Red Light, Green Light

I am really, really sad.

Everything is great, and still I am sad.

Summer is here. The sun is shining and my flowers are blooming and I take pleasure from those things – I upload a photograph of my flowering magnolia to the plant group I joined on Facebook because I’m so proud – but, beneath it, still I am sad.

There is nothing wrong. But still I am sad.

No matter how much I tell myself that it’s not my fault; I can’t control it; this sadness is not a response to my life or my circumstances or the weather, I feel guilty, as if my sadness is in some way indicative of how ungrateful I am, how little I recognise my own privilege.

I talk about it, sometimes, to people I love and who, I know, love me, but other times I don’t. What is there to say? I’m tired of talking about it. I’m tired of trying to explain what it feels like to wake up and feel like someone has died – that sinking, pit of grief in the centre of your chest – when we both know that no one has died. Nothing is wrong. Still I am sad.

Guilt is not the only offshoot of this sadness. There is also fear. I am afraid that my sadness will drive people away. “Surround yourself with positive people who uplift you and help you become your best self!” Haven’t we all read some iteration of this, on Instagram or on Pinterest or in whatever self help book we have, against our better judgment, decided to read?

I could not honestly tell you that I am a positive person. I’m not sure I am capable of uplifting others. I doubt I could help anyone become their best self.

Why would anyone want to spend time with me, when I am so sad? What am I bringing to the table? I am a ghost, an imaginary friend, taking up space, with no real contribution of my own.

A car pulls up outside the house.

“Are we expecting someone?” Brandin asks, holding the baby, who is enthusiastically pulling on his chest hair.

We are not expecting anyone, but the idea that this could be an impromptu visitor is out of the question. People don’t just show up at your door, in the year of our Lord 2023.

That’s not entirely true. If my Mum lived nearby, she would show up at my door.

“I was just on my way to the shops,” she’d say, “and I thought I should call in and chance it, maybe you’d be home.” (I am almost always home.)

I’d make tea and I’d rummage around to see what I could offer her. I don’t keep biscuits in the house, here, but I have some chocolate in the fridge, some Ritz crackers in the press. That would be enough.

We would sit and drink tea and she would dandle the baby on her lap and admire my garden and probably tell me how to prop up my clematis, or that the flowers I think are growing in my flowerbeds are weeds after all.

She would stay for dinner, or not, if she had plans at home. “Philip’s making Mexican pork chops,” maybe, or “Philip’s at a committee meeting.” He is in a society that makes home-built light aircraft. They have committee meetings.

I wouldn’t mind her showing up unannounced because that’s what we do in our family. We show up unannounced. We set another place at the table.

But this is not my mother, coming over for tea and gardening advice and maybe dinner.

This is a man and a woman. They’re well-dressed. He looks like he irons his ties. She carries a small leather purse, nestled in the crook of her arm. Her hair is neatly tied up in a bun. They both wear glasses.

“It’s the Jehovah’s Witnesses,” I tell Brandin, as they begin to walk up our front path. I see them on the doorbell camera, preparing to press the button. The dog barks at the sound of it, runs to the door. The baby wriggles out of his dad’s arms and follows.

“Don’t answer it,” Brandin says.

In secondary school, I collected for Trócaire each year. I didn’t do the sponsored silence, or the sponsored fast (because I simply wasn’t able for either of them), so instead I stood at traffic lights and shook buckets and asked drivers, through rolled-down windows, if they could spare some change.

We stood at the lights at Newland’s Cross – there were lights, then, before they built the overpass at the Red Cow – for hours. It seems unfathomable to me, now, that children would stand on a busy multi-lane road and shake buckets, but we did it, with varying levels of success.

The majority of people said no: I don’t have any change, I’m sorry; not today, sorry; sorry, sorry, sorry. There were those who threw whatever they could find in the centre console into our plastic buckets, and then there were those who simply ignored us.

