In my mind, I’m walking by canals

By Mary McMahon

Right, I’d like to think my story was unique, it probably isn’t. I remember when it started I was extremely young; I found eating was a way of keeping my feelings down. I got to an age where I was enormous and old enough to booze which kept my feelings down and not only did it keep my feelings down and blurred the edges of loneliness, it also means that you’re very confident or you become very confident after a few pints and you become the life and soul of parties so you can mask the fact that you’re lonely because you become quite popular.

Of course people know they’re going to enjoy themselves if you’re there and you’re making a total pratt of yourself drunk. You don’t think of yourself as making a total pratt of yourself you just think oh I’m great me, unfortunately you’re not its just a way of fitting in and I found that just getting drunk was a great way of fitting in, being normal, being accepted.

But I never accepted me and that was the big tragedy. Everybody else accepted us, everybody else thought I was normal and I spent my life trying to be normal so what I ended up doing was masking all my emotions with booze and making one mistake after another and making one mistake to cover up another mistake I spent my entire life being normal and looking back it doesn’t make any sense at all I just made myself completely miserable to be normal, to be accepted, to be like everybody else and I keep thinking there’s a young lass out there somewhere who wants to be normal and someone needs to say you are normal, whatever’s normal for you is ok and there’s got to be something other than young people just getting blind drunk because there nothing else for them to do and most of them are just masking the fact that they’re just really really lonely. 

Booze made us the life and soul of the party at the time but it never, it was never good enough, never good enough and I wish there was something that could’ve been put in its place and I could’ve been encouraged to do. Not even encouraged just someone to say you can do this you don’t have to go out every night and get drunk you can do that, you can do that, you can do that, there must be other things there there’s got to be.

Nowadays anyway we know better than we did when I was young.