The Blindboy Podcast - St.Augustines Suntan

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

I speak about autistic burnout and read a short story about religion and jackdaws  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dog bless you, Tumas and Henrys. Welcome to the Blind By podcast. If this is your first episode, go back to an earlier episode to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. Absolutely fantastic response to last week's episode where I spoke to Rory O'Neill slash Panty Bliss about the art of drag performance. It was a live podcast that was recorded in Vicar Street, Dublin, a couple of months back. And because of that episode last week, a lot of you went and got tickets for my Vicar Street gig on the 18th of June,

which I know is five weeks away, but a lot of you got tickets last week, so now it's almost sold out. I adore my Vicar Street gigs. I do a few of them a year. My best live podcasts tend to happen in Vicar Street because the venue is great, the staff are great, the crowd are always wonderful. But I'm only doing one Dublin gig this summer and it's in Vicar Street on the 18th of June

so if you are interested in coming to that, I know it's five weeks away, but now is the time to get the tickets because a lot of them went last week. And I don't want my international listeners in particular being disappointed because I know from messages and comments on Instagram, a few of you from Canada and America and whatever wanted to come to Ireland on a little holiday in June and also want to come to my Vicar Street gig So get the tickets now before you book your plane tickets if you do want to see me this summer in Ireland I don't know who my podcast guest will be at that gig, but that's the joy It could either be Enya or a butcher.

I don't know. It's not going to be Enya. Fuck me what I love to interview Enya. My god. That's never going to happen. Enya doesn't do interviews. I want to speak briefly this week about burnout. Specifically autistic burnout.

As you know last week I did a massive UK tour. I was away in England, Scotland and Wales for two weeks solid. I did 11 gigs I think. It was wonderful. I loved it. I had so much crack. I saw beautiful things. I met wonderful, friendly, kind people. I met and interacted with, I'd say 60 people, possibly over the course of those two weeks. I had conversations with 60 people, maybe more. No, I don't just mean my podcast guest. I mean the people working at venues, the people working in hotels, industry people, journalists,

agents, managers, people who would come backstage to say hello to me and to engage me in conversation. I did intense amounts of social interaction with other human beings for two weeks solid every single day and I loved it. And now I'm back in Ireland and I'm having legitimate difficulty leaving my house and going to the shop and thinking about how to make my dinner and respond to text messages. And I'm having difficulty opening my emails. And I've been home for four days, and I've been having great difficulty

trying to make this week's podcast. Even the fact there that I said the phrase great difficulty three different times, rather than choosing different words like, I am exhausted, I am tired, I am confused. So I'm experiencing the past couple of days the beginnings of what's called autistic burnout, neurodivergent burnout. This is something that I've dealt with my entire life, but only in the past two years since getting diagnosed as autistic do I have words and a framework and an understanding for what this is.

We all know if with neurodivergent people, with autistic people, it's on a spectrum. So even though I'm diagnosed as autistic, I could be completely different. My experience could be completely different to another person who's also diagnosed as autistic. I'm not really sensitive to bright lights, noises, textures. Well, I am.

I am, but in a very enjoyable way. I love sounds and textures and lights. I adore these things. But I never get overstimulated by them to the point that it becomes something difficult that I need to avoid. And as I've said to you before, sometimes I'm not even comfortable calling myself autistic even though I'm diagnosed because I don't feel autistic enough. Autistic people to me are people who can't go to a shopping center because the noises and the lights are too much for them to be able to handle.

I have a very happy life, but I don't have to deal with any of that shit at all. I don't even feel autistic. Sometimes I question if I really am until I'm placed in a situation like I was for the past two weeks where I have to be around loads and loads of people all the time with very little break and I have to have lots and lots of conversations with strangers. Then I'm reminded that being autistic or neurodivergent is a spectrum and where I as a unique individual where I fall on that spectrum

is I'm overstimulated by social things. You see I spend about 98% of my time on my own. I spend huge amounts of time on my own and if I'm not on my own, I'm around a very small circle of trusted individuals, family basically, who I can be myself around. But when I am speaking with people as part of my job, people who I only kind of know, then I have to engage in the learned performance of being normal, which is, it's a lot of effort. It's not instinctual for me. It's something I have to keep up. Now don't get me wrong, I love it. I met some wonderful, beautiful people and had great conversations, and I loved having those conversations and meeting

people and listening to them and being friendly and all that stuff and when you listen to my live podcasts you can tell I'm able to hold a conversation. I'm able to be interested in what a person is saying, I'm able to listen to them, I'm able to maintain eye contact, I'm able to not speak over another person. I'm really good at that because I've put a lot of practice into it. I've learned all that. But it's a bit like if you see a weightlifter and they're lifting weights, they're really good at lifting weights. They do this all the time. Their form is perfect. They're able to finish their set. They do all their reps. They do this all the time. Their form is perfect. They're able to finish their set. They

do all their reps. They can lift a heavy weight. They enjoy it. But it's effort. They put the weight down and then they rest for like a day before they go picking up the weights again. And that's what that's what socializing and social interaction is like for me a bit. Sometimes I might meet someone unplanned on the street, someone I haven't seen in a while, and I'll have a wonderful conversation with them, so much crack. And then I'll leave the conversation, walk into a shop, and forget my wallet, or leave my phone there, or I'll get locked out of my house. Whatever social interaction, speaking with other people, whatever that does to my brain,

it can create a great feeling of confusion in me around very very basic things very basic things that are usually autonomous. Leaving a shop but my phone and putting it into my pocket that's autonomous I don't have to think about that I don't have to think about don't lose your wallet have a place for your wallet I don't have to think about don't lock yourself out of the house. These are autonomous things. But if I meet another person unplanned and have a lovely conversation that I enjoy doing, whatever the fuck that does to my brain, it inserts an environment of confusion around autonomous things and And that there is autism.

