Art by Linde Vergeylen.

The first time I got Covid, I was just barely, barely emerging from my first heartbreak. That week, serendipitously, the one in between Christmas and New Year’s, was the best thing that could have happened to me. I was still unsure of myself. I was still in love with someone I hadn’t seen in months and I hadn’t yet realised that I’d never not be in love with him. That is to say that, back then, I was still waiting for The Feeling to pass. I stayed up until 4 a.m. I wrote a short story about walls that could listen to me. I watched a Stanford lecture series on Human Behavioural Biology. I thanked my mother when she brought me cups of tea, and little bottles of beer. I barely ate. I read. I waited. I smoked cigarettes out of my bedroom window until mother yelled at me to stop. God, in ways, I was miserable, but I was by myself and I was surviving and that felt like a small miracle. However, I cannot escape the law that no writer is exempt from: the retrospective romanticisation of my past self.

I am jealous of the weight I was at when I was seventeen. I am jealous of a seventeen year old me who fell in love for the first time. I wish I was her again. I wish I was her the night she fell in love just one more time. And I know, I know, that when I was seventeen I was just a child and I didn’t have any of the freedom I have now. I barely wrote, I didn’t know anything about radical philosophy, I was lazy and insecure. Still, I look at pictures of myself wearing the white shirt and the red lipstick and I can’t help but believe that was the best it was ever going to get.

It’s the same principle as the last time I had Covid. The last five months have been the longest I have been consistently, ridiculously happy. I make porridge with honey and chia seeds as the sun rises, listen to music as I stir, and watch the pot slowly heat up. I go running, past the farmer’s markets on a Sunday, past the kids playing hurling on a Thursday and it makes me feel like I belong here, with all of the other people in this park, in this town where I live. I am saving my money as carefully as I can because I am starting to consider doing a master’s – something I swore I’d never do. I am hopelessly in love with a boy who makes the best pancakes in the world, rubs my hair as I fall asleep each night and goes on adventures with me, whenever. I just say the word and we’re gone, exploring and giggling. I have put on weight and grown soft and kind now that I am in love. And yet I am forever craning my neck to look behind me. Looking back, yes, to a time in my life when I genuinely couldn’t picture a future for myself in which I was happy. And as I sit down to write this article, it is her that intrigues me.

I was so lonely and so full of intensity that all I could do was write and write and write. I wouldn’t have survived it otherwise. And I miss that desperation. 

That’s passion, I suppose. It kills you and it keeps you alive. I see it every day. In doctors, chefs, actors, and in the mirror. I examine my face and try to find clues about what’s going on in my brain. I look into my eyes, touch my eyebrows, my lips, and try to figure out if this is what a writer looks like. Maybe. I have serious eyes, and then lips, that quirk to the side slightly when I find something funny that I know I shouldn’t. Yet  even I, a self-proclaimed cretin, can dimly recognise that the aesthetic of passion, much like all other aesthetics, is baseless.

I’ll tell you something useful now. When I forget how happy I am today. When I think about the poems I wrote when I was seventeen, and I think about the story I wrote the first time I had Covid, or even the old diary entries from last summer where I was so excited about college but so naïve (like really naïve), I forget to give myself credit for all of the terrible writing I’ve done because even though it was terrible, it was completely my own. A more well adjusted person than I would think “Gosh darn, I’ve really worked hard at this skill for a very long time and I should be proud of myself and hopeful about my future” (Don’t you just hate those people). When I do those things, this is what my goblin brain thinks: “you’ll never write anything as good as that again”. And that’s a dangerous way to think. If you start to believe your idiot goblin brain, the logical next step is to just give up altogether. 

You cannot romanticise your passion, I’m afraid. Besides, you have a passion! That’s romantic enough! But there are rules to this thing and the first one is that you can’t take it too seriously. Yes, I used to stay up until four a.m. writing stories about silly walls, and now, I’m asleep wearing my retainers by twelve p.m, even on Friday nights. And you know what? I’m so much happier now. And you know what? I write just as much. If you romanticise the aesthetic of your passion then your love for it has conditions. “It’s only good if I was drunk writing it”, “it’s only good if it was published by Icarus”, “it’s only good if it’s about pain”. Bullshit! 

You have to love everything that you do because, and this is a promise, nobody else will. I spent too long hating myself for hating myself. I spent too long trying to seem like a writer instead of actually writing, that writing became synonymous with my pain and when I started to heal I wasn’t sure if I could ever write again. All of my favourite pieces have been rejected… The story about the goddamn walls was met by pretty much universal confusion. Some fluff pieces that I’ve written have touched strangers in a way that I never could have expected. It is in those moments, when someone reads one of my lines right back to me and tells me that they’ve felt like that too, that is why I write. Not so that I can be the “Cool Girl” in the little café, or so I can manipulate my sadness to get attention and stop myself from ever evolving. My passion is not a way to prove that I am interesting and my life cannot be dictated by what I think would make for good content. That is all that writing is: changing and remembering and loving, unconditionally.