Susan O’Neill: I turned to music in my teenage years to help me 

Susan O’Neill joins Mick Flannery as his special guest for his biggest Irish headline show to date, at the Iveagh Gardens, Dublin, Thursday, July 7. Photo: Mrs Red Head"

I grew up in Ennis. My parents used to run golf courses. My mam was a chef, and my dad would have managed the bar there. My earliest memories were looking out at vast green. I guess something that always influenced me was that idea of spaciousness.

I’m the oldest of three kids in my family. I was also probably a bit of a weird child. I remember playing with vision. Really enjoying squinting and looking at things and playing with light with my eyes. I remember always finding those things to be far more interesting than what was actually around me in real life.

I think school was probably the biggest challenge I ever faced in my life. I knew fundamentally from a very young age that it felt wrong, and that it didn’t fit. I guess I was quite free, and I felt very connected to everything around me in my world. I remember being brought to playschool and immediately realizing I had been carried into some kind of prison. I was being told what to do in a way that had never happened before. I felt my choices been taken — my freedom been taken as a child and knowing there was something not right with this.

The only thing I put on my CAO form was music. I turned to music in my teenage years to help me and it did, and I went to college to study it but even when I finished college, just turning 21, I went wild. I went absolutely wild and realized then was my rebel years that never came as a teenager because school had shaven off some of the life spark that I was really boldly wearing as a young child.

That’s not to say that I didn’t have some lovely teachers and some great times, and I made beautiful friends in school — it wasn’t to do with them. I’m purely talking about the fact that the type of teaching methods did not suit the type of intelligence that I now know I have. As a kid in that system, you very quickly start to feel stupid and like you have no value. That is a very damaging thing that I’m really interested in looking at now as an adult because it's changing for the better, but I still think it’s very slow to change.

Mick Flannery and Susan O'Neill pictured performing at the RTÉ Choice Music Prize in Vicar Street. Pic: Andres Poveda

I’m a really big believer in needing to have different age groups of friends and so I have a couple of elders in my life that I would ring sometimes. When I need certain types of advice, I would seek it out from them because they have a way of saying things that you might have heard from somebody your own age, but it lands and sits differently when you hear it from somebody who has nearly completed their cycle on this earth.

Equally so, sometimes the person that you really need to speak with is the stranger in the coffee shop you didn’t plan on meeting.

What scares me most…a couple of years ago I started to have some very weird experiences and dreams and I started to feel this kind of heaviness that one might say is depression or anxiety. Now, a couple of years later, I look back at it and I realise what had been happening to me was that I stopped living my truth. I was still doing what looked to everybody else to be interesting things and exciting things, but it wasn’t what was making my heart resonate.

One of my biggest fears is dying by not living and being dead while I’m awake. Being dead walking around the place. I think that I was nearly on a path of doing that and I managed to just catch myself. I think everyone can do that. I’ve turned it ever so slightly and I’m finding things that really, really move me and make me feel like I am blessed to be on this earth every day.

I was 13 and I had just sung a song in the theatre in Ennis in the glór and this man came up and he said: ‘No matter what or where you go in life, you have to keep remembering to know yourself and to love yourself and at all times be yourself.’

It sounds so easy but knowing yourself is really hard because you change and no matter who you are, I think we all have multiple masks and multiple personalities that come through us the more we are open so knowing yourself is actually a beautiful endeavour but it’s not completely straight forward. A lot of people are afraid to know themselves. That was probably some of the best advice that I ever got.

• Susan O’Neill joins Mick Flannery as his special guest for his biggest Irish headline show to date, at the Iveagh Gardens, Dublin, Thursday, July 7. Tickets are available from Ticketmaster.ie.