That's being on the autistic spectrum. People with ADHD have similar experiences, because that's also neurodivergence. To get technical, it's a loss of executive functioning skills. Executive function skills are like your memory, your capacity to think critically, how you control your inhibitions, your capacity to plan things, prioritize, organize, initiate a task, setting goals, managing your time. Pretty basic shit that you need to live as a regular person in your day to day.

You need time management. You need to be able to set and plan a goal. Even if that goal is, tonight I'm gonna have a dinner. I need to go to Duns to buy this dinner. I need to have a shopping list so I know what I'm gonna buy in Dons when I go to Dons. I need to plan how this is gonna work out so that when I go to Dons I have enough time when I get home to cook my dinner so that I can eat it at a certain time.

The cognitive skills required, the thinking skills required to do something like that, these are known as our executive functioning skills. And people who are neurodivergent, ADHD, autistic, dyslexic, neurodivergent people can experience a loss of executive functioning skills when they're overstimulated. And for me, that overstimulation occurs when I have to be social, when social interaction with other human beings. I'm not gonna say that social interaction is unpleasant for me, I'm not gonna say I don't like it, I'm not even gonna say it's stressful, but it's not instinctual. It doesn't come to me naturally, I don't seek it out. It's a skill that I've learned. I go into performance

mode. I'm an actor. I'm an actor when I speak to people who aren't very, very close to me. I'm a weightlifter lifting weights. And if I speak to too many people too consistently, such as every single day, new people all the time, in an environment like being on tour, then after two weeks of that, I begin to experience what's called burnout. And burnout is when my social battery is completely gone and then I start to lose executive functioning skills. completely gone and then I start to lose executive functioning skills. I need to recharge. I need to recharge my battery, my social battery. So to be honest with you this week, I've tried to record this podcast three times over the past couple of days and I struggled with words in my brain. I struggled with the amount of words that existed in my brain. What I want to do right now, we'll say for the next week, I want to wear incredibly comfortable

clothes, only incredibly comfortable baggy clothes. I don't want to meet or speak to any people. I especially don't want to meet or speak to any people. I especially don't want to make eye contact with people. I want to go for runs. I want to go to the gym. I don't want to talk to anybody at the gym or look at anyone at the gym. I don't want anybody to look at me.

I want to completely switch my thinking off by playing video games for an hour or two a day, then eventually I'll get bored of that and in about two days time I'm gonna want to open up Wikipedia and just read everything that exists on the topic of chairs or ice and that will recharge my battery, that will recharge my social battery. And all of a sudden something like going to the shop to buy my dinner, it just becomes instinctual again. Answering emails, answering text messages, it just becomes normal shit. I can just do it without thinking about it. And that's how I'm going to avoid falling into full-on fucking burnout because I get full-on

burnout maybe once a year maybe once every two years and it's not nice at all it can last for months and severe mental health issues accompany it but the thing is the mental health issues they occur because of the experience of shame the experience of shame that can happen with burnout. Here's what I mean by this. So basically, I'm not doing a hot take this week. I've tried three times to do a big hot take podcast with lots of research. And I don't have it mentally in me because I've spent two weeks speaking to strangers. See, I now have the awareness of what's going on with me, so I'm not gonna just plough through

and try and do a hot take podcast with tons of research and writing. Because if I try in this state that I'm in right now, I'll deliver a piece of shit, and I'll give you a shit podcast, and then tomorrow I'll deliver a piece of shit and I'll give you a shit podcast and then tomorrow I'll feel like a failure and I'll call myself lazy and I'll beat myself up for not delivering a podcast to all ye who show up each week and I'll call myself ungrateful and I'll beat the living fuck out of myself mentally with words and shours, until by the end of the day I'm feeling depressed. If someone rings my doorbell, I'm not answering it.

Emails are coming in that are important and I'm struggling to respond to these emails. I'm stuck to the couch for two hours, unable to go to the shop to buy the things that I need to buy. This is all shameful behaviour that's labelled as being a failure, that's labelled as being lazy, ineffective. This is all behaviour that I would shame myself over and feel bad about and label myself as a useless prick. My earliest memory of this type of burnout was,

I was maybe eight or nine years old and I was in school. Whatever I was doing, a teacher screamed at me. A male teacher screamed into my face at the top of his lungs, scared the living fuck out of me. And it immediately triggered executive dysfunction. I wasn't able to talk, I wasn't able to speak. I left the schoolyard, my dad was collecting me, and I walked into the shop with my head entirely up my arse. And it was when that ice cream, Haagen-Dazs, first started being on sale in Ireland.

