Louise O'Neill: 'Re-reading this, it sounds like I have low-level depression'
Picture: Miki Barlok
A couple of months ago, I was tired all the time. I would wake up, have my breakfast, and then feel so exhausted I was tempted to go back to bed again.
I went to my GP for blood tests and it turned out my iron levels were ‘dangerously low’. A series of injections later, I was buzzing with energy. Don’t you love that? When you’re not feeling 100% and the doctor discovers there’s a medical reason behind it, something that’s easily fixed with a pill or a needle or an infusion? It’s so delightfully straightforward.
I wish that was the case for what’s happening right now but I don’t think it’s a physical issue. I just feel… blah. (Yes, I have a degree in English Literature and that’s the word I’m going to choose, okay?) I seem to have lost enthusiasm for everything besides Love Island – the day that disappears, I know I’m done for – and often, I want to do little else rather than lie in bed all day, pull the duvet over my head, and pretend the outside world doesn’t exist.
Cooking food seems like too much hassle, so I’ve been subsisting on bowls of cereal and my new obsession, Ben and Jerry’s Peace Pops. I’ve found it difficult to work and for me, that’s the most frightening thing of all.
Even during the start of the pandemic, when we were all paralysed by fear, I never felt this *resistant* to sitting down at my desk. I’ve been writing for almost ten years now and it has always been a refuge of sorts, the place where I come home to myself again.
Suddenly, it feels like yet another chore, yet another thing to tick off my to-do list.
Re-reading this, it sounds like I have low-level depression, yet I’m not sure if that’s the case.
I think I’m just burnt-out. In the Times Before, even if I didn’t have time for a proper holiday, I would make a point of booking a room in a hotel every two months. It would be somewhere relatively close – The Cliff House in Ardmore, the Europe in Killarney – and I would go there, alone, for 24 hours. Leaving my phone behind in the car so I could completely switch off, I would read and nap and swim and return home completely refreshed.
It was indulgent, yes, and not something I would be able to do if I had small children to care for, but this habit did a lot of heavy lifting when it came to maintaining my sense of well-being. Where have I been over the last eighteen months? My own bedroom, my own study, my own living room, my own garden.
I feel extremely lucky to live somewhere so beautiful and Inchydoney in particular has been a saving grace, but I want to go somewhere else now, anywhere else. And yet, even as the country opens up, I still feel stuck. Every hotel, holiday home, and Airbnb in the state is booked out, and even at that, everything is so expensive, and we’re supposed to be buying a house, I remind myself, this is not the time for frivolities.
And so, money becomes the new trap – I want to take a break from work, even a month, I think, imagining myself tucking my laptop and phone into a drawer, as I rent a cottage on the Beara peninsula, just me and the dog and a stack of books that I’ve been meaning to read but can’t quite find the time for, and for the first time in months, I would feel like me again – but then I think of the house and the mortgage and the bills and I tell myself to be responsible, to keep going, to keep pushing, pushing, pushing.
I wonder, why was I so anxious to grow up when I was a kid? Imagining a life of sweets for dinner and staying up as late as I wanted, when instead it feels like a relentless grind of tasks and duties, like Sisyphus, doomed to roll that boulder up a hill for eternity, only to see it slip back down as soon as he neared the top.
I fantasise about winning the lottery, about giving it all up and running away. To a Greek Island, where I would eat feta cheese for breakfast, or Tuscany where I would rent a boat and spend a day diving into the crystal blue waters and swimming to my heart’s content.
A life with no worries, no deadlines. Nothing. And I tell myself, I would get bored. I would begin to crave routine, discipline. The lure of my desk would prove too great. But my god, I’d love the opportunity to get bored! Better that, than this deadening numbness of burn-out.
I need a holiday, I keep saying. But I don’t know, maybe I need more than that. Maybe I need a new life.
The second series of Never Have I Ever hits Netflix on July 15. It’s about an Indian-American teenage girl grappling with grief, friends, and boyfriend issues and it was one of my favourite shows of last year. It’s hilarious.
