Brigid O’Dea: We live life in search of a good story

The week began with a burn. A bad burn. The type of burn that fills you with a pain so alive and hot, you find yourself laughing. The type of burn that pumps your body with an energy so frenetic and angry, sleep becomes elusive.

Which is unfortunate when sleep is the only escape.

Bad luck, like energy, is neither created nor destroyed but transformed from one form to another. The burn became a migraine, the migraine became a bug, the bug became an argument brewing.

This week, the gods were truly taking the Michael.

‘Gamechanger’ drug that ‘melts away’ tumours could replace surgery for bowel cancer, say doctors

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Flushing old medicines down the toilet can make the planet sick, so how should you dispose of them?

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Am I settling in my relationship? Or am I just being realistic?

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Children’s hospital costs: Failure to inform official appearing at PAC about extra €107m ‘undermines public confidence’

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The previous week, I had been doing just fine. It was, as weeks sometimes are, uneventful, and pleasant for that reason. I remember little of it, and that is no bad thing.

Over the weekend, I met friends for a short hike. Although, hike is perhaps a generous term for a walk that was, like the week that preceded it, a gentle occurrence. Afterwards, in a cosy coffee shop warmed by the scent of fresh coffee brewing, my friend asked how I came up with ideas for my column.

Life is so much more than a story, or a neat sequence of stories. It’s a journey or an adventure or a drag or a tussle

“I guess it depends on what’s going on,” I replied rather unhelpfully.

“Like would you write about this?” she asked.

“That sort of depends on what the story is,” I said to which she replied, “so like we need something dramatic to happen?”

[ Brigid O’Dea: What would we do if we didn’t fear embarrassment? ]

So, the next week, when something dramatic did happen, I consoled myself as the nurse applied antibiotic cream to the raw skin of my fingers, that it was at least, “all good copy”.

I might even get a column out of it.

But the truth is, I’m not sure what the story is here either.

I burnt my hand, and it was a pain in the foot.

Quelle chienne de vie.

In her book, Parallel Lives, in which she explores the marriages of five Victorian literary couples, Phyllis Rose claims that writers are lousy lovers – that relationships become a quest for the writers’ own narrative fulfilment.

I’m not sure if a desire for narrative fulfilment is parasitic or symbiotic, but many writers are hosts to this condition – we live life in search of a good story.

[ The night I smoked a joint and thought my ear was trapped in my friend’s stomach, and other moments of my life ]

As a writer, it often feels as though you are tasked with creating something out of nothing. To build a world that doesn’t exist; a world into which the reader can escape. And often we too come to live within these worlds; to reduce life to a neat arc that begins with a question, follows a quest and concludes with resolution. Those who inhabit the world with us become heroes or villains, demi-gods or monsters. People to fight and people to save. Allies, adversaries and bystanders. We search for the moral in it all. And if that fails, at least the humour.

But life is so much more than a story, or a neat sequence of stories. It’s a journey or an adventure or a drag or a tussle. It’s long and it’s short and it’s overwhelming. It is big and confusing and it’s boring.

We are told that we forget what people said, but remember how they made us feel. The best moments in life are often like that

Every so often, this thing happens, where we bump into someone we haven’t seen in years. Often this person played a peripheral role in our lives, but a large one in the figment of our imaginations. Perhaps aged now, dressed in office brogues or practical leisurewear, we come to see the person for who they are and not for the character as we created them in our fiction. They become human. Someone who turns on the immersion when they wake, and takes their glasses off before sleeping at night. The mask is lifted. But it wasn’t them who placed it there; it was you. The funny thing is, when the mask is dropped, the person finally becomes the thing we were searching for all along – interesting.

By seeing life through the lens of “narrative”, we miss out on many moments in which nothing much happens, and are for that reason beautiful. Maybe by seeking a “greater meaning” for these moments we miss out on the true meaning of just being.

[ The calm, organised lives of list makers sound lovely, but I cannot keep a list ]

We are told that we forget what people said, but remember how they made us feel. The best moments in life are often like that, forgotten in detail but remembered in the warmth they implanted within our bodies. The lazy mornings chatting with a friend or paramour; afternoons on the couch reading; conversations which, with nothing to discuss, are filled instead with nonsense. The lie-ins and lay-abouts, the silly little walks, and sandwiches. The teas and coffees, the dog petting and baby oohing and ahhing. The baking cakes and mincing garlic and dancing in the kitchen alone.

These are the things that warm our bodies and sustain them for the moments of intensity that occur along the way.

Anyway, this is all a long-winded, windy, roundabout way of saying I went for a walk with my friends about a fortnight ago.

Nothing eventful happened. Isn’t that delightful?