Now Haagen-Dazs was beyond fancy. This was a tub of Hagendaz. This was in the 90s. It was like five pounds. This was a luxury item. And I went to the freezer in the shop, saw the Hagendaz, picked it up and then walked out of the shop with the haggard as and Sat into my dad's car and then realized You're just after stealing five pounds worth the fucking luxury ice cream from the shop and I started bawling crying Terrified terrified that I was gonna get arrested that was executive dysfunction an adult had screamed at me. That was way too confusing. My brain shut down and now I'm not thinking or being present at all.

And I'm walking out of a shop with expensive ice cream. I don't think I even wanted the ice cream. I don't know what the fuck I was doing. What I remember is bawling, crying in my dad's car and feeling awful, feeling horrible that I'd just stolen something. My dad had to get the ice cream and bring it back into the shop. I was mortified for weeks. And then another example is like two, two, three years ago, 2022, just after the pandemic, I got bad burnout, real bad executive dysfunction. I wasn't able to clean my studio. I was in my studio surrounded by mess, completely paralyzed. Wasn't answering emails, wasn't answering text messages. I was struggling to exist as a normal person. Around this time I was offered an award, a big award

from UCD. UCD, the University College Dublin, which is like a fucking international fucking University. UCD had offered me the James Joyce Award, which is one of the highest awards that an Irish college can give. UCD give this award to people who they see have excelled in their chosen field. That's why it's called the James Joyce Award. He was a student in UCD, I believe. So they offered me this award, which I should be over the moon about. And I ended up turning the award down

because I couldn't figure out how to get to Dublin. I couldn't figure out how am I gonna get to Dublin? Who's giving me this award? How many people are gonna be there? How do I get to the room where the award is? What do I need to do? Now if you're neurotypical you might be listening to this thinking, you're talking out of your arse. What do you mean you couldn't figure out how to get to fucking Dublin? Aren't you doing a gig up there soon? You know how to get to Dublin blind boy. Yes I do, not a bother. I go to Dublin all the time. I go on tours, I do lots of stuff. I do loads of travel.

But this happened while I was experiencing this fucking artistic burnout shit. This happened during a period of executive dysfunction. I look back now and say to myself, what do you mean you couldn't figure out

how to get to fucking Dublin? The thought of trying to get to Dublin to go to UCD to accept an award and to meet all these people I've never met before. The thought of that felt like doing really complicated long division. It's the only way I can describe it. That feeling when you can't figure out a maths problem. So I turned down the award rather than go up and accept it. And the feeling of shame and self-flagellation that came when I made that choice was fucking horrendous. It was awful. It was very painful.

This was before I knew. This was before I'd been diagnosed as autistic, this is before I knew what executive dysfunction was, what burnout was. I didn't know what these things were. I just thought it was being a useless, miserable, lazy failure. A pathetic, weak, incapable man who isn't an adult. He's a baby pretending to be an adult who can't even figure out how to get to Dublin. And none of that type of self-talk is conducive with mental health. Like around that time as well, that's when I started renting out my office. If you were listening to this podcast in 2022, you'll know that after lockdown, that's when I decided I'm going to get an office and I'm going to turn up to this office 9 to 5 every day. I was doing that so I could relearn skills of executive functioning after a period of

burnout. If you're noradivergent listening to this, I don't need to explain any of this shit. You're listening to it going, I know exactly what he's talking about, because I go through that too. But if you're neurotypical, this might be quite a big leap. Quite a big leap

for me to say to you, I didn't know how to get to Dublin there two years ago. It sounds like I'm lying. It sounds like I'm talking out of my fucking arse and I understand why it would sound like that But you have to just take my word for it when I get like that Then I say to myself all right I'm on the autistic spectrum and I can see why this is a disability when I get like that Then it's a real problem

That's a real fucking problem. And I have to acknowledge the fucking privilege that I have too, to have this job that I have. Because what about the people like me, who work in a supermarket, or work in an office, and they have to socially interact all the time, all the time, with no fucking break. What happens to them? They get fired. They're unemployable. You look at the statistics for people on the autistic spectrum,

the biggest problem is autistic people can't hold down a job. When this shit was happening to me as a teenager, as a child, I couldn't hold down a school. I had to disappear into a fantasy world while I was in school, completely not present to deal with this shit. I told you before, I used to work in a call centre in my early twenties, a job I didn't hold down for very long. And I got fired, I got fired from this job in a call centre because I printed out 93

pages about CIA crack cocaine smuggling on the office printer But the thing that pushed me over the edge in this job is if you've worked in an office, you know that You're often part of a team. So you're in a team of maybe six people and you've got a team leader No, I was in this job for maybe two months And I was getting on okay job for maybe two months. And I was getting on okay. But at breakfast time and at lunch time, I would fuck off by myself to the car park and sit under a tree and listen to music or read or look at the sky. Whatever the fuck, this is what I used to do every day.

