ‘life’ is that simple.

I remember vividly the moment everything changed – a sonographer’s silence as she turned the screen away from us. I had experienced grief before and immediately recognised it: a black curtain that closes in front of your eyes, forever shutting out the world as you once knew it. He kicked furiously inside me. “It’s good that it’s happening to us,” I kept telling myself. “We’re strong – we can get through this.”

Along with the sadness I feel when I think about our firstborn, there is a deep, deep sense of gratitude. The care we received was so utterly dignified, the consultant so objectively professional yet supportive, the midwives so warm and caring that we spent weeks talking about them afterwards. It was the definition of ‘care’. I hate the memory of those Whittington corridors, the feeling of walking down the hill from Highgate in leafy north London. But the NHS will always have a special place in my heart, because at a time of numbing grief, we were treated with nothing but respect.

Life isn’t black and white. It comes in full colour, full of bright highs and all different shades of tough, indiscernible grey. There’s no such thing as sheer existence – we feel it, we try to make sense of it, we make decisions and move on. And therein lies the power of it all: we can’t choose what will happen to us, but we can choose how to deal with it – provided our jurisdiction trusts us to.

We hear the anti-choice campaign talk about the right to life, about the need to voice the interests of the voiceless. I’m marching on Saturday because I’m not convinced they can.

We trust pregnant people to mind themselves throughout the sometimes tumultuous experience of a pregnancy, to prepare for the arrival of a new human being who will need their complete attention every moment of every day for years to come, to deal with all the difficult decisions and choices they’ll face as they rise to the challenge of being a parent. How can we decide for their unborn children that sheer existence, the idea of life as absolute, is the best thing for them – no matter how their mother feels, no matter the challenges she’s facing or her feelings of doubt?

We hear the anti-choice campaign talk about the right to life. I’m marching on Saturday because most of the time, it sounds more like they’re talking about the right to birth – the right to arrive into this world no matter the cost, no matter the implications for their siblings, no matter how suicidal their mother is or if she’s been absolutely certain her entire life that motherhood is not for her; indeed no matter the experience of the pregnant person facing months of answering well-intended questions about due dates and plans, knowing that the baby is slowly but surely dying and there will be no such thing as a life at the end of it.

We hear the anti-choice campaign talk about the right to life, and I’m growing really, really tired of it. I’m marching on Saturday because all too often, people tell me they’re pro-life but that what we went through was different – and that’s got nothing to do with life, nor does it have anything to do with choice. That’s telling me that my choice was allowed because I grieved, and that next time, maybe, if they can’t put themselves in my shoes, they’ll deem me a criminal. It’s draining life of all its rich, challenging colour, leaving a watered-down version seeping with shame and fear.

I’m marching on Saturday because I want real care and real respect, and the way things stand, Ireland gives me none of it.

This was written for and originally published by the Abortion Rights Campaign. 

The end of censoring myself

“I think midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear: I’m not screwing around. It’s time. All of this pretending and performing – these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt – has to go.”

I came across this Brené Brown quote one evening recently just after taking part in a Facebook group thread about authenticity and learning to be yourself fully and whole-heartedly, without regard for other people’s opinions. It seemed funny how this came up just then; and then I realised that I had myself been working on a blog post just days earlier, entitled ‘The end of censoring myself’. It suddenly felt as if an entire generation of women had had enough of being nice.

My blog post – the initial draft of what was to eventually be rewritten into this – had been triggered by something as random as a discussion about the sentiment of a car bumper sticker, also in said Facebook group. A friend had lashed out due to frustrations with people, in this instance feminists, who continuously got worked up about the wrong things yet seemed unwilling to support the cause vocally enough and share petitions and articles on request. I had questioned her, it had been a bit tense, we’d had it out and moved on – but I had somehow ended up feeling frazzled, even hurt. A month or two later, enough pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place for me to begin to understand what had happened: I was censoring myself, and she had called me out on it.

It took little more than the realisation for me to decide that I wanted to change. Like the woman who had started the authenticity thread, I knew that I was holding back – but why? Whom was I scared that I might offend? Whom was I trying to protect?

