I want to set my life on fire
(after seven years of being a good girl)
When I was turning thirty, I wrote an essay for my now defunct blog in which I said goodbye to my twenties. I outlined in great detail all the stupid shit I had done in the previous decade, the risks I had taken, the ways in which I had willingly if not gleefully put my own life in danger all in service of “the plot”. (Truly, I would have done anything for a good story to tell afterwards)
The first three years of my thirties weren’t much better, but it soon became clear that this was a different type of messiness, the wheels were well and truly falling off. It wasn’t fun anymore, things were beginning to feel chaotic, unmanageable. I’ve spoken about this before but there was a period of around twelve months when it felt like my eating disorder was digging my own grave, where the words I’m going to die, I’m going to die from this were a constant echo in my brain. It felt inevitable, my death, like watching a horror movie and screaming at the girl who runs up the stairs rather than out the front door, knowing it won’t make any difference anyway. I didn’t want to die but I was utterly resigned to it too. What other choice did I have?
When you’ve never experienced addiction, you wonder why the person can’t just stop. Why can’t they stop drinking, stop taking drugs, stop vomiting after meals, stop gambling? The easiest thing in the world is just to stop, surely? Until you’ve been in the grip of that compulsion, you could never understand that to stop feels like holding your breath and pretending you don’t need oxygen. You hold on for one minute, maybe you can do this, and another few seconds, until quickly you realise that you can’t, it’s too hard, you need it, you have never needed anything more. You’re doomed to fail, falling to your knees, gasping for air, and you listen to the people around you who tell you that you’re weak for giving in, and you nod your head, yes. You probably are weak, you think.
When I first started to recover in 2017, I deliberately made my life as small as I could. I kept my circle of friends tight, I moved back to west Cork to have family around me, I stopped drinking and doing