I would get two hours of time by myself. Then one day the team leader said to me, everyone in the team thinks that you don't like them because you don't sit and eat breakfast and lunch with everybody. You really should sit and eat breakfast and lunch with us. Now this was terrifying information for me because I needed my hour at lunchtime and breakfast to fuck off by myself myself to recharge my battery. Now all of a sudden I had to start eating lunch and eating breakfast with the people

on my team. It felt like I was drowning. It felt like drowning in people. And that's when I started printing out all the pages about CIA cocaine smuggling in Nicaragua. I printed out 93 pages so that I could read them under my desk. I needed facts and curiosity and my passions to cope with and deal with the fact that I had to have small talk on my lunch and on my breakfast. So I got fired.

I got fired because that's fucking mental. That's mad. That's mental behaviour. You can't explain that to HR. This system is set up for neurotypical people. People who... Social interaction, speaking to other people, having lunch with other people,

is an enjoyable, instinct-based behavior that's just completely normal but reading about something I was truly interested in which was CIA cocaine smuggling in Nicaragua in the 1980s that was the only way I could meet my needs. I understand how eccentric that is, I understand how bizarre that is, I know that it's strange, I know that it sounds like a joke, but it's the truth. That's what it is to try and hold down a job if you're on the autistic spectrum. I'm realizing all this stuff now, now that I have a diagnosis.

I have words and language, and I can read about this shit in books, and I can see, oh, that's what this is, that's what this is, and it's not just me that experiences this, it's loads of people. And I still, I feel embarrassed, I still feel embarrassed even saying that stuff because I know it sounds, it sounds unbelievable, it sounds like I'm making it up and it sounds like I'm looking for attention. But I want to, I do want to acknowledge my privilege, the privilege as an autistic person, that I'm in a job that suits me and that I actually can, I actually can this week say to ye, I don't have it in me to do a hot take this week because I'm fearful of burnout. So it's not in me.

So I've prepared something else instead. And what I'm going to do for the next few days is wear comfy clothes, not look people in the eye, go for runs and read about chairs. I'm unbelievably aware and thankful that I have the privilege of being able to make those choices because someone else in the exact same position as me is going to get fired this week. Because you don't want to experience burnout or executive dysfunction in a professional environment where you're expected to have executive functioning skills such as timekeeping, time management, planning, all that type of shit. So, yeah, there's no podcast this week, not a monologue hot take

that took days to research and write. I know I've been speaking there for 25 minutes. That wasn't a podcast. That was, that's a phone call. That was unedited. I just spoke into a microphone for 25 minutes. So that past 25 minutes was a phone call. I rang you up on the phone and told you, why there's no podcast this week.

Well there is a podcast this week. I've come prepared. I'm gonna read you a short story. I'm gonna read you a short story that I think you'll enjoy. I'll do that after the Ocarina Pause. So there is a podcast this week. There's always going to be a podcast. No way would I ring you up on the phone and say there's literally no podcast. What I mean is I'd have to get gored by a bull. I'd have to get gored by a bull for there to be no podcast. I have something prepared for you.

There's a short story. Before I do the ocarina pause, I just want to speak briefly about how I'm going to tackle this executive dysfunction shit. So I already have written out my plan for tomorrow. I'm going to get up, like this is written out in front of me, I have this done, and it's the first thing I'm going to read when I wake up. I'm going to get up, going to have a shower, I'm going to go for a 10 kilometer run, I'm going to up, gonna have a shower, I'm gonna go for a 10 kilometer run, I'm gonna come back and have another shower after my run. Then I'm gonna go to Duns and I'm gonna purchase the ingredients of a spaghetti bolognese, of all the ingredients written out. Then I'm gonna come home,

I'm gonna cook the spaghetti bolognese. Then I'm gonna eat the spaghetti bolognese at about 5 o'clock. And then I'm gonna play video games and go to bed. And then on Thursday I'm gonna answer my business emails. I'm gonna do the admin work. That's what I'm gonna do on Thursday. You see the executive dysfunction shit, that's not the problem. The creating lists, writing lists, writing time management, taking it out of my head and putting it on a page and seeing it, I can do that.

I just need to have the discipline to follow it. What I'm looking for is the little feelings of accomplishment that I get when I hit each one of those steps tomorrow. That little feeling of accomplishment that I get when I hit each one of those steps tomorrow, that little feeling of accomplishment, that's what recharges my battery and that's what's going to set me up on Thursday to answer my emails. The problems that are going to occur, it's not the executive dysfunction and shit, it's the meaning, the meaning that I give to the experience of executive dysfunction. You can't even get

out of bed and go for a run, you useless lazy prick. You can't even go to Don's and make your spaghetti bolognese. You're pathetic. You're useless. You're weak. You're a failure. This is how you've been your whole life. That shit's the problem. That's what the problem is. That has nothing to do with neurodivergence. That has nothing to do with executive dysfunction. What that is, are the labels that society places around these challenges that neurodivergent people face. Those are the internalized messages that I've received from society, from teachers, from myself, whenever I've encountered difficulty in the past.