Then another timely piece of writing appeared. After a couple of years’ hiatus, feminist writer Flavia Dzodan returned to the scene with a piece that started like this: “This is about the difficulty of writing about difficulties. The things we do not say because they are not polite or because they are embarrassing. The things we do not talk about because of how they would reflect on those we care.”

There it was: the reason I’d been censoring myself – on Facebook, absolutely, but in many ways far more widely than that. Dzodan continues: “Writing as a woman on the internet is also writing for public scrutiny, to be evaluated in one’s “moral character”. Is this woman embarrassing herself and, by proxy the people in her life? Is this woman bringing “shame” to her family? Unlike men on the internet, we write not only as a reflection of ourselves but of our entire community. When a woman “goes mad” on the internet, she doesn’t just go mad (whatever that means) on her own, she calls into question the patriarchal structures that should have kept her in her place.”

Here’s the thing: I don’t really care what other people think; I’ve just been behaving as if that’s rude of me. But I’m going to write. I’m going to share, and I’m going to ‘like’. Going from A to B might take a bit of time - I’m not even quite sure what B is yet. But what I’m saying is this: if I annoy you, mute me; if you start to really dislike me, unfriend me; if things get uncomfortable, know that it’s coming from a good place. Know that it’s me, fully and whole-heartedly. The watered-down version is no longer in stock. I’m pretty sure I’ll put my foot in it before too long – but I’ll live and I’ll learn and I’ll be able to say that I didn’t censor myself.

All of this pretending and performing has to go. I’m not screwing around. It’s time.

How the predictable can be sad

Who would have thought that some sympathy would face so much criticism?

When Amy Winehouse died on Saturday, we didn’t just lose one of the greatest singers of our time. Her parents lost a daughter, many lost a friend. Yet, most of Amy’s obituaries, along with endless angry tweets and facebook updates, were preoccupied by pondering the apparently surprising scenario that her death left thousands if not millions of people shocked, sad, almost speechless. Amy’s destructive lifestyle had been well-documented by the media: we shouldn’t be surprised, so we shouldn’t be sad.

As if the death of a young person could ever really be comprehensibly predictable, because of addictions or depressions or self harm or long lists of pills you don’t even know the names of. I knew back in 2006 that my sister was thinking about killing herself, because she told me. Still, when she did, it shocked me to the core. Because no matter how sick you are, how many demons you’re struggling with, the unthinkable remains unthinkable.

As if the predictable can’t be sad; as if fact equals acceptance. Would you have said the same thing to me the day before I went in to give birth to my fatally ill son? I knew that he wouldn’t survive, but that never stopped me from mourning the loss of my firstborn.

But Amy was just a drug addict. She brought it on herself. (Or, as someone said on facebook, “I couldn’t give a shit about Amy Winehouse. She was an idiot and she brought it on herself, so zero sympathy.”)

Focus on Norway. Now that’s a tragedy. (Yes, many people were seriously offended by the amount of attention given to the death of the troubled singer, because they felt that it should have been over-shadowed by the much more devastating events in Norway.)

As if an addict doesn’t deserve being paid tribute to. As if losing a miserable, self-destructive daughter would somehow be easier than losing one who is happy, generous, blissfully unaware of what’s to come. As if it’s a competition and you have to choose: pick no more than one terrible incident at any one time, and grieve that. And don’t you dare mention that mess of a drug addict called Amy.

People can be as cynical as they like about it all and say that sad things happen all the time. I’m aware of that, and I don’t mind them taking the piss out of people like me, who are shocked again and again by bad news. I don’t even mind if they feel the need to compare and say that Norway is worse – because even if I don’t see how comparing loss is possible or even appropriate, I understand that it comes from fear and not ignorance: it was a deliberate attack on democracy; many victims were innocent teenagers; and, that notion that’s so hard to digest – that they were all just normal, sane people, just like us.

