Róisín Ingle on . . . the book of my life

Trawling through the nearly 15 (gulp) years of this column in the last few months has been an interesting, if somewhat painful, exercise. I’ve been going through them because I’m putting together a book of highlights from my columnising*.

I know you will all have many questions and comments arising immediately from this “news” and I am more than happy to answer them right now in no particular order:

It's coming out in September; It will be available in All Good Bookshops and on irishtimes.com; The Irish Times is the publisher; Why THANK YOU, I agree, it is THE perfect gift for all manner of occasions! Here endeth the plugathon**.

My mother has been helping me edit more than 4,000 columns down to a more manageable number. (If you have a favourite column you absolutely think should be included let me know by email.) Clearly it's not War and Peace I'm making here but I do need a slightly bigger word count than your average takeaway menu. I recruited my mother because I needed someone who knew the columns intimately enough to know which ones should be included but who was also able to say: "No, don't put that one in about the time your umbrella got caught in the spokes of your bike when you were cycling to work and you went over the handlebars."

“But it’s funny,” I’d say.

“About as funny as varicose veins,” she’d say.

She’s been saving me from myself, basically. What’s new?

Well, nothing much really, is what I've been thinking as I travel through the 15 years of columns with my fingers semi-splayed over my eyes. Fifteen years of weekly personal ramblings is a comprehensive record of nearly two-thirds of my adult life. It's all there, the good, the bad and the ah, here, could you not have kept that to yourself? I was thinking of calling it TMI.

The thing is I haven’t changed much in that time. The “good” parts of me or the less good parts of me. I’m still struggling with the parts I was struggling with 15 years ago and I’m still amused, moved and emotionally buoyed winded by the same life happenings that did that to me back when I started. There have been surprises looking back. I am slightly appalled at the amount of times the word “chips” has appeared in my “oeuvre” and also a bit morto about how many times I imagined I’d fixed a certain issue in my life (laziness/ general aversion to exercise/overeating/ swimming pool phobia) only to return many more times clearly not fixed at all.

It’s like a friend who has battled some demons in her time said to me recently: “The thing about demons is you don’t ever slay them. They are always there lurking. You just get better at keeping them in their lairs.” She’s right. And I think if anything has changed in nearly 15 years it’s my understanding of that. I’ve wasted a lot of my life gleefully anticipating the day when I would transform into this much better version of myself. I remembering turning 30 and feeling that this would be it. Thirty would herald in the Real Me, the person I had always wanted to be. And then a few years ago when I was approaching 40, I was so looking forward to finally reinventing myself and coming face to face with the Real Róisín. It had just taken a little longer than I thought. And then, to my great surprise, it didn’t happen.

And then you learn something: You are who you are who you are. There is no Better You waiting around the corner to greet you wearing a pair of Levi 501s and carrying a plate of goji berries. (The kind of Real Me I’ve always aspired towards wears jeans and plain white T-shirts and loafers, for some reason loves nothing more than to snack on super fruit before her two-hour Pilates class).

But there is no Better You. No Real You. There is Just You with a bit more understanding about yourself. You but with a bit more compassion for yourself. You with knobs on. Some people don’t have to learn this – they seem to have been born knowing. I used to look at those people and get a touch of the green-eyed monsters. Why has it taken me so long to get the message? Well, it just has. That’s how it is. And I am who I am who I am.

Read all about it this September.

*one of the joys of columnising is being allowed to use made-up words. ** ditto.

[ roisin@irishtimes.com ]

[ The Irish Times Bookshop ]