So I'm preempting that. I'm preempting it by literally drawing out a timetable for tomorrow, making it very easy for myself. I'm not gonna struggle with going for a run in the morning or having a shower when I can see it written down in front of me. Now it's out of my head. Now it's not confusing anymore.

And I know when I take those little boxes and achieve those tiny little goals that I've set for myself, each time I'm gonna get a little feeling of accomplishment and a self-esteem boost and happiness and that's gonna put me back on track very rapidly. Now let's have an ocarina pause. I've got this wonderful ceramic otter that was given to me as a gift while I was in the UK. It's an otter, it's a ceramic otter ocarina and I blow into his tail and he makes a wonderful low baritone sound.

So I'm gonna do this and hopefully you won't hear adverts from McDonald's, the cunts who've been advertising on this podcast. Fuck McDonald's if they advertise in the middle of this beautiful ocarina pause. What a wonderful day! It is our time. Apes hunt humans. That is wrong. Bend for your king. Never. Roar!

On May 17th... I actually like this so much better than a motel. I bet the people who live here really hate it. I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna lie. On sale now. What are you doing? Oh my God! Why are you doing this to us? Because you're here. The Stranger is Chapter 1, only in theaters May 17th. I'm blown into his tail. If someone was to walk in it would look like I'm filleting, filleting a ceramic otter.

And that's the sound of him coming. That was the melodic ceramic otter fellatio pause. Support for this podcast comes from you the listener via the patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast This podcast is my full-time job. This podcast is how I earn a living. It's how I rent my office It's how I pay my bills it's how I have to It's how I have the time to take a couple of fucking days off and recharge if that's what I need.

So if this podcast brings you joy or mirth or merriment or distraction, whatever the fuck this podcast does for you, please consider supporting it directly via the Patreon page patreon.com forward slash deployed by podcast. And if you can't afford that, don't worry about it. You can listen for free. Because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets a podcast and I get to earn a living. And also too, if you're on Patreon, make sure you're a paid subscriber and not a free subscriber.

That doesn't benefit this podcast. It just benefits Patreon who want your data. Also follow me on Instagram, Blind by Bog Club, and come to my live podcast in June, on the 18th of June in Vicar Street in Dublin. Those tickets are going very fast. Dog bless. So I'm going to read you a short story this week from my most recent book Topography of Hibernica and this short story is called St. Augustine's Sun Ten. It sounds biographical but it's not biographical. This is a work of fiction although there's always gonna be a little bit of auto-fiction involved.

I don't believe any writer does pure fiction. There's always a bit of auto-fiction involved. But I remember I first started writing this story while I was in Spain about three years ago and experiencing burnout. I wrote this story sitting outside a restaurant in a Spanish city called Cordova. It was on the street Gran Capitan what was the name of the fucking restaurant? La Cueva 1900 it was called.

It's this beautiful old restaurant that's designed in an art deco style from the turn of the last century. I think I told you a story about this restaurant before. I went, I was wearing shorts and I went into the jacks to take a piss but I accidentally pissed on my shorts and when I walked back out to my table an entire family of Spanish people, like I'm talking three generations, just laughed and pointed at the piss stain on my crotch. But I was writing this story that I'm about to read out, and I was experiencing burnout and writer's block, and I was very frustrated.

So I think I began the short story by writing about that frustration, and then that got me into a feeling of flow, and the story just revealed itself to me. This is a story about religion and psychology and paganism. St Augustine's Sun Town. The Jackdaws build their nests in the confessional boxes of the Deconsecrated Augustinian Cathedral. I come here in the morning to feed them petrol station sausage rolls. A teenage looking jackdaw pecks at the pink of the sausage meat that I've thrown on the dusty tiles. Pig steam rising to his beak. He watches me watch him. And then it begins

with these 25 very specific words in the following order. I want to tear the thoughts from the inside of my head and throw them splattered in a head-rod ditch for the weasels to eat. I heard it as an inner monologue, in my own voice, just them words, no imagery, because I can't imagine what it would look like for a weasel to eat one of my thoughts. But the words jut out from all my other words, with their confidence. My posture improves, my brow unfurrows. I feel like a real person. There's no doubt around the agenda or self-sabotaging notions that someone else might do it better or sneer at me if I tried. I want to tear the thoughts from the inside of my head and throw them splattered in a

hedgerow ditch for the weasels to eat. At the very core of me is a badness that I can't put words on. A feeling that I have done something terrible, and it's only a matter of time before I'm found out and punished. The thing is, I know that I haven't done anything bad. I've recounted every misdeed and wrongdoing, at first with priests and then with therapists. A dirty frying pan hasn't been scoured as much. No past action accounts for the wicked and persevering sourness at my heart. I'm not the only one who returns here to this cathedral, even though

I've never seen another person. I notice their traces. The holy water font where I used to bless myself. Alvis has the new rusty turd of an adult man in it. It's not a dog or a fox that does it, because a dog couldn't get their arse up that high. It's a man, and he returns here to do it for his own reasons. There's a lonely plinth, where a four-foot Padre Pio once stood with his blood gloves. And if you look closely,

you'll see the recurring print of an Adidas runner. I don't know whose it is or what they do on the plinth, but they do it regularly. This is a skeleton's church, and there's holes where the windows were, and addicts do fentanyl in the crypts under the altar when there's moonlight. There's solid red wax splatters on the floor in the shape of where the candle box was. The paint layers on the walls

tell you where the crucifix is hung. You can try to remove all the religious iconography from a cathedral, pretend it's just an old building, blow out the ears and eyes of God, but something else will fill that space. Something that was there in the ground before the church. People come back here to perform their own rituals now. Memories burn into churches like a farmer's sun tan.

