Bressie: I didn’t cope well as a teenager and that carried throughout my whole life

'My greatest quality is that I’m very good in a crisis. The problem is some people can take that for granted'

Bressie: 'I’ve had some really difficult moments in my career and I’ve been able to respond well to them'

Sat, 17 Dec, 2022 - 21:11

Mary Cate Smith

I moved to Israel when I was 13; my dad was there for two years with the UN so I got a rude awakening to life outside Mullingar. It changed how I viewed the world. 13-year-olds really don’t care about politics but I became very curious. I didn’t cope well as a teenager and that carried throughout my whole life. I think it was to do with living in Israel. I didn’t feel safe.

My earliest memory was going to school for the first time. I was very close to my mother and it was the first indication that I didn’t get to have everything my own way.

I went to St. Mary’s Christian Brothers school which wasn’t the most pleasant place, if I’m perfectly honest. The Christian Brothers’ methods were never to be questioned.

I value education above everything else in society. I think it’s such an important superpower. We’re very lucky to have a strong system here with good teachers.

One thing I was very quickly taught as a child was ‘don’t put yourself in a box.’ That’s why I ended up going from professional sports into music and into banking (for about 20 minutes before I fired myself).

I never feared things not working out. When I co-founded the charity A Lust for Life, it felt like the thing that would drive me along for the rest of my life.

Now, we’ve reached nearly 50,000 students in primary schools with mental health and emotional intelligence programs. We’ll be in every school in Ireland within the next few years.

Black and white binary thinking is not serving us anymore; the creatives amongst us have a place to really help people solve problems.

Setting up the charity is my proudest achievement. I remember standing in AIB in Dublin looking for an overdraft to keep it open. I had no idea what I was doing. The biggest difficulty was that we were self-funding.

I’ve made absolute howlers of things that I’ve done. One thing I struggle with in society is the unsustainable level of morality and righteousness that we all have to try and attain. We’re human beings - we can we do and say stupid things. And yes, we need to hold ourselves to account but we will f*ck up. We have to make a bit more space for people to do so.

My greatest quality is that I’m very good in a crisis. The problem is some people can take that for granted.

I’ve had some really difficult moments in my career and I’ve been able to respond well to them. I was signed to a record label in America to do a spoken word album. I get this call saying I’m dropped. You start blaming and then you just take your space and go ‘no, this is the industry I’m in.’ Part of that was mourning, grieving the loss of something I thought was going to be a huge opportunity and feeling the pain of it, suffering with it a little bit and then moving on.

I have had many of those moments in my career. I’m not one of those people who has to hide it. No, f*ck it, that’s what happens. People get dropped, they get fired. It doesn’t make us bad or wrong or any worse at what we do. It’s just part of the game we’re in.

I’m currently finishing my proposal for my PhD about the Irish psychiatric system and the silence that prevailed. We keep telling people to be positive all the time. That’s just another form of silence. That’s not mental health. Mental health is the full spectrum; the good, the bad and the ugly.

There’s times where you need to really listen to what your body’s telling you and not feel guilty about it. I’ve had breakdowns because I believed that my happiness lay in my achievements. That’s not the only space for happiness - where happiness lies is in your relationships and I just wasn’t giving them enough time.

The person I turn to most is my partner Louize, she’s very, very, kind; she’s a psychologist. She doesn’t lecture you on things, she views the world in a different way.

I’m very close to my mother. I became closer to my dad as I got older, I stayed with them throughout the whole pandemic. I was very privileged to see them in their vulnerability. My mother lost her brother to Covid very early on so to be with her through that was brilliant.

Life is not a straight line. Goals and ambition are important – they give you your north star but we’ve created this neoliberal world where everything we do is transactional.

The best piece of advice I was given was by my therapist who said ‘if you went back, then what would you say?’ I gave him this over-intellectualised answer and he said ‘your anger seems quite reasonable.’ Righteous anger is actually what changes society. It’s okay to be angry.

Misguided anger, toxic energy, is what we’re doing in society now - we’re getting angry at the wrong people, like immigrants.

There’s lots that happened in our history that we have to look at. What happened with Blackrock – we cannot just blindly move on and pretend this stuff did not happen. It did.

I’d like to be remembered as a person who was loyal. Irish people don’t like unfairness. And that’s why Vicky [Phelan’s] story was so painful.

I really wish as a teenager I’d spoke out about where I was. I think my parents would have been far more understanding than I thought. That’s my biggest regret.

Climate change is the biggest existential threat we face in society. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. I’ve become incredibly energy-aware now, I’m aware of what I use.

What surprises me in life is that Twitter is not a great metric to judge humanity. People are not algorithms; when you actually stand in front of people, you start to realise that we’re far better than that.