You'll have received another email from me today with a link that jsut doesn't work. My apologies and I'll send out a new one tomorrow with the proper link. I've redone a few blog posts and it causes some issues with links. But... the bit about my patience being gone? That's real. It might not be covered in this week's blog post, but I will come back to it and I'd be delighted to hear from you if you're in a similar place!! BrÃd libh Órlagh Check out the links below: Brigid's Forge School...
11 days ago • 1 min read
My patience for bullshit has disappeared. Completely. Gone. That's not really a complaint - it's the actual topic of this week's post, and the thing I want to talk to you about properly here. Perimenopause has had a deep impact on how I think about life, and not the way anyone warned me about. Nobody mentioned the bit where your tolerance for sitting through meeting after meeting just... evaporates. Or that your ability to hide your expressions goes with it, so now whatever I'm thinking is...
11 days ago • 1 min read
So this week's post is about the three marks of a poet, imbas forosnai, teinm laeda, dichetal do chennaib - and the whole time I was writing it, my engineer brain was sitting in the corner with its arms crossed going "prove it." That's the fight I actually want to talk to you about today. Not the poet stuff, the fight underneath it. I'm a Chartered Engineer. Twenty-four years of it. I need things to check out, to be testable, to have a mechanism I can point to and say "this is why this...
18 days ago • 1 min read
After the last two weeks, I figured we all needed this one: Joy. Yes - step three on Brigid's Path, the one most of us skip straight past. This week I talk about why joy and discipline aren't actually opposites, what a trampoline and some questionable neighbours taught me about it, and why ten minutes a day - hail, rain, or shine - turned out to matter more than I expected. There's even a bit of proper research in there. And a Mayo GAA reference. (Listen, you can be completely not interested...
24 days ago • 1 min read
You know that feeling when a new notebook feels like it's going to fix everything? I bought one anyway. Special trip to Eason's and all. Last week I told ye about the twentieth night - the moment I finally admitted things weren't working. This week's post is what I actually did about it: a list of all the little things that had been bothering me, one thing crossed off each day, whether that was hours spent building a trampoline (sorry, neighbours) or two minutes sewing on a button. It wasn't...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
This post is a day late. I'm not going to pretend that's not a little funny given what it's actually about. Some of ye might have noticed things have been quieter here than usual, and when I did post, it maybe didn't quite sound like me. The honest reason: I started asking AI to help optimise things for SEO, trying to get found in the searches. And that's exactly what happened - it got optimised, and it stopped sounding like me. Which is kind of the bloody point, isn't it. But underneath...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
My official working hours are 8 to 4:30. My actual working hours, for much of this year, have been closer to 7:30 in the morning to 7:30 in the evening. Sometimes later. This is, as I discovered the hard way earlier this year, not sustainable. The anxiety I mentioned a few weeks ago didn't arrive from nowhere. It arrived because I had quietly allowed the boundaries between work and everything else to dissolve, one small compromise at a time, until I was operating on empty and calling it...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Trigger warning: this email contains a brief reference to miscarriage and pregnancy loss. If you need to step away from that today, please do - the blog post linked below doesn't contain this material and is safe to read. When I first read about Crom Cruach and the first-born sacrifice, I was doing what I usually do with mythology - approaching it academically, looking for the patterns, thinking about what it tells us about how our ancestors understood the world. And then it hit me...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
My mother grew up in rural Clare in the 1960s. And one of her fondest memories from childhood is the trip to Lahinch for Garland Sunday - the last Sunday of July, which in her memory was simply a great day out. The men would walk the seafront. The women came too - which was notable, she says, because most of the fairs and gatherings of the time were horse fairs or cattle fairs, places where women didn't usually go. Garland Sunday was different. It was for everyone. Children ran and played and...
2 months ago • 1 min read