They would stare straight ahead and refuse to make eye contact. We would smile and shake, shake, shake, and still, they would pretend they couldn’t see us. It was not a good feeling, being ignored by other human beings. Sometimes, when I’d get three, four or five of those blinkered drivers in a row, I would wonder if I had died, without realising it.

Did I get hit by a car? Am I a ghost?

So I open the door to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, holding Vinny back by his collar. Atlas hovers in the background, probably expecting it to be a delivery of Indian takeaway for his lunch.

We say hello and we smile and they say hello to both the dog and the baby and then the woman says, to me, “We’re just here to share a few words from the Bible.” There is a pause as she waits for me to say yes or no; to stand and listen or to shut the door in her face; to stare directly in front of me as I wait for the green light and permission to drive off at speed.

“Thank you so much,” I say, “but I’m Irish. I’ve had enough of the Bible to last me a lifetime.” (I may be sad, but I still manage to retain a debonair wit.)

“Well,” she says, neither amused nor put off by my humour, “there are four very salient points from this particular piece of Scripture…”

“Honestly, thank you, but no thank you,” I tell them. We are all still smiling. “But I hope you have a good day.”

“You have a good day, too,” she tells me, and just before I shut it I hear her add, “And thank you for opening the door.”

My sister and I have a fight. It starts off innocuously, in, honestly, incongruent surroundings.

We are lying on deck chairs at her pool in 30-degree heat and I say something that makes her angry and then, because I am, honestly, teetering on the emotional brink, I get angry at the fact that she is angry.

“Why are you getting so annoyed with me?!” I ask her, somewhat disingenuously because I realise, right after I’ve said the thing I said, that it was the wrong thing to say and the wrong time to say it (although I’m not sure there would be a right time).

I can’t cope with this, and I tell her as much. “I’m just gonna go,” I say, dramatically, and begin to stuff my things – my book, my phone, my sunscreen – into my beach bag and buckle my shoes and all the while she is protesting, without uttering the words, “Don’t go. Stay.”

I want her to tell me to stay, because that will contain the promise that things will be fine, we’ll figure it out, we just need some time to cool off.

Instead, she says, “you’re actually leaving?! Fine! Go. Just go.”

I stride down to my car – these are the moments I would love to be able to teleport, just those few feet, because there is nothing more embarrassing than someone watching you walk away from an argument – and pull on my shirt dress and get in and think, I probably shouldn’t drive this upset, but sitting in the driveway would be unhinged so I turn on the engine and I drive away.

My house is seven minutes’ drive from hers, and I’m probably five minutes away when I pull into a church car park and drive back. I am sobbing now, wailing in a way I wouldn’t let myself if I wasn’t properly alone, with the windows rolled up, but I am also thinking through what will happen if I drive the next two minutes, all the way home, and don’t go back and figure this thing out.

I’ll sit at home and I’ll stare at my phone and I’ll wonder who’s going to break the silence and even though it’s always her, I’m not sure I can rely on that knowledge this time.

We will have no dinner, as we were meant to eat at hers, bar the large pavlova I made as our contribution. Beau (9) will be devastated; pavlova is his favourite.

I do a U-turn in front of the large, light-up REVIVE sign outside the church and I drive, slowly, back up the driveway, feeling sick but also foolish and it’s as if I’m rewinding the clock, walking back to the pool, sitting down on the deck chair and unpacking my things.

We both apologise. I’m not feeling in control of my emotions, I tell her. That was just the wrong thing to say, she tells me. (I know.)

Within minutes, we’re laughing again but every now and then tears will run down my cheeks. It’s never too far from the surface, these days.

An addendum: I’m currently in the weaning-on, weaning-off period that happens when you switch antidepressant medication, which I know has a lot to do with how I’ve been feeling. Knowing that this sadness is medication-induced doesn’t make me any less sad, but I guess it makes me feel like I might not be sad, some time soon, and that’s comforting.

It helps me to write it down sometimes. It might help you too. If you ever want to trade sadness stories, just reply to this email and let it all out. I swear it’s very cathartic.