Fit&Flair

Just saw yet ANOTHER example of a fitness professional talking about how people ‘make excuses’ not to prioritise exercise and I. Just. Cannot. With these people. (#notallPTs — there some amazing ones!*) I had to rant, I’m sorry.

This time it was a personal trainer talking about how parents use their children as an ‘excuse’ not to train, but the whole ‘excuses’ thing pervades fitness culture.

One of my personal favourites was the time a (male) trainer told a roomful of women taking his HIIT class that he ‘knew all our tricks’. One of these tricks was apparently pretending to adjust our ponytails as a way to get an extra break between exercises. Have you ever heard anything so patronizing?? I told him (silently, in my head), Dude I am literally paying money for the privilege of sweating through my heavy-duty sports bra here. Why would I be looking for excuses *not* to do what I came here to do? Has it occurred to you, (I continued, giving him a quick glare while he had his back to me) that there might be other reasons why women feel the need to pay more attention to our appearances while training in public? And one more thing (I added later, in the shower, as I angrily shampooed my hair), I DON’T NEED AN EXCUSE NOT TO DO BURPEES. NOBODY DOES.

Whether it’s taking a walk break during your run or just not getting much exercise for a while, you don’t need an excuse. Dismissing your reasons as mere ‘excuses’ seems counterproductive to me. It’s mean, it’s disempowering, and it’s just going to make you feel less motivated. Yes, you probably would feel better if you were able to push yourself a bit more. Humans are made to move. We evolved to move A LOT. (Think hunting and gathering.)

But there is a catch to this. We are extremely well adapted for movement, but we are also adapted for situations in which movement is inevitable. So we’re adapted to avoid unnecessary movement. When we’re wrapped in a blanket two seasons deep in something mediocre on Netflix, our cave brains are going, “Yes, great stuff, keep resting now because tomorrow we’ll probably have to run 20 miles to hunt for meat!” And incidentally should we also happen to find ourselves bate into a ‘sharing’ (lol) bag of Maltesers, that same inner cave person is thrilled with us! “This is brilliant, sooo much sugar and fat; now we’ll definitely survive that 20 mile run. Keep going!” We get a lot of short-term physiological rewards and reenforcement for NOT moving. That’s not an excuse, that’s biology. If we want to address the reasons we are not moving as much as we’d like, we need to work with that biology, not deny it and give out to ourselves. Self-acceptance, gentleness, starting from where we are — these are all ways to be kind and change things. Beating ourselves up for doing what comes naturally? Well, there’s no excuse for that.

*Off the top of my head: If you’re in Cork, Aclaí is a really inclusive and friendly place which encompasses genuine diversity and works with people of all abilities. Online, I love Emma Green PhD and Jake Gifford to name but two.

Decided to post the slides from a presentation I gave at the British Society for Phenomenology annual conference. I was very disappointed that Covid19 took away my excuse to go to Exeter for the conference, but the organisers did a great job of making it work online. I’m working on writing this up as a paper, so I’d love to get people’s thoughts and feedback.

My main point is that living in a fatphobic society can make people feel so ashamed of their bodies that they don’t want to move as much. This is bad enough, but this problem continually reinforces itself, because the less you move the less you can move. Movement of all kinds is so important for health that body shame caused by weight stigma can actually be said to be affecting the health of fat people.

How ancient philosophy can help us cultivate an excellent relationship with food

Online workshop (on Google Hangouts), Tuesday 14th April 2020, 7.30 – 9.00 pm (Irish time). The workshop is free but places are limited. Please email mags@margaretsteele.ie to register.

What does it mean to eat well? Is it just a matter of meeting your body’s nutritional needs, or is there more to it than that? This workshop invites you to reflect on your relationship to food — what it is and what you would like it to be. We will consider this question using ideas from Plato and Aristotle.

Please note this is not a nutrition or dietetics workshop. I am not a dietitian and I don’t know what you should eat! This workshop is about how philosophy can help you figure out how you would like to eat!

Image credit: Olives from Jordan by Nick Fraser CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2208405

We don’t usally see mirrors as modern technology, but, as far as I know, they were not part of most people’s everyday lives until very recently. For most people in most times and places, seeing oneself as others might see one was not a common experience. These days, it’s hard to avoid. Shiny plate glass shop-fronts and office blocks line our streets. Clothes shops, gyms, hair salons and beauty clinics have floor-to-ceiling mirrors. We never stop seeing ourselves, even when we don’t want to.

