Making It Up As I Go Along (31 page)

Did I ever tell you about the time I decided to
become a yoga instructor? Only a couple of years ago, it was.

Well, like all women of my age, I’d
‘dabbled’ over the years, I’d done my fair share of
‘experimenting’. Yoga used to be a thing that only hippies did, but about fifteen
years ago a new mutated version of yoga started doing the rounds. This yoga wasn’t an
adjunct to meditation but a new way to get hard-bodied. It was
cripplingly
difficult.
So difficult that it was okay for even rugby and GAA players to do it. (Although I believe
they’ve stopped now.)

This new yoga pretended to be
‘spiritual’ like the old yoga, and every class would begin with a wafty speech from
the instructor about how you should listen to your body and how you shouldn’t be in
competition with anyone around you and it was ‘your practice’ and no one
else’s, and everyone would nod in agreement. But in reality I found it horribly
competitive and there were times when I’d be holding a pose and the sweat would be pouring
off me and I’d feel like I was going to die but I was damned if I was going to give my
screaming muscles a break and topple on to the floor and let the girl beside me with the
fake-serene look on her face snicker up her sleeve.

People – oh, they can deny it all they
like, but it’s true – were even competitive about their mats: every now and again
someone would show up with a springy new mat in a beautiful colour that
you
couldn’t get in Ireland and they’d be swanking around, acting all ‘Oh this old
thing?’ about it, and everyone would be sickened with jealousy and stare at their own
curly-edged old blue mat with hatred but then they had to get all spiritual and ‘rise
above it’.

I hated yoga. In fairness, I hated all exercise
but regarded it as a necessary evil. Yoga, however, was the most awful – I think it was
the cod spirituality that made it difficult to stomach. A spinning class might be hell, but at
least no one makes you think positive thoughts about people you dislike – you think about
your thighs and that’s all.

So with yoga, I’d go for a while, then
I’d stop. Then I’d read another article about how yoga builds core strength and
gives you lovely long lean muscles
and
gives you peace of mind into the bargain and
I’d start up again for a while, but always lapse.

I never got the serenity that people talked
about. Then, when it all went to hell with me, mental-health-wise, and I flailed around, looking
for a lifebuoy, I somehow started doing yoga again and to my great surprise I’d get
moments at the end of a class when my tormented head would settle down and I’d have a
brief spell of feeling like I could cope.

Yoga, I decided, was the answer. Yoga would save
me. Yoga would give me
a new life
! I couldn’t write and I needed a job, so why
not become a yoga instructor?! I had great plans: I’d open each class with beautiful
inspirational readings; at the end I’d talk people through glorious visualizations and
I’d cover them with pink cashmere throws – I spent the best part of a day on the
Designers Guild site trying to decide which blankets to buy. I wondered about venues. And how
much I should charge people. And other mad stuff.

Then I found a yoga school! Over the course of a
year I’d do twelve weekends of practical and theoretical yoga and at the end
I’d do an exam and, assuming I passed, then I’d be a yoga
instructor. Earnestly, I began my ‘study’. I bought a fabulous jealous-making purple
mat. And a notebook. But there was one thing I hadn’t factored into the equation: I
didn’t look like a yoga instructor. Yoga instructors are lean and long and lithe and
limber and lissom. They can do headstands and handstands and itch their eye with their big toe,
and if they aren’t born that way, they get that way by starting to practise yoga at a
young age and doing it all day, every day.

I was the wrong side of forty-five. Throughout my
life I’d exercised sporadically at best. I was short and stout and my joints had already
started to seize up – my right hip was gammy and my right knee was banjaxed.

Worst of all, I had the wrong kind of feet. Yoga
instructors’ feet are as soft and pink as a baby’s cheek. My feet look like the
Burren – my soles are insulated with layer upon layer of grey stony stuff. I went to a
woman who promised to burn off the limestone, which she duly did, but the skin underneath was a
startlingly bright yellow. It was hopeless,
hopeless.

And to be honest, by then I was losing interest.
It was too hard – I was expected to do a yoga class every day. And there were too many
Sanskrit words: Savasanas and Padmasanas and Pranayamas. Reluctantly I admitted to myself that
I’d have to find salvation and a new career elsewhere, and after the second training
weekend I tiptoed quietly away, leaving my good purple mat behind.

Easons.com
, August
2012.

Recently, I fulfilled a long-held ambition,
something I’ve wanted to do for years and years, a dream that I’ve nurtured for as
long as I can remember but the time just never seemed right. Anyway, last Saturday it finally
came to pass – I did a basic first-aid course!

