Chasing Shadows And Hugging Strangers

To tell you the honest truth, as if there’s any other kind, I’ve spent my life chasing shadows. They’re everywhere I turn. This search for who I really am that goes on and on, always someone or something there to remind me. Reminders of the places and the people I have been. Son. Brother. Schoolboy. Student. Postman. Teacher. Friend. Football fan. Boyfriend. Husband. Journalist. Father. Ex-husband. Writer. Counsellor. Jack of all trades and as some might say master of none. Jack the lad. Now part-time writer, full-time guidance counsellor and trainee psychotherapist. Oh and I forgot - comedian. I’ve worn so many masks that I’m still not entirely sure where the restlessness that has always existed inside comes from.

Maybe it’s a little gift given to me by my Irish heritage. It’s thrown me off balance, thrown me to the ground, picked me up and put me back down. It’s taken me to Barcelona, London, Carlow, Berlin, Sofia, to -42 degree days spent working in Northern Finland and boiling hot ones in Morocco, and of course Riyadh, where I lived for five years, but it’s Dublin that will always be my home. It’s where my heart beats strongest. I love the coast and the countryside, but I love the city more. I think it’s the anonymity that attracts me, along with the hustle and bustle and all the crazy people, and the bigger the better. Dublin is a nice size, but it still remains quietly conservative in its ways compared to London. Nobody cares who you are or what you wear over there. Punk. Goth. Rocker. Football fan. Pin stripe suit. Pencil skirt matching a kinky tattoo. I’ll admit it can feel a little cold and disconnected, the eyes staring into nothing on the tube, but that can be freeing in its own way. It allows for a certain kind of latitude that doesn’t exist where everybody knows you. When you’re lost in the crowd you don’t have to live up to your own or anyone else’s expectations. You can be yourself.

I often wonder where this need to feel lost comes from. Maybe it’s something to do with the safety that comes with numbers. I’m always happiest on Hill 16 or the old North Bank at Highbury. These are the places I go to worship, where I can be with my tribe. It’s here I can hug a stranger when Con O’Callaghan slides an early goal into the Mayo net and not get arrested. Not that I make a habit of hugging strangers. It goes with the flow. The spontaneous combustion. The edge. The joy. The will to live fed by the electricity flowing through my blue veins. Up here on Hill 16, nothing else matters for those couple of hours. Not even tomorrow. It might as well not exist. Nobody cares. All that matters is Dublin winning. Singing songs and thousand’s of hands punching the air in unison. We are the great unwashed. Stripped bare of yesterday and what’s yet to come. There are no shadows in the now. Maybe it’s the erosion of self by the collective or the sense of belonging to something bigger, greater, that lies beyond what we know and understand that is so attractive.

The shadows represent the regrets and the memories of the mistakes I’be made along the way and trust me I’ve made a few, as well as the hopes and dreams that continue to drive me on, taunting me and messing with my head. I live to prove them wrong. They’re always there, giving out, poking their noses in, fucking about. They scream and shout. They’re the unconscious brakes that screech to a halt as I charge head first towards a cliff. Geronimo fuckers! I sidestep them, sneak past, switch cars on a dark empty street, run, and hide, whatever it takes to lose them even for a few precious minutes. They’re people too. The little reminders of where I slipped off track. They’re also the places I left behind. The good and the bad times rolling into the continuum. They’re the things I would do differently if I could do them again and the things I wouldn’t. They’re the chances I might take. The times passed and the promise of what’s to come. They like to stir the pot, to sow the seeds of doubt by throwing their weight about.

It’s why I loved working on the films and why I found Riyadh refreshing. I knew nobody and nobody knew me. It was that sense of freedom that comes with beginning again, meeting new people with no history, no expectations, only the feverish sense of possibility pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. It’s the oxygen of adventure and newness that brings with it the chance to be reborn, to go back to the things that are really precious and important, to strip back the layers and reach down into the very depths of the spirit. When I first went to Riyadh I knew no one, so I would put on my headphones and walk the bustling streets when the sun went down. Part of me was running from the silence I had left behind. I fell in love with music again and the feeling of being around the people who were as curious about me as I was about them. It cured the loneliness until I began to make new friends. Out there on the streets of a strange and faraway place I have never felt safer surrounded by strangers.

The shadows live in the people we will never see again, the living and those who are gone, but who are always with us. They inhabit our dreams and walk beside us. They’re in the books we read and write. But it’s not all plain sailing. The trouble with chasing shadows is that they only ever seem to grow longer. I thought they might be gone by now, tired of following me. Move on lads, nothing to see here, anymore. But like me, they can’t let go. It seems we’ve invested too much in each other to part ways at this late stage. In fact they’re so strong now that they don’t even need the sun to stretch out anymore. They’re even stronger in the wintertime when darkness comes early, the long nights when they’re grey, black and moody in themselves. I do my best to resist with humour and a sense of acceptance of what’s gone. I’m not the boy I used to be, but some precious parts remain and he’s damned if he’s going to give in. The changes we experience as part of growing older catching like lichen and moss attaching itself to our bark are plentiful. The realisation dawning that you never step in the same river twice or even once for that matter helps. The precious things we pick up along the way only to lose them in the flow.

Thankfully the shadows bring with them a wisdom born of time, way beyond our comprehension, thoughts and feelings that come from another place. They exist below the surface of our conscious mind in the things we carry. Old friends who left a permanent mark or an incident that should have meant little but ended up meaning a lot. The words of a stranger tossed onto the wind catching us unawares. The little things adding up and multiplying, stretching their arms out towards the sky to fill the road behind us and when we take a chance to look back they’re gone, but never ever forgotten. I know the shadows are still there, this little band of brothers whose job it is to bring the pot to the boil. They’re the reason I don’t give up, as much a part of my heartbeat as the blood that flows through it. I respect them, like would be too strong. They’ve made me take choices that I still don’t fully understand; a life lived with lots of unexpected twists and turns. I’ve got better at the acceptance bit, but it’s never easy. Now I get to sit with clients in the therapeutic space wondering who I am to be trying to help people find their way to where they want be, when I’m not even sure myself? But there’s also a voice telling me that this is where I’m meant to be right now. I’ve learnt to trust in life’s direction a lot more. It’s called fate or faith depending on what you believe. For me it’s both. it’s a feeling. It’s why I sit down to write. It helps me to work things out and move on until they come looking for me again, that shadow self who will never be satisfied. It lives on, even when we die.

I’m writing this piece in the gap before dawn on a Saturday morning in early November 2020 before it’s time to get up and shake the sleep out of my tired legs. Staying on the move is my way of reaching the place beyond the silence and stillness that’s fed by restlessness. It’s time to give the day a rattle and see what it brings.

Who knows, some day I might even learn to be still.