This is where I did my confessions as a child. In those boxes yonder where the jackdaws nest. There's a healing here for me that I can't hear yet. I first started seeing the priests when I was seven years old. I say seeing, but you never saw them during Confession. Myself and my classmates would queue up in the slimy pews over there. Back then, around 1992, this was where everyone in my school visited when training for communion and confession. There was the vinegar smell

of radiator-dried jumper rain in the ceiling over us. The dangly wet stalactite things hanging from the rafters like they drop into your mouth. We'd pint and say that they were fake sins that never made it up past the roof, so they just stuck there like melted ghosts. I'd be scancing down at the floor tiles and thinking hard about what sins I might have committed before it was my turn. It was an urgent feeling, like I had lost something very important belonging to someone else and I had to find it in a short amount of time. With the little green head on me, the confession box had the

look of two upright coffins, nailed together with a hole in the middle. There was the hum of eternity inside the box. The timber would suck time out of the air and hold it in the walls. You'd breathe it in slow motion. The priest sitting limp behind a plywood gauze so that God could listen in with his huge ears like an inside-out Santa Claus. You couldn't go to confession with no sins. So I'd plunder the past few months of my young skull for anything bad I'd done. Did I say any bad words? Did I steal a pound from my mother's purse?

Did I get angry with her? Nothin'. I wasn't much for sinning as a child, to be honest. So long as I had cartoons or an ice cream I was grand. But you'd practice your sins with the teacher, Mrs. O'Sullivan, before a real confession with a priest. She told me that liking ice cream and cartoons wasn't a big enough sin. I told her that they were more or less all I thought about,

to the point that it qualifies as a sin. Mrs. O'Sullivan would urge me to remember a better sin, so I didn't disgrace her in front of Father Sexton. All of us sin, she said, telling me that I had the miserly sins of someone who was withholding bigger ones. The priest had smelt it off me. Listening to sins is his job, she'd say. So I confided that I couldn't tell the difference between the taste of ice cream wafer and communion wafer.

Mrs. O'Sullivan said that was a brilliant sin to bring to confession. A very advanced sin concerning the miracle of transubstantiation. I had an orange man's tongue on me that couldn't taste the Lord. A big dirty Protestant tongue that's not fit to lick the blood of his wounds, she said. I'd never been given so much praise in front of the class. I was thrilled. We were told that God could flick the pages in our brains like a phone book. The sins are logged in there, just for him, in a language only he can read. The devil could go blind if he tried to read the sins you write inside your mind.

The point of the confession was for God to clean you so that your insides weren't manky before you ate his son. So the worst thing you could do was withhold a sin from the priest during confession. Then you'd be lying to a priest in front of God, and poor Christ would have to dissolve wrong in the filth of you. You had to tell the priest everything, and my friend Aaron Costello had to tell the priest that he enjoyed watching his goldfish take shits for fuck's sake. Sometimes if I hadn't a sin to confess, I'd ask someone else for the lend of their sins.

Georgie Slattery threw a stone into his neighbor's dog's face until it needed a vet, and so I took that one for him. My thinking at the time was that I probably had done something bad but forgot, so by confessing someone else's sin as my own, I was balancing it out with God. Before long, other young fellas would offload their sins on me. Big sins like robbing from shops or stabbing their baby brother's legs would encompass. But I began to feel guilty by confessing to sins that weren't mine, so I started to do them, as a type of method

acting so that they would become real sins that I could confess. I would rob from the shop, I would wait by the playground looking for a distracted mother with a toddler, and creep up to her unattended baby in a buggy and stab its little thigh with a compass until it gave up a single pearl of blood. Which you might think is sufficiently bad to confess, but I wasn't doing it out of badness. I was doing it so my sin wasn't a lie before God.

The truth of it was that I hated doing these things. No matter how much I carried out the offences, these were not my sins. The intent to be cruel wasn't in me. They were other children's sins that I was performing on their behalf, just like a soldier who was killing during war. It's not a real sin. I could trick the priest, but God knew that these were not my authentic sins. He wouldn't let them pass the roof.

They flew up and stuck to the ceiling and hung down all melty. When I'd confess, the priest would give me penance, like saying Hail Mary twenty times. I'd listen to the pause in the priest's voice for the bigger sins. He used to go all high-pitched, like he wanted to punish me himself, like he wanted to withhold penance because what I'd done was so bad and wrong, but he couldn't do that. Because I had confessed he had to give me God's forgiveness. Those were the rules. Instantly clean, free from sin and guilt, no more nights spent awake, thinking over and over about what a terrible bye I was.