… and now I sense I’ve disappointed
you. Maybe you thought I was going to say I saw the sun rise over Angkor Wat? Or I floated in a
hot-air balloon across the Serengeti? Don’t worry, you’re not the only one to think
that way – now and again, usually when I’m promoting a book, I get wheeled out from
my Dublin suburb to do interviews. And a question that’s often asked is, ‘So
what’s next for Marian Keyes?’ (Because they talk this way, interviewers. Especially
if they’re on the telly.) I usually mumble something about hoping to write another book,
because I like writing books. But they press their case, ‘What’s on Marian
Keyes’s bucket list?’

Shamefaced, Marian Keyes has to admit that, apart
from the first-aid course, she doesn’t really have a bucket list – which perplexes
the interviewers no end. ‘What if Hollywood comes a-calling?’ So I explain that
actually Hollywood
did
come a-calling and flew me over there and introduced me to lots
of smiley, tanned people and showed me buffet tables groaning with food, which we all stood
around and admired, but which none of us actually ate from, and everyone was really, really,
really lovely and clearly we were best friends for ever, but bafflingly when I got home I never
heard from any of them again.

‘Well, surely there
must be something,’ the interviewers insist. ‘How about swimming with
dolphins?’ (
Always
the poor dolphins, who must be exhausted from the endless
swimming they’re having to do, as they help millions of people tick off the number-one
item on their list.) Then I have to explain that I have the ‘Keyes Ear’, which means
myself and my siblings get infections in our right ear at the drop of a hat and I was told by an
ear specialist that I must NEVER get water in mine. So swimming is out. Also, I have to admit
that I don’t exactly …
trust
dolphins. They’re just too nice. I
can’t stop myself from thinking, ‘What’s their game? What are they up to?
Where’s the catch?
’

At this point, my inquisitor is openly
contemptuous of me – because the rule is that we’re meant to have aspirations,
five-year plans, things to aim for. We have to be improving constantly, ‘moving closer to
our goals’. To stand still is to regress.

But here’s how it is: I spent my entire
life in a state of yearning. During my (very ordinary) childhood, happiness belonged in the
far-off future and the markers kept being moved. I’d be okay when I became a teenager. No,
when I left school. No, when I got a degree.

My twenties were a decade of suspended animation
– before I could declare my life open for business, I needed the right man, the right job,
the right flat, the right hair, the right legs and the right lifestyle (Heal’s, jogging,
Barcelona).

Unaccountably, everything remained wrong. Until,
through a small amount of rare proactive effort on my part, coupled with a huge amount of dumb
luck, I ended up getting a book published.
And
I met a nice man. I got almost
everything I yearned for (not the legs, nothing can be done about them, not until
bone-lengthening is invented), but to my great surprise, I was not yearn-free.

Even as I was writing the first book, I was
already worried
about the next one – what if I couldn’t write
it, what if it was awful, what if everyone hated the current one and it all became irrelevant
anyway? Those worries never went away, to the point where every book that I was due to write in
my lifetime I yearned to have already written, so that I didn’t have to worry about them,
if that makes any sense?

But I don’t want to live in a state of
yearning. I don’t want to move through my days not touching the sides. I don’t want
my life to be deferred until everything is perfect, because that will be never. Instead I want
to want what I have. Whatever that is.

I’m at my happiest when I want nothing.
Even happier when I realize that I’m
entitled
to nothing – but that
I’ve been granted so much. It’s only an accident of birth that I live in a country
that’s not at war; somewhere in a refugee camp made of endless rows of tents is a Syrian
woman the same age as me – we might even share a birthday – trying to accept that
her home has gone for ever. When I think that way, I’m filled with wonder at the water
that flows from my kitchen tap and the electricity that works my lamp, so that I can read at
night. I’m grateful that I can read. And that I have a book. And that I can see …
And then I’m no longer yearning. Instead I’m giddy, almost queasy at my good
fortune.

So anyway, my first-aid course. You know if
you’re on a plane and someone announces, ‘If there’s a doctor on board, can
they make themselves known’? Well, I wanted to
be
that person. Basically, I
wanted to be a doctor but without having to do the seven pesky years in university, followed by
three years of 72-hour shifts in A&E departments.

And because I come from a family that enjoys bad
health, and gets no end of peculiar ailments, I felt I’d had a great medical schooling. To
be honest with you, I felt I already
was
a doctor in all but name.

But on the course I
discovered that being a doctor is harder than I’d thought. And having to save lives
– that’s a big responsibility.

