How To Fall Apart

We spoke to Jen O’Dwyer co-host of The Creep Dive and Mother of Pod, Soobie Lynch, @standingbythewall and all round creative genius, and Esther O’Moore Donohoe, host of podcasts the 80% and Esther is in Bits,  about when Christmas isn’t all joy and festivities, and it feels like the rest of the world is having the time of its life.

We talked about when a family member is ill at Christmas time, about separation- both your own and your parents, about wanting to create new traditions or not wanting to for fear of things falling apart again. About having to reinvent your Christmas and getting over thinking things have to be a certain way for Christmas to be right.

We did our first panel! Aisling Keenan Sarah Rickard and Dawn Nolan talked to me about freelancer fear- what it is and how to deal with it. We spoke about making the decision to go freelance (or having it made for you by redundancy), anxiety and the ways in which freelancing exacerbates that, the isolation of working on your own, talking about money, valuing yourself, the never-say-no freelancer mentality, not getting paid, being self employed and single parent, and always being on.

In this week's episode, boutique owner Mary Greene talks about her 10 year journey to conceive. It's an unconventional story with many highs and too many lows but an eventual surprise ending. 

My guest today is Zoe Desmond, the founder of Frolo, the single parent networking app. Zoe became a single parent two years ago when her son Billy was one. At the time she really struggled with the sense of isolation from not knowing any other single parents, the loneliness and the sense of otherness. After finding nothing online that would help her meet others in a similar situation, she went on to create Frolo. The app launched five weeks ago and is now both a source of advice and an instigator of meets. Zoe talks about loneliness, how to navigate co-parenting, manage the times when your child is with the other parent, and creating your network.

Editor and journalist Yvonne Hogan speaks about losing her baby when nineteen weeks pregnant. “Grief is a physical thing, you can’t think your way out of it, you have no control over it,” she said in our interview. “Until something bad happens to you, you don’t realise bad things can happen. I just thought you got past twelve weeks and that was it.” We talked about the exhaustion of grief, about the decision to have another baby, figuring out just how to deal with this loss, how to talk about the loss of a baby. “There is no blueprint”, Yvonne said; she went on to set up a baby loss section on independent.ie which is full of personal testimonies from women of all ages, including some who decades later told their story for the first time.

Stylist Paula Hughes talks about her daughter Kayla being diagnosed with the rare degenerative brain disorder Rhett syndrome. About chasing a diagnosis, advocating for your child, how they taught Kayla to communicate, looking after your marriage while also caring for your child, raising a second child within this situation, about still finding the joy in life, and about how their daughter’s love of food led Aura and her husband to create their food delivery business Kayla’s Kitchen.

Someone recently asked Sophie and I if we ever run out of things to talk about, the answer is no. When we originally sat down to do an interview for HTFA, we chatted for nearly three hours. So we kept this second half for this week, when Sophie's first novel, Filter This, comes out.

Sophie talks about her dad, Kevin Linehan, who died in 2017 after a long illness with alzheimer's. About when a loss takes place not in one moment, but over a number of years. Of what it is like to grieve for someone while they are still here. Sometimes when a person is gone, but also still infront of you, it is easier to make yourself forget what they were like, as it's too painful to remember. Soph talks about how she reconnected with her memories of her dad through meditation.

Georgie Crawford was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017 when her daughter was just seven months old. A year after her treatment finished, she talks about coping with her diagnosis and her treatment, about mothering through sickness, and the aftermath of cancer-living with fear, the guilt and shame she sometimes feels around food, setting up her hugely successful podcast The Good Glow, and how the experience of having cancer changed her totally.

Our new episode of #howtofallapart is up now. Trigger warning, this episode is a conversation about life after suicide. I spoke to my friend make-up artist Eilis Downey, who two years ago lost her sister Lyn, who died by suicide. 

“Knowing Lyn was to love her,” Eilis says. They had lived together, worked together and hung out together. In the aftermath, she said that she didn’t know how to be herself without her sister. But Eilis faced into her loss in a way I think is totally awe inspiring and a hugely helpful roadmap for anyone who has to come to terms with having to live with someone without whom they previously couldn’t imagine their life. She talked about not being angry at her sister. How she got through the first few weeks of grief. Starting counselling within weeks of her sister’s death, because she knew she wasn’t good at talking to the people close to her about how she was feeling, and because she didn’t want her life to fall apart. Trying to find a new normal. Accepting the fact that she might not ever be the same kind of happy again. On accepting a loss. How she wrote a letter to herself making a decision to live her life again. How when you’re grieving there will always be days when you feel sad,  no matter how much time passes. The language we use to talk about suicide. 

“You learn to live without someone. It’s like a really bad break up. You have to figure out a way of moving on without them”.

#podcast #lifeafterloss #lifeaftersuicide

With her book #eatpraylove @elizabeth_gilbert_writer essentially wrote the manifesto for what to do when your life goes off the path you had expected it to go on. Here she talks about how her biggest mistake back then was thinking that she needed to stop going after one year. And that our lives don’t end in tidy happy ever after packages. We talked about her grief over the last year, in the wake of the death of her partner and best friend Rayya Elias, of how depression is often caused by blocking all feelings, about when grief feels like rage, how she deals with fear, what she thinks about #metoo, about female promiscuity, and her new book #cityofgirls which is about women and friendship, and how women can survive the consequences of their at times bad choices. This interview originally appeared in the Sunday Independent. Big big thank you to @cormac.kinsella for all your help setting this up #elizabethgilbert #podcast