November's Hard Passes and Happy Yeses

November involved breaking out of the avoidance fog to have an overdue conversation and saying yes to the possibility of getting knocked back and creative playtime.

At the end of each month, I share some of my hard passes and happy yeses for that month, including insight into what’s behind them or the aftermath. I hope it will encourage some of you to share yours, too.

Hard pass

Quietly tormenting myself avoiding a difficult conversation

Do you ever put off saying or doing something only to be mortified by how anticlimactic and relieving the conversation was or how little time doing the thing actually took? You wind up spending way more time worrying about or avoiding the thing than it actually takes to confront it.

Pretty much every day this year, I’ve thought about how I could do with speaking to my accountant. But, as some of you may recall, we had a really tricky several months supporting our daughter’s mental health and her not being in class, and I just didn’t have the headspace for it. Then, as life became easier, I kept putting the convo on the long finger because I’d left it a while, as if that would create an awkward opening. And then and then and then. It was as if a dense fog of awkwardness and angst descended on me, turning familiar terrain into something frightening.

The recovering Good Girl in me had a similar feeling of not wanting to go to her teacher and admit she hadn’t even started her project. She didn’t want to ‘get into trouble’.

But then, as is the way with me sometimes, the fog lifted abruptly. One evening, loud and clear, I heard myself. “You need to frickin call him.” The following day, I did, and twelve minutes later, it was over, and I felt much lighter and, admittedly, silly. No drama, no getting into trouble.

Sometimes we make things unnecessarily hard for ourselves, often with things where we know what we need to do and where not saying or doing the thing is far more consequential and requires far more emotional labour than confronting and taking action. Like when you have a document on your desk all year that you just need to scan and email.👀 Yes, I sent it the same week as facing the avoided convo and, yes, it took less than two minutes.

Ordinarily, if something keeps popping into my head, I pay attention. The truth is, though, I’ve felt overwhelmed. To protect myself from burnout or being plunged into feeling low, I went into proverbial ‘low power mode’. It gave me space, margin, to take care but did mean dropping more than a few balls. Honestly speaking, I’ve taken some knocks over the last couple of years that pushed the buttons of old wounds. Should I find myself in this spot again, I plan for it not to take as long for me to take action. I'll face the hard thing, the awkward thing, much sooner.

Happy Yeses

Risking rejection

Picture this: I’m sat in the green room at Stylist Live after giving a talk to a packed room on why we need to cut back on people pleasing when Sharon Horgan, yes, she of Bad Sisters, Catastrophe, Motherland, Divorce and other brilliant telly, walks in. Cue all the social anxiety. After going through an internal deliberation about “making a tit of [myself]”, I surmised that kicking myself for having been in a room with her and not saying hello wasn’t something I wanted to deal with. She was lovely, and, of course I had to tell her I grew up in Dublin!

I also received an email from a big name talk telling me how much they’d love me to be a speaker at their next event. And then it said I had to apply. Feck’s sake, I thought. Two weeks go by and I hear myself saying, Are you actually not going to apply just because you’re worried they’ll knock you back? So what if they do. You’ll be grand. So I applied, and the sky won’t fall down, whatever the outcome.

Using disappointment to make time for creative play

I’d been eyeing a printmaking course at my local college but the timing hadn’t worked out. Having surgery that puts me out of action for a while at the start of 2025, though, spurred me to book for November’s 5-week course. When they wound up needing to cancel due to low take-up for that session, I felt deflated. However, I kept the time I’d blocked off for creative playtime, and it’s been bliss. I’ve made pompoms, finished (and started) another tufted wall hanging (both pictured), painted, drawn, and basically had a whale of a time while listening and dancing to some of my favourite tunes.

ON MY RADAR RECENTLY

• I re-read Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents to prep for my chat with the author Lindsay C. Gibson for The Baggage Reclaim Sessions podcast - adored our conversation! I also did my yearly re-read of Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert.

• Recording chats. My idealised self would have a couple of months of writing prepped for when I have surgery next month. In reality, that’s asking a bit much of myself. Then I had the bright idea of starting my series How I Know Myself, the first of which featured my brother. Now I’m on a roll, and I’ve got several fun chats coming up. If you’d like to suggest someone, including yourself, let me know!

• We read Family Meal by Bryan Washington for family book club, and there were so many sex scenes and drug references, I howled laughing in anticipation of my aunt’s reaction. She’d only just about survived Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo!

• I’ve fallen for Shrinking on Apple TV+ thanks to my friend

  Nicola Rae
  recommendation.

• Of course, I’m watching season two of Bad Sisters (also Apple TV+) but the whole dripping an episode each week like olden times is doing me in so I’ve decided to let them build up a bit.

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