The wiped slate, the lanky fingers of God reaching into my head and pulling out the sin and the earth-clad guilty roots with it gone from me. And then I'd eat his tasty wafer son as a small treat. There was a simplicity to it all that you could only sell to a child. I'm sure I can't go to confession now, because I'm in my thirties and it's foolish and we all know about what the priests were up to. A man in a box, who you tell your secrets to, and some beardy cunt in the sky cures you of the torment. How can I put any currency in that?

So I started to believe in therapists, with the rigor of the science of psychology. Attending therapy is a bit like confession, but with the windows open and light coming in. There's more shame to therapy though. With confession, you have to wait in line with all the other people getting ready to confess. You can see each other. Your desire to be washed is out there in the open. With psychotherapy, you have to hide.

You're separated from anyone else who has a battered head on them. You will never see another therapy client as long as you attend therapy. The counselor makes sure your schedules don't clash. It happened to me once last year. I arrived early to a transactional analysis session, just as a man in his forties with weathered eyelids was leaving his appointment. He was a wrath the way he scurried away. We made small, terrifying eye contact and in that moment, I felt like the devil decoding the book of sins inside his head. Was he sexually abused I asked myself and that's why he's here. It made me feel a bit superior, I suppose, which was then followed by a burst of fear.

Because what if he thought I had been abused, and that's why I was in therapy too? So I followed him to his car and told him that I knew what he was thinking. And I'd never been abused, and still hadn't figured out the reason why I'm attending therapy. The man started to cry, "'Therapy is dirtier than confession.' And I felt like confessing the shame of having turned up early to therapy deliberately to see another person sneaking out the door.

Ate and their discretion went no salt, like a glutton. I wanted to tear the thoughts from inside my head and throw them splattered in a head-rod ditch for the weasels to eat. My first ever therapist was a woman by the name of Dr. Deirdre Fye and she was big into her attachment theory. How they came about with the attachment theory is a wicked one. These scientists in the 1950s were raising baby monkeys in sterile cubicles, complete isolation, no siblings, and most importantly no mother. And what do you think happened to the baby monkeys? They began tearing

the hair from their skulls and biting into themselves. They were given enough food, enough water, and warmth, but ultimately it didn't matter a fuck. Without the cuddles and reassurance from their monkey mothers, they went stone mad with the agony. So the scientists made fools of the baby monkeys, by constructing them false mothers made from wire and wool, and they'd worship their wire mothers

with the little, aged heads on them, confusing the fur for love and support. The infant monkeys needed love and comfort more than they needed food and water. Dr. Deirdre Faye told me that my innate feeling of badness exists because my mother left me crying for so long as a baby that I thought I was dying and now anytime I feel any discomfort as an adult I believe that I will die from abandonment because I deserve it. Stress transports me back to my cot, helpless in supine with a fat piss nappy and no movement of my body except the jittery primal howls from my lungs.

No concept of the future or anyone returning to help me. No mother, not even a false, firm metal monkey mother. An infant's yelp is all was directed inwards as blame, she said. That's the feeling of badness in my head that has me tormenting myself with guilt, she says. I told her that it sounds like how the priests would describe hell to me in confession. A terrifying feeling of separation and abandonment from the love of God. It's not the same, she said. And then I asked her. If I'm now consciously aware that the reason I feel like a rotten person is because I was

left in my cot for too long, why can't I shake the feeling? now consciously aware that the reason I feel like a rotten person is because I was left in my cot for too long, why can't I shake the feeling? Surely, knowing this answer will solve the problem. Like confessing a sin. She said that my pain is rooted in a time before I learned to relate to the world using words and images. So talking or thinking about it is useless to my adult brain, but I should still try to hug myself as a child using self-compassion.

I said this sounded like being born with original sin from Eve eating a snake's apple in the Garden of Eden and that I'd already been cured of that during baptism. She disagreed and said that original sin is a misogynistic construct which vilifies women's desires. The snake was another man's penis and the apple was her womb. The concept of original sin keeps women obedient to men by positing cuckoldry as the greatest sin of all, which we can pass on genetically. My feeling of badness is my mother's fault and not Eve's. And so, after, I rang my mother from the car park and asked her if she abandoned me in my cot and she said,

It was far from abandonment you were aired. And tried to convince me that my therapist didn't tell me to go hog myself, but told me to go fuck myself. And that's when I stopped seeing the attachment therapist. As I recount these memories, I think about killing my mother with a screwdriver, I instinctively scan the church and search for the Holy Mary statue for forgiveness. It's gone, of course, but I stare at the deep recession in the wall where her statue once stood, full of bright green moss and fag butts, an empty concave, like someone had scooped an eye out of a skull. I don't want to be too hard on my mother.

My mother grew up in poverty on a farm in Donegal, with no mother of her own, and when I was about the age of four or five, she would read me bedtime stories about animals, like the fox and the hen or chicken licking. She would interrupt these stories because they were unrealistic and tell her own stories from her childhood. About the knowing terror in a pig's snort before her uncle slid it to the throat, or how she accidentally broke a baby duck's neck by drying it with a towel. The story that stuck out for me most was how she would watch the jackdaws circling lambs.