Still! At least now I know and I can tick it off
my list.

First published in the
Sunday Times Style
,
June 2014.

You know, I was
always
a bit odd. Growing
up in dull-as-anything Catholic Ireland I was convinced that I was adopted and it was only a
matter of time before my real – much more glamorous – parents showed up and whisked
me off to start my real life. Aged about nine, I fell in love with Donny Osmond, and during the
sermon at Mass I’d disappear into my head and fantasize about our thrilling life together
in Salt Lake City – then I’d get the ferocious guilts and do a great deal of
kneeling by the side of my bed, saying decades of the rosary.

After I grew up a bit and moved into
disposable-income territory, I did all the obvious stuff – drinking too much, eating too
much, spending too much, exercising too much, working too little, looking at every man as a
potential saviour, visiting dodgy ‘psychics’ and buying an unholy quantity of shoes.

But in recent years I stepped up my game and
moved into ‘second tier’ fixes (basically more expensive ones). Despite being
ludicrously lucky in having a lovely job and a lovely husband and a great family (they turned
out to be not dull at all) I always felt … I suppose the best word is
afraid.
Afraid and incomplete. So I did rehab, sobriety, counselling, craniosacral therapy, meditation,
reiki, reflexology, sugar, no sugar, sugar, no sugar and ‘good deeds’ (basically
offering lifts to strangers standing in the rain at bus stops – they never accepted but I
got the warm glow of having done ‘a good thing’). And when all else failed, I bought
more shoes.

Then! I moved on to the hard
stuff. Convinced that some forgotten trauma was generating my feelings of
‘wrongness’, I started hypnotherapy, looking to retrieve repressed memories. But
because I’m an outrageous people-pleaser, I used to pretend I was ‘under’ when
I don’t think I was really, and went along with the therapist’s suggestions,
speaking in a faint ‘hypnotized-style’ voice, as we searched for the one bad event
that had broken me. However, after seven months I reluctantly admitted that actually nothing
terrible had happened to me. It was a bad blow. Then I got back in the game and embraced
acupuncture, persuaded that my meridians (whatever they may be) were out of whack. And I threw
‘chakra yoga’ into the mix (a strange form of yoga that involves – horrors!
– singing).

I did a week in the Golden Door, a well-fancy
holistic spa in California, where I was looking for spiritual enlightenment, but all they seemed
to care about was that I lost weight. But I escaped for a day and had a fabulous time in the
local branch of Anthropologie, so it wasn’t all bad.

Next, I found an angel-channeller, a lovely,
lovely woman, who kept cocking her head and listening to messages of encouragement from my own
personal angels, who had nothing but FABULOUS news. However, it was so silly that I used to have
to suck my tongue really hard to stop myself from sniggering.

I had my astrological chart done by a truly
creepy man who delighted in telling me that I was transitioning into a time of great disaster in
my life and that I should consider moving to Peru.

Continuing my search, I stumbled across a crowd
called the Art of Living and did a weekend course with them, which consisted – mostly
– of doing funny breathing. The breathing bit was nice (and is something I continue to do,
probably the only useful thing I’ve learnt in all my questing, apart from the fact that I
love
Anthropologie). But, well meaning as they were, they were vaguely
cult-like and I was expected to meet up with other members and bring ‘pot-luck’
dishes and we’d all do our funny breathing together, and because the phrase
‘pot-luck’ makes big smacky-rage rise up in me, I made my excuses and left.

In the last nine months, something has changed:
I’ve grasped that happiness is not the single ‘correct’ feeling and that all
other feelings must be wrestled into submission. Happiness is simply one of countless emotions
I’ll feel in my lifetime.

These days I’m consciously grateful for
every good thing. More importantly, I’m accepting that I’m always going to have
‘a hole in my soul’ – that every human being has it, to a greater or lesser
extent. Sometimes the volume is turned up high and other times it’s quiet, but like a
stone in my shoe it’s always there, and it’s absolutely fine. I’m not doing
anything wrong, I am simply a human being.

Today I do NOTHING to fix myself (except
obsessively buying second-hand furniture and banjoing it). I’ve been reading a lot about
ayahuasca and there was a time when I would have thought, ‘Quick, quick! Sign me up
immediately!’ But not any longer.

These days I won’t even read my horoscope.
I don’t want to know what’s coming – I want to live in today and focus on what
I have rather than what I haven’t.

I finally accept that there’s no cure for
the condition of being human – feeling incomplete is
central
to it. And if this
isn’t peace, well, it’s something very similar.

First published in the
Sunday Times Style
,
October 2014.