Where am I?

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa!!! Back up a second, let me catch my breath. Where am I? For a moment there I thought I'd gone right back to May 2013. Back to smoking on balconies, thinking about testing my body's aerodynamics, back to being on the cusp of Carlingford Lough's treacherous whitecaps. That was when I thought a neo-classical bust had more chance of striking up a conversation with a member of the opposite sex than I ever would. May 2013, when I was being told if I carry on like I have been that I'm pretty much on the way out already. It was looking fairly likely that I might not make it past the infamous year of 27 like Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse. I had finished exams but I could care less about engineering. I figured I'd fallen head over heals in love with my best friend and that there lay the beginning and end of all my happiness. Of course, in May 2013 this meant the end. I was stupid, I was sick, I was damn fucking depressed! I was finished...

" I know you want it"

I can hear something. The memory is hazy now. I've heard it before but it's only just started to click. HEY, HEY, HEY! HEY, HEY HEY! My body is starting to rock a little now. Back and forth. Slowly at first but faster and more loose with each passing bar of pop gold. Where have I been all this time? Locked inside my own personal prison. The crowd of people, that before I heard it, made me feel like the loneliest man in the milky way, were now all my disciples. I was the son of God and that night God was Robin Thicke. Now that I've woken up everything is good. Life is there for the taking and I am going to grasp more than my fair share. I can't dance but I can own it when I'm doing it so hilariously bad. I'm shy but now I'm talking to them all. I'm not that good looking but I'm Ciaran Cooney so go ahead...beat that! All of a sudden I didn't feel sick anymore. I was released. Hold onto this feeling and I'm golden. Summer started at last. Did RT just save my life?

And so it went on like this for a couple of months. Singing and dancing. Drinking and smoking. Sleazing and slutting my way across the British Isles and continental Europe. I don't have to think about stupid electricity or the future. Freedom is exuding from me for the first time in years and I can start to live a little more than i did before. I have gone all Chris Tucker in Rush Hour 2. I want you, you, you and you. I want it all. I just want to have some fun.

The thing is though, even in the height of that summer fun I knew it was all a dream. A waterfall of delirious fantasy that was blocking the reality from making it's print on my retina. The reality being that almost all the fun was alcohol induced. All the confidence and sharpness. The reality is that it will always come to a crashing, crushing halt when I stretch the elastic just a little too far.

And that is kind of where I am today. Last night I could feel the clenched fist squeezing me and today it began to asphyxiate me. Once again I am the idiot. I am the child unable to care for himself. I spent eight days drinking in Italy tracking women and chasing adventures. Neglecting all the things I know I have to do to keep me relatively placid. Make no mistake, I enjoyed every minute of it and the some of the memories are tattooed on my hard drive but I swear it has the potential to drive a wrecking ball through the rest of my year because right now I feel like throwing it all into the nearest skip I can find.

Perhaps I won't let it this time. Maybe I'll accept it as it comes for a few days without succombing to it's devastating intentions. I've been here enough times to recognise that I will find my way out of the darkness sooner or later so There isn't much of a point to wallow in really. I can't see it today but I know there are good things for me to grab hold of and that I'll do them all. I guess that is the difference in me now. Back in the old days when I felt like I do today I never ever believed that it was going to get any better. Back then the conviction that I would die young was a relief rather than a fear. But yeah, that's right...where am I? I know now. It ain't May no more baby, you're almost striking October now. You've had your fun. Now is the time to start turning the gears towards the next part.

Thinking makes it

" There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so"

So William Shakespeare tells me anyway. I must admit that I can't totally agree with him that there is nothing good or bad, it seems plainly obvious that there is, but still the man makes a good point. Perception of reality is not necessarily the reality. In fact it is, almost by necessity, never the whole reality. It is first person, 2-D, hand held video camera, emotionally biased hubris that makes us think we can look at a situation and perceive the whole story. Basically, what he is saying is that you can think yourself into almost any state of mind. You can think about something in any way you choose. I'm not saying that anyone can choose their emotions but they can choose how to think about them and by extension they can choose how to think about other peoples'. You may think you know what the people in your life are thinking or why they are doing what they are doing. But do you really really know? No, you just think you do.

Let me indulge myself by taking a sidebar for a second. If anyone is interested in English language etymology you might take some geekish pleasure in noticing how I can finish a question and begin it's answer with words that have two different meanings, two different spellings but exactly the same phonetic pronunciation. But then if I think about it really, I'm not so sure that anyone other than me would be even slightly interested in that.

Today I've been feeling a little like the crumpled wreckage of the Challenger space shuttle. I was flying high! On my way to the stars! Then BOOM! and I exploded into a million fragmented pieces of trash. Pieces that when held together seemed to be doing something right. So, when I perceive this metaphorical explosion it seems like my whole life is carnage. What was everything yesterday is nothing today and a life with nothing is no life at all. Feel free to interchange the challenger analogy with Humpty Dumpty if it helps. Either works!

A good friend pointed out to me today that thoughts are malleable. They can be changed and reconstructed. Molded and coloured. Based on reality or on a fantasy that suits you best at any particular time. He made me think about myself two years ago. If I could show myself then all the things I have done in that time to make my life better wouldn't my younger self be a little happy with what he has seen? The conversation imbued me with the sense that I have done some good things in that time. I've achieved goals that two years ago I would have thought were impossible. There's that thinking getting in the way again. I have achieved things within the past week that would have made the younger me certain that I was lying. Yet here I am again, allowing myself to think that my life is so worthless that a skydive without a parachute didn't seem like such a bad idea.

Now I am trying to my life the way it really is by widening the boundaries of perception to allow for the possibility that my first look was wrong and things really aren't that bad. You should too.

All the kings horses and all the kings men couldn't put Humpty together again but Sean had a good crack at Ciaran with some superglue and sense.                                     

fatal addiction

I am definitely addicted to sadness in the way Gotye say in that song. Things have been going good for me the last few months by any measurement but how long can that ever last. There is no middle ground for me. It's euphoria or depression. Live or die. When you leave one of your best friends house, having not seen her for months, feeling like crying then you know it is going to be difficult not to slip. I had forgotten what it was like to really want to die. Today I'm starting to remember a little.

But like I say, I'm addicted to sadness. I go looking for things to make me feel that way. There is something in me that needs it constantly. If I'm not sad, I'm delusional. Which is better? Last night I went looking for it, knowing I would find it. Knowing that I wasn't likely to hear what i thought I wanted to hear. Should have left when things were going good. Shouldn't  ever be allowed to use my phone after midnight.

It's not always that i want what i can't have. Sometimes it's simply that i cant have what i really really want.

And now it looks like I've got to do something I don't ever want to do because it seems like the only option. I'm unbelievably upset about it but I guess that is what i went looking for.

I have been waiting in the van my whole life. Procrastinating, formulating, dissecting and projecting my emotions onto others who don't need it. Oscillating, prozac taking, smile faking and hospital waiting rooms that only seem to help for a little while. Down one road or another it always leads back to my lonely room and feeling like i'm not ever happy because I don't want myself to be. I've put so much conscious effort into being happy that now I'm just exhausted and need to be myself for a while.

Here I am, back to being my own interlocutor in almost all of my conversations. Some people might thing I am quiet and I am. The thing is though, I think I'm talking more than anyone, it's  just that I'm only talking to myself.

I bring about sadness in people around me. There is something in me that teases out the real heartaches in my friends lives. I don't know why but it feels like that stuff just orbits around me. The rest are having fun talking and laughing and having the craic but when it's me with someone I find a way of directing the traffic to the bad things that don't get talked about so often.

My name is Ciaran and I am an addict...