What bothers me is the narrow-minded view of addiction: the idea that a girl who goes from eating disorders to self harm and addiction only has herself to blame and that she’s somehow worth less than other people, in extreme cases the opinion that she actually deserves to die. It makes me feel physically sick that there are people in my online network who genuinely don’t understand that self harm and addiction are more complicated than the thing we call choice. It’s not only a heartless stance, but one that says a lot about the society we live in.

The death of a 27-year-old woman is a sad thing no matter how predictable you insist that it was. The death of Amy Winehouse was perhaps particularly sad, because of the hostility and ignorance it exposed in us.

Selfish, depressed fuckers

I sat on the tube the other day as an announcement came: “The Piccadilly Line will from now on run with some delays due to a person under a train at Arnos Grove. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.” In front of me: a row of tired, annoyed faces. Tutting and sighing all round.

That particular day, for some reason, the absurdity struck me: it was an announcement like any other, a reason for delays like any other. Yet another voice mechanically apologising for the inconvenience of someone killing themselves on the particular tube line YOU depend on.

People are in a hurry, you know. They have meetings to attend, emails to reply to, bosses to face. Almost everyone in the whole world is busy enough to get seriously annoyed when someone picks their train to jump in front of.

I interviewed some internship candidates that day. One of them called to say that he was running late, and when he finally arrived and shook my hand he said, “I’m so sorry I’m late. There were severe delays on the overground due to a person under a train. Some people are selfish, aren’t they?”

I laughed, because I didn’t know what else to do. Selfish, depressed fuckers. Ruining everyone else’s day because of their misery.

That guy didn’t get the internship. It wasn’t because he was late.

Baby on board - shout it from the rooftops!

“I like to think I’m a fairly tolerant person. I’m not, obviously, but I still like to think it. In truth, as I get older the list of things that disproportionately annoy me gets longer. Grammatical errors. Tourists who walk too slowly down busy London thoroughfares. Pregnant women who wear “Baby on board” badges when travelling on public transport. That kind of thing.”

I read the first paragraph of Elizabeth Day’s column in The Observer last weekend and thought: I like her; she’s a bit like me. Because not only am I a notorious grammar stickler, but I used to think exactly that – in fact, I still feel a bit like that – about those stupid badges.

Still today, I refuse to wear one. Despite finding out that the back pain and exhaustion that comes with pregnancy can turn up way ahead of the neat little bump, nine weeks on from being diagnosed with pelvic girdle pain and spending a week completely housebound with pain, I still don’t wear one.

What is it that the ‘Baby on board’ badge says that’s so offensive? Does it communicate weakness? Is it something about the blatantly ticking biological clock that our career-minded society can’t stomach?

A nice, middle-aged lady stood up as I got on the tube the other day and gave me her seat. Then she smiled and said, “You should get one of those badges. You’re only very tiny, and people can’t tell.” I’m sure it came from a good place, yet I felt attacked. After all, she clearly could tell, couldn’t she?

“You’re only very tiny,” what does that mean? Is it a compliment, meaning that I’m skinny (in which case it’s a lie)? Does it mean I don’t actually look that pregnant after all (in which case it feels a bit like a slap in the face)? The bump will bloody grow, won’t it? And, as much as I appreciated her giving me her seat, who is she to decide whether or not I choose to publicise my current state in order to get comfortable during my commute, and how I choose to do so? Is it really that embarrassingly awkward for people to stare at my belly for a few seconds to try to figure out what’s really going on, and if so, is that my fault? I’m not moaning, am I? Or am I ruining the rush-hour peace with my sheer presence?

Of course she’s got a point. Elizabeth Day may be a fantastic writer with plenty of self-awareness and an ability to laugh at herself, but at the end of the day it’s not the middle-aged woman on the tube who is pathetic for thinking that a simple badge might help. Maybe I should learn to laugh at myself too, and get over what seems like nothing but a superwoman complex.

(By the way, a clearly blind woman with a walking stick got on the bus this morning. I waited for a second, but no one, not a single person, gave up their seat. So I got up. You know, I’m only very tiny, after all. But what do they want from her? A “Watch out! Blind person!” badge?)