Now I'm 64

I can finally stop banging my head off a brick wall, leave the shitshow behind

I’ve recently moved house again and country (not an easy thing when you live alone and are skidding towards your last quarter). As in all the other moves I’ve made, my reasons for selling up are financial. I’ve no private pension, no secure job and as a writer with little or no earnings from writing the Ireland of today is a thing I can’t afford. I’m finding my old life in the taped-up boxes, the ones that never got unpacked in my previous moves. School photos of the girl I was, with her crooked fringe and borrowed doll. There’s a portrait of her at twelve, a pastel drawn by one of the hippies who lived in a van at the end of our road that summer. It’s not a great likeness, but I kept it anyway. I love the string of Moroccan beads around her neck and the collar of her cream and brown cheesecloth shirt bought with the cash she earned for selling Peruvian jumpers in Dublin’s Dandelion market on Stephen’s Green. Its only now, at 64 that I can admit to feeling sad for the girl that was me. Now that I know less than I’ve ever known. Now that I’ve given up climbing a career ladder fueled by cortisol and filling out applications for funding I’m never going to get. The very word makes me retch, I can no longer submit. When people say they don’t regret I think they’re spinning a yarn. I regret. All the time. I regret not telling my younger self how beautiful she was. That her sense of fairness wasn’t naïve, nor her bright red rage against misogyny and male privilege. ‘Your exclusion is not a deficiency in you, honey,’ I should have said, ‘it’s centuries of discrimination against your sex.’

When I look back at my four, five- and six-year-old self, I remember being in a permanent state of worry, and itchiness – I had a creeping skin condition that made people back away. I scratched my legs and arms and face until they bled, cried myself to sleep most nights, curled my hair into knots that needed to be cut from my scalp. A state of permanent tiredness made me unkind, even cruel. In a piqué of envy as a nine-year-old I persuaded a gang of girls to help me torture another girl who went to a posh school. We lassoed her with skipping ropes, led her in circles until she was dizzy then poked her with sticks like we were branding a calf. Her only crime was a bedroom full of unopened easter eggs when most of us were lucky to get one. And I was jealous of girls who had birthday parties with disco balls, wore bras and got their periods by the time they were eleven. By twelve I was stealing diet pills from my mother’s dressing table and booze from the homes I babysat in. Dealing hash at fourteen, trying opium, speed, and cocaine by fifteen and the night before my sixteenth birthday I let some random man fuck me because I didn’t want to be called a virgin. I loved how smoking heroin made my stomach concave when I was eighteen and would for certain have succumbed to raging addiction if it weren’t for my crawling skin condition. The thing is, as a teenager I never had a dream of being anything but out of my head. My only true conviction was that I’d be dead by thirty. I’m afraid of the word de-pressed but there it is, hopping off the page as I write. This is what I’ve come to accept about my lovely younger self. She was depressed and persistently joyless.

I swore I’d never have children. I didn’t want them to suffer with eczema as I had but mercifully, my body clock won that battle. My children are the two things I’ve never regretted. I’ve never been a model mother. An aversion to routine made child rearing a challenge. I abhorred being a searcher of lost things, detested everything associated with school like runs, gates, homework, sports gear, teacher meetings, reports, and end of year plays. I’m not a ‘Brady bunch’ home maker although I am a home bird. I’ve never liked weddings or photographs of weddings or portraits of families in white tee-shirts and ripped jeans, smiling cultlike from the walls of perfect houses. Being freelance meant skipping mortgage payments and at times, my only way to make ends meet was to sell up and move on ( I understand how lucky I’ve been to have owned my own homes believe me, I do). My sisters and brothers always came to my rescue, I’m lucky to have seven, each with a heart bigger than the moon but I feel guilt all the same, huge unrelenting shame for not providing a more stable and permanent homes for my children.

Workwise, well like the many places I’ve lived, it’s not possible to list all the jobs I’ve worked. I’ve been an assembly line worker in a car factory, a chambermaid, waitress, lounge girl, bar tender, survey taker, shop assistant, fitness trainer, ward orderly, wages clerk, language teacher, lecturer and when I’m lucky, a filmmaker and a writer. Sixteen, seventeen and very often twenty-hour days are par for the course in film production. This business isn’t all sex and pink champagne y’know,’ an old wardrobe man warned me when I first entered the business as a trainee Editor. It was a quarter to midnight, and I was freezing my butt off in a disused warehouse waiting for the big shot Hollywood director to turn up so I could show him the previous day’s footage on a projector the size of a dinosaur. You get to be a good listener in an edit suite, as an Editor my shoulder was the one directors got to cry on. There were occasions when fists would fly, usually after the director and producer had been out for a liquid lunch. I once had a pair chase each other around the editing suite threatening to kill one another. When I kicked them out they retired to the pub next door and I was obliged lock my door for fear that they’d return. Don’t get me wrong, I loved editing or making the material sing (which, in the old days was a physical and tactile craft), unfortunately, editing is only 10% of the job. The rest is politics and I hated the politics of most directors and producers that passed through my door.

