Caroline O'Donoghue: A year indoors, sticking to close friends and family, makes you weird
Irish Examiner Request :- Columnist - Caroline O'Donoghue in London. FAO Eoghan Dinan
England is a little bit back to normal now, and I’ve just had my first full week of pubs (outdoor) restaurants (also outdoor) and shopping (crowded, too polite, everyone bumping off each other and getting their masks tangled in their headphones). Please, try not to hate me too much. We’ve all spent too long resenting Australia and New Zealand for their ‘back to normal’ stance, and I know that even reading this paragraph has made you hate me a little bit.
There’s been a marked change in this version of ‘getting back to normal’. As we all know, we’ve been burned by the ‘getting back to normal’ mantra before.
Many people don’t seem to fully believe that this freedom will last: that, like a bad spouse or an unruly dictator, the pandemic is even more chilling when it is being nice to you. Every meal out or meet-up with friends is accompanied by anxiety, a sense that we are about to be punished, and that we should all hide quivering behind the sofa like a dog who has done a poo on the carpet.
There’s no getting around it. A year indoors, sticking to close friends and family, makes you weird. It’s a tragedy. We’ve all been trying to build up these concrete social personalities for ourselves since our teens, and now it’s all shot to shit. We’re back at square one. I am no exception. I remember standing in the doorway of Garryduff disco, aged 13, wearing a denim corset and body glitter, having just realised that I was a bad dancer. It was a horrible moment. I had been dancing to , and simply doing what I did in my own bedroom: closing my eyes, and pretending I was Christina Aguilera. When I opened my eyes I realised that I was being laughed at, which is fair enough, considering I was a gangly, titless teenager in a denim corset with a bandana wrapped around my head, and I had just mimicked ‘sweating ‘til my clothes come off’ to my peers. I would laugh at me, too.
I trudged to the edge of the rainbow-lighted sports hall and tried to figure out what I had done wrong. I watched everyone else, and realised there was a kind of dancing you could do in private and a kind of dancing you did for everyone else. So I watched, and I copied, and tried not to do it again. Of course, I did it again. I had lots of feelings, and they came out all the time, whether I wanted them to or not.
It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that this first week back has made me feel more like that 13-year-old trying to figure out how to dance than any other time in my life. I’ve been out to see people several times, and during each one I felt the familiar gut crunch of a teenager who is terrified of being exposed. I was quiet for long stretches at a time, and when I did talk, it all came out in a fast backwards mumble.
Oh, god, the mumbling. I had forgotten the mumbling. For about five years in my teens I had something of a speech impediment. I didn’t stutter so much as I stopped being able to put spaces between my words, so everythingcameoutinalonggiddystreamofsounds. It was pointed out constantly, grown-ups reminding me to speak sloooooooowly, which mostly resulted in my not speaking at all. I truly had not thought about this in years, but this week, it’s back. I realised with a group of new people that they were nodding and smiling at me politely, but not quite responding to what I had to say. At first, I thought it was because they didn’t like me. Then I realised they couldn’t understand me. I felt, for the first time in a long time, the deep agonising flush of genuine shyness.
I feel as though I’ve done a body swap with my own adolescent self, the one who was frightened of people and played guitar alone in her bedroom while her brothers had parties downstairs. Is it any surprise, though?
We’ve all been grounded for a year, and layers of our personalities have been peeled off like old coats of paint. All we’re left with is the original wall.
I felt bad about this, and like I was the only one, until I played tennis last week with a girl I met at my class. She is the first total stranger I have spent a long period of time with since, well, 2019. Halfway through our game, she was giving me advice on my swing, and then became crimson with embarrassment. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m being so bossy. When I was 12 I used to fantasise about becoming a PE teacher.”
She paused like she was having the memory for the first time, and I felt comforted.
Yes, I might be temporarily back to my early teenage self; but as long as everyone else is too, I’m fine with it.
