I always knew I would go to Ireland at some point in my life. My last name starts with Mc for christ's sake, it's practically required that I go. If I were Muslim, I would make a pilgrimage to Mecca, but I'm Irish (with grandparents directly from the island - accents, American wakes and all), so a trip to the emerald isle was all but inevitable.
Despite all the heritage, it was never a huge priority for me to get there. There are a lot of other places I wanted to go to first like Vietnam and Tasmania (my bizarre and unrelenting fixation with Tas will eventually come up and be explained on my little bloggy, I'm sure. Eventually.) But the heavens aligned and the circumstances arose so that last fall going to Ireland was viable and preferable. Namely, I had a free place to stay, so duh of course I had to go. Free is always the right price.
So I went to Ireland in late September/early October and I had a great time and somewhere along the way I agreed to write about it. For free. (About free always being the right price? I may have to rethink that.) Despite having more than 5 months to complete this article, I am now three weeks away from the deadline and I haven't started yet. It's only 1200 words, including a "what to know if you go" box, so really it's nothing. And I already know what I have to cover in the article, so what's the hold up?
Partly it's due to me being the queen of procrastination, a character flaw I have been fighting against my entire life. (You want proof of that? This blog post was started on Saturday morning. Further proof? Call my mom, she's been compiling stories of me putting things off since I refused to come out of the womb and had to be cut out.) And partly it's because I don't want to.
Ireland was so much more than I thought it would be and in a way I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it was. There are places I've visited that didn't leave much impression. Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy myself while there, but once I left I was gone. Ireland has proven to be somewhat different.
It is impossible to say how any journey affects you immediately; it is something that is revealed slowly and in pieces. It takes time, sometimes years or (I suspect) decades. I feel very protective of those pieces and have been hesitant to even share them with my friends and loved ones. I have a few go to stories to share, but some things I just want to keep close.
Also, I'm a bit scared. I want this article to be good, but vanity makes me want everything I write to be good. More than that, I want to it be meaningful. I want it to do justice to the people I encountered, the places I saw. I want it to inspire others to go there and have experiences. But I don't want it to be hokey.
In Anthony Bourdain's preface in The Nasty Bits he writes "For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you've been and what's happened. In the end, you're just happy you were there - with your eyes open - and lived to see it."
To be able to step out of my own life and see is a privilege I hope I never get tired of and never take for granted.
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