When analogue changed to digital and producers starting demanding fifteen hundred versions of the same story, I changed too. Being five months pregnant while directing my first feature film wasn’t ideal or intentional. Film funding takes time, four years of searching for finance in fact, before the cameras rolled on that, my first film. It was 1995 and the producer was afraid that if the insurance people found out I was pregnant they’d pull the plug. So I hid my bump with oversized jumpers and leggings like it was some sort of teenage affair. My second feature was a sci-fi action film that had its budget slashed in half with just two weeks to go before filming began. It killed my movie directing career and broke my marriage. Female directors are rarely afforded a second chance so, again, I changed course. Began directing television where projects, like human babies have a shorter gestation period. The downside is having to perform multiple roles: producer, driver, locations manager, production coordinator, safety officer and if wardrobe and make-up are needed these roles too. I’ve been spat at, punched, called ‘a cow’, kicked, ripped off financially, sexually harassed and on more than a few occasions mentally abused. My expertise on the geography of Ireland stems from the amount of murders, rapes, and robberies I’ve had the misfortune to recreate. Most interviewees would rather not talk about the fact that their son’s dismembered body turned up in a field in Kildare or a shallow grave on the outskirts of a housing estate in Limerick, but producers are good at twisting their arms. And I was the one to stroke those arms when the tears flowed. I’ve dealt with presenters throwing tantrums, in jungles, and late-night bars and on early morning flights, and camera men trying to sabotage my day’s work because I didn’t stroke their ego or, in one case, his dick (yes, 95% of camera people especially in TV land are male). I’ve had researchers supply me with little to no research (too busy using my time to book their vacations and health appointments). I’ve had sound technicians (again mostly men but it is changing) ask if they can take off early to watch a premier league match when we’re in the middle of an interview with a man who was beaten and tortured by cops. I’ve had producers booking extras when a trained actor is clearly needed then blaming me for the unfortunate extras poor performance at the client viewing.

I mistrust power, even when those with the power think themselves just. I am occasionally bitter about other people’s success but only when I believe it’s down to privilege. I’ve no problem with luck, hard graft, tenacity, or talent but privilege, like injustice drives me crazy. I don’t mistake balance for equality. I’m not competitive even though I love sport. I enjoy being part of a team but hate clubs especially ‘old boy’ ones. I’ve often regretted my move from film editor to director. On my feet constantly, leading the charge, wheedling the cast, bargaining with the crew, chasing the light, and fighting the clock. Making television programmes with impossible schedules was, for my body at least, like being permanently in the ring of a world wrestling smackdown. And yet, despite the gruel fest, I met some fine people in the world of television, and adored telling stories of ordinary people and how extraordinary they can be.

With the dawn of reality TV, commissioners didn’t want stories of real lives, or history documentaries that audiences might learn something from. These were swapped for the formatted false reality of people locked in houses or on islands obsessing about their looks and who slept with who. To my shame I’ve worked on some of these turkeys - there’s the very popular and stupid series on brides and grooms, where I let myself be bullied by a producer who wanted the brides to cry. Makes the audience feel empathy she told me in her unempathetic way. There was another one where a woman called to the houses of couples who’d just had a baby to tell them how they were doing everything wrong. These projects bored me to death as does the fact that the only way to get a project off the ground nowadays is by attaching a has been celebrity or third-rate presenter. Promoting their shallow lives is not my idea of public service broadcasting. I’d like to say I made a conscious decision to leave the shitshow but in the end it was my body that gave up. A cortisol spike, like a bolt of lightning one day while I was out walking the dog. I lay on the damp grass and waited a long tortuous hour before my legs stopped shaking. Driving became a worry, panic rising as the energy drained out of me like an old car battery, forcing me off the road and into the hard shoulder. It was scary not being in control, Who would walk the dog, I thought, Who would mind me? I cried.

I’ve hung the portrait of the young girl that was me on the wall in my new home. I’m beginning to understand how well the garlic chewing hippy captured her uniqueness. I’d love to take a front seat in a time machine, go back and give her a hug. Tell her to lift her face to the sun, taste the rain, chase the light of a full moon, see shapes in the wind. Like Plath’s black rook, I want these images to haul her eyelids up, because in the end, this is all we have. To try and see the wonder even in the gloom. Now, in my sixty fifth year I do this every day, even without trying. Yesterday it was a toddler who plonked herself onto the wet pavement to chat with a snail. And I write. Every day. Not to formula or plot or three act structures or for deadlines but for me. It’s how I make sense of the world.

The girl that was me watches as I unpack more boxes, find her tin whistle and book of Irish tunes, her collection of plastic pigs, old postcards from friends in London. I pull out a Filofax stuffed with business cards and the contact numbers for all those old friends. She kept everything from her eight years in the UK, her apprentiship to becoming an Editor. London underground passes, tickets from music gigs, old wage slips and invitations to the premiers of the movies she worked on. There’s a suitcase too, with a pair of western boots, birthday cards, letters, and notebooks. Hundreds of them full of this young woman’s familiar scrawl. It brings me joy to know that writing is the thread that binds us. That words have saved her life, thus far.