hello again

I took a sabbatical from writing.

It’s nearly over now: the academic writing, the certainty of knowing what comes next, deadlines stacked on deadlines in double-spaced, twelve-point font. Sometimes I put off writing my thesis just to buy myself more time before having to decide where I am headed. My diet consists mostly of cheese and chocolate-coated raisins, and I have graduated from regular Diet Coke to caffeine-free. I do not cry as much as I thought I would at this point, and I have been getting out more- into nature, into pubs, into conversations. I am being kinder to myself.

But I  took a sabbatical from poetry.

I finished my poetry portfolio and decided there needn’t be any more words after that, as though being graded had somehow concluded the conversation.

Still, I dream of a poetic future- one fuelled by caffeinated Coke and sleeplessness and the arrogance of believing every feeling deserves a metaphor. 

But lately the wanting itself has gone a bit quiet, and I wonder sometimes whether I should step away from metaphors and drawn-out images, from prose drafts crossed through and condensed by biros in the margins of my notebook, romanticising details nobody else would consider meaningful: a day spent too long in bed; the thread of a button wound four times through a hole no larger than a pinprick; the April sun that refuses to leave Galway and the collective delusion of people convincing themselves it is summer because they have swapped coats for cardigans.

And perhaps there is nothing new in any of that. 

Me, myself, and I- looking inward, which has never been considered a serious direction, instead of outward, which women are always asked to be.

Perhaps I should spend my free time writing academically instead. Perhaps I should become more interested in criticism than lyricism. Less metaphor, more certainty.

I could write about false feminism and the performance of liberation; about GLP-1s and the exhausting dishonesty surrounding bodies. I am growing tired of pretending bodies are politically neutral, tired of pretending illness never alters the shape of autonomy.

I could write about Ireland, too: the elite and the higher middle class convincing themselves they share the same precarity because both complain about rent; the selective morality of a country that celebrates emigration when its own young people leave but treats immigration as cultural erosion when others arrive instead.

The hypocrisy of it all. Constant and shapeshifting.

Perhaps both. Perhaps neither.

How bold a claim can a woman make in writing before somebody asks her to cite it?

Perhaps twenty-three is already old enough to become quieter. Perhaps lyricism begins to embarrass women at a certain age.

I took a sabbatical from writing poetry.

I still thought all the same.