Why?????

Tuesday morning, 10am, the bell has gone but the arrival of my English teacher to class is dragging. Why?…..

I'm sat front and center of the classroom, eagerly anticipating the grading of the English essay I submitted the previous Friday. It's been 67 hours but each hour has me convinced my stream of consciousness piece is going to warrent a B+ minimum, but likely creeping into A- terriority. I'm so focused on the pending grade, I've got myself into some form of altered state. The cacophony from the boys down the back as they shrill over the hole in the weatherboard ceiling they secretly caused without reprimand last week is nothing more than white noise. The drone of the cars outside as they make their way into town or the ricocheted sunbeams from their windscreens piercing my eyes do nothing to dislodge my dreamy state. That is until I hear the door close on its hinges and a chorus of 'Good morning, Miss' resound around the room. That's it, my event horizon is here in the form of thirty odd copybooks that need to be handed out to various levels of expectant students. As luck would have it, my copybook was only number five into the pile, as Sod's law would have it, an emblazoned hellish red screamed C- at me. In matching red scrawl that would challenge that of a doctors, the feedback lynched my confidence. "Darren, I'm not sure where you were going with this but the thoughts in this prose ramble around like an incoherent drunk, making it nigh on impossible for the reader to make sense of the story line let alone enjoy the story! Were it not for some exquisit imagery painted through words, you ran dangerously close to a D for this effort. Better luck next time."

With my heart summoning all the electricity it could to barely beat, the use of sailors English and a safe distance between me and 'her highness', I could only mumble, "My teacher, the F@RKING Irish Times critic in waiting!"….. That's why…

I'm five points short, places go completely in the first round offers, my life as a journalist is over….. Whyyyyyy…..

The red C didn't hang around my mind too long, I'm a stubborn c@rnt like that! When I think of the jibes I get from my mates today for my 'pigeon' or 'pikie' English, it doesn't change my desire for the language or the subject. In fact I see it as my own personal dialect, how I face off to the world. For three years, an orgy of Yeats, Shakespere and Kavanagh to name but a few made me their bed fellow. My technical and science subjects would bolster my points tally, but the target was fixed, English was my game and journalism was my trophy.

Fortunately for the ould pair they're farmers, they didn't pass much remarks to my insistent badgering to be up, cows milked, breakfast eaten and in at the school for nine on the dot to get my Leaving Cert results. I was after all, Trinity or DCU bound! Hurdle one, the results envelope. Who knew such a tiny smatthering of glue could turn healthy seventeen year old hands into what felt like ninety year old arthritic claws with Parkinson's! Hurdle two, and probably the key one (I muse sarcastically….), was a measly five points which to my semi trained teenage brain now posed an insurmountable task to my journalistic aspirations. It didn't matter that I had a great spread of A's, B's and C's, it all came down to those bloody five points. To say I was a sullen little b@$tard for a few days is an understatement. Everything felt like it was going to sh!t, Biology my second choice didn't have the same draw as it once had (my teacher wasn't going to teach in uni..), it was going to be the farming life for me! While this is by no means a failing, it was the opposite direction of my parents and my investment in a life of the 'books' so that sixteen hour days didn't become my norm. And then, just in time to save my drooping jaw from a serious case of the cement grazes, the ould fella made a suggestion that at the time we didn't know would be a fundamental stepping stone for what my life would become. "Sure you'll need to know how to type if ya want to be a journalist, take one of them computer courses for a year in the local college and sure if nothing else, it'll bridge your five points next year for ya!"

So off I headed to study IT, five points and touch typing in my sights and no idea I'd made one of the best decisions in my life. That's Why…..

Something just doesn't seem right, Covid seems like yesteryear, but there seems to be a hole….. Whyyyyyy…..

25 years later and 'the ould computers' have turned out well for me. Living in Sydney, working in data and analytics, the IT degree has surpassed expectations. But, never get too comfortable, the world always has a challenge up its sleeve and COVID reset my mindset…. I've become a firm believer not to undermine someone elses challenges, otherwise it'll come and kick you in the arse! I learned that the hard way before lockdowns became a normality. Joking about the first office casualties of a casual contact and their enforced enternment from people and socialisation, I never acknowledged what the same situation would mean for me! I was lucky, I got to go out and celebrate Paddies Day in 2020, albeit the quietest celebration I've seen in the Rocks in my 17 years in Australia. But that's where it began, lockdowns kicked in after that and the two bedder unit that normally was ample in size literally became the whole world for my partner and I. We still joke to this day how surprised we are that we didn't kill each other, let alone cancel the impending nuputials (even thought they did take three attempts). But something else was afoot, some call it the 'black dog', in gaelic it would be ' ta bron orm — sadness is upon me' and it was hard to shake. Throw into the mix, on average a bottle of red a night and the whole getting up, logging into zoom, feeling like work needed to happen before 9 and after 5, and it was hard to think anything other than the world is out to get you! I went inwards, I usally do and there was nothing my partner was able to tease out of me. Everything was 'fine', at least that was all I was admitting to! Then one day, some would call it an epiphany, I was reading an article on Medium, it spoke to the mental health benefits of writing, how it could be theraputic in nature, how it could clear your head for the following day. Should I renew my age old love of writing, could I renew it? Well as I sit hear with the cursor hovering over the publish button, that's why I'm here, that's what I'm trying…