They would hover in the sky, scanning for a newborn lamb who'd got separated from its mother, and they would eat only the soft eyes from its head, with it still alive, before flying off. The mother sheep would hear the lamb's yelping bleats, but it was too late, and all she could do was lick the bloody holes where its eyes had been. Though I had never seen this, the image of it in my head as a child was vivid and smelled like iron. I saw it through my mother's eyes. The lamb would survive with no eyes

and would never leave its mother's side, even when it grew up to be a big sheep. But that rarely got to happen. Someone always ate it first. A jackdaw will peck anything that's helpless and pathetic enough, she said. A jackdaw will peck anything that's helpless and pathetic enough," she said. I would ask my mother if it was sad when the jackdaws ate the lamb's eyes, and she said no, because it meant her father would kill it and they'd have lamb for Sunday dinner. Now I'm no fool. I've read my psychology, so it's no surprise to me that my plan about tearing the thoughts

from the inside of my head and throwing them splattered in a head-rub ditch for the weasels to eat came to me when it did. I was watching a jackdaw eating a sausage roll, and I suppose a part of me wanted my head to be the sausage roll, and I suppose an even deeper part of me wanted to be the lamb getting the eyes eaten out of its head while my own mother watched it happen as a toddler. Because if I'm being honest, the way she'd tell the story to me back then, I could tell

it disturbed her. It felt like a strange wish that she had for me. Like, if my eyes were eaten out of my tiny head, then she could move on from the pain of the memory, and I suppose I should have taken this new awareness to a therapist to be analyzed, and I would have, were it not for that teenage Jack Daw putting those warps in my head. It was an attachment therapist's insistence that I practice self-compassion with a younger version of myself that had me returning to this cathedral, to retrace my steps in the aisles before confession, to hold my own hand and hug myself and tell myself not to be stressing too much about sins.

Because a child can't sin anyway, and I suppose, in case I was abused here and I can't remember. Because that's what we all think, isn't it? If you've looked at the news at any point in the last thirty years, we all had to be locked in boxes with priests, didn't we? With the guilt and the terror of what we might have done, and them being the only ones who could cure us of it. I'd have done whatever the priest told me my penance was, if it meant being clean.

How am I to know what happened or didn't happen to me? Doesn't it get pushed into the unconscious mind, to a place where words don't exist, like my therapist would say? Or what if it didn't happen to me, and it happened to my mother, and she passed it to me through the image of a baby sheep with bloody holes for eyes? I was drawn here, into this rotten building. The sausage rolls were just a bit of comfort. You could tell that God's long ears no longer pointed at the confession boxes.

They didn't need to. You could tell that God's long ears no longer pointed at the confession boxes. They didn't need to. There was nothing of any major interest to him in a jackdaws mind because there's too much honesty to them. They could never hide the complexity of a lie under that clacking beak. I've come to realize that the jackdaws are the priests of nature, always watching, always reporting back with their black chests and white-collared heads. It's no coincidence at all to me that they chose the confessional boxes as their nesting

place. I've done my research. In the old myths of the Lower Gavala, Aaron, the goddess Morrigan would appear as a jackdaw and manipulate events towards their natural conclusion. Before confession, before Christ, before psychology, we had trepanation. When a pain was too great, or a disturbance too much to bear, or skulls were refined. Either a hole was bored, or it was scraped with flint or obsidian. This would relieve pressure on the mind and allow the pain to escape. In school, we learned about the bog bodies with the holes in their heads that were found

deep in the peat of the Shannon Marshes. I gently pull back the door of the confessional box. I brush away the sticks, shit, and eggshells that scattered the little bench where I sat all those years ago. The wooden gauze the priest once sat behind is twined with bits of twigs and leaves. The smell of eternity still holds in the wood. Air passes into my lungs in slow motion. I take my last sausage roll from the hot tinfoil petrol station bag, place it gently on my head, and wait for an intervention. A Jackdaw appears, with his beady eye assessing me in an antiseptic

way. He leaps up onto my forehead, and I can feel his gentle claws in my hair like a metal spider. He begins to peck at the sausage roll. Hot flakes of pastry flittered on my face to my lap. More Jackdaws entered the confession box with their clacks and claws to watch the procedure. I can feel the Jackdaws beak pierce the sausage meat and knock at my head. He knows what he's doing. Any pain I feel is drowned out by the excitement of being cleansed. I close my eyes and let him pierce my skull to tear the little pages from my head where my sins are written. And he will drop them in a ditch for the weasels to read with their teeth.

Hope you enjoyed that story. I'll catch you next week, you glorious cunts. On May 17th, I actually like this so much better than a motel. I bet the people who live here are really happy. Witness how the strangers... Hello? Became the strangers. What the fuck are you doing this time? Because you're not going to tell me. I'm not going to tell you.

I'm not going to tell you. I'm not going to tell you. I'm not going to tell you. I'm not going to tell you. I'm not going to tell you. I'm not going to tell you. I'm not going to tell you. You have to get her, get her. What the fuck are you doing? Stop! Why are you doing this to us? Because you're here. The Stranger is Chapter 1. Only in theaters May 17th..