In neuro-biological terms, recognising one’s own reflection is a remarkable accomplishment. Very few species have been shown to be able to do so, and even humans typically cannot do it until around 18 months. But this accomplishment comes at a price. In order to recognise that ‘that is me’ I must see myself as a ‘that’ – an object, a thing for others to look at. It is not a coincidence that, in ordinary conversation, we use ‘self-conscious’ to describe the feeling of being vulnerable to the observations and judgements of others. Our ability to be self-aware and our tendency to be self-conscious are two sides of the same coin. Of course, humans felt like this long before there were mirrors. But the mirror allows me (kind of) to see myself as others might see me, and thus gives me a new way to think about what other might think of me. In the story of Snow White, the wicked queen’s magic mirror tells her how she compares with all the other women in the kingdom. The mirror literally talks to her and tells her that she is – or is not – ‘the fairest of them all.’ Real mirrors don’t interpret or narrate, but it can feel like they are passing judgement on us.

Beauvoir argues that women, in particular, feel this judgement. This is because women have always been taught that we are our appearances, our images, our bodies. We are first and foremost things to be looked at, and our value lies in how we appear to others, especially to men. What we look like is who we are. Every ‘flaw’ in our appearance thus reveals a flaw in our character. Wrinkles, stretch marks, cellulite – they are all evidence of the ways in which we have failed. A spot on my chin says I am not eating correctly or not undergoing the correct cleanse-tone-and-moisturise routine. I must work harder and be better. (Also, of course, I must buy more stuff.) In the meantime, I must cover the spot so others cannot see how greedy and lazy I am. For men (especially, as Beauvoir would readily acknowledge, white, gender-conforming, able-bodied men), the reflection in the mirror just shows how they look, not who they are. But for women, looking in the mirror is an opportunity to see my true self. It becomes an exercise in moral discernment, an examination of conscience.

Our attempts to deceive our mirrors are also attempts at self-deception. If how I look is who I am, then looking good enough literally means being good enough. If I can convince others that I woke up like this, then I will really be #flawless. But really, tis only ourselves we’re codding. (I would like to suggest this as the official Hiberno-English translation of ‘mauvaise foi’ or ‘bad faith.’) In reality, I know that I cannot really control how others see me, and I know that how they see me does not define me. This doesn’t mean I can’t, in good faith, change my appearance in the mirror. It’s not our fault that we have grown up in a society that judges us by how we look, and in any case, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to look your best. But as free indivduals, we do have a responsibility to choose how we react to this judgement. We can choose to take it seriously, to treat ‘looking your best’ as an absolute, objective standard, increasing its harm to ourselves and others. Or we can change what ‘looking your best’ means, so that it’s a standard that we use to help each other. Mirrors are just things. We, absolutely, inescapably, are not. We decide what things mean and whether and how they matter. Our mirrors can’t tell us who we are. It’s up to us to choose that for ourselves.

Back in 2015, I voted ‘yes’ to marriage equality with joy, and pride in my country. There was sadness and regret too; it was hard not to think how lesbian, gay and bisexual people had suffered – and still suffer – in this country. But this felt like a huge step in the right direction, a collective decision to acknowledge and embrace a long-marginalised community, and I, like much of the country, celebrated. On Friday next, I will vote ‘yes’ in the referendum to repeal the 8^th amendment, but it feels different. If the people vote to make this change, I will be relieved rather than joyful. I am not pro-abortion any more than I am pro-antibiotics. These are not things I enjoy or celebrate. Even when they are the right answer, they’re not an easy answer. They are not without side effects, and I believe there are moral questions over their use, and the questions around antibiotic use pale in comparison to those around abortion. I’m not saying the two carry equal moral weight, just that I see each as, to a greater or lesser extent, a grim necessity rather than something to be celebrated.

I can’t imagine anybody celebrating the end of any pregnancy unless that end comes in the form of a healthy new baby. I don’t think anybody is ‘pro-abortion’ as such, and I certainly am not. I understand that many people sincerely believe the unborn baby is a person with a right to life. I am not sure that they are wrong. I would personally be very uncomfortable with the idea of a healthy mother terminating a healthy pregnancy at, say, 24 weeks. Babies are great. Bring on the babies, like. But I am suspicious of the attitude that seems to value ‘life’ as a pure, abstract concept to the point that it precludes an appreciation of the complexity of actual lives, actual people. How can someone value ‘Life’ so much that they would force a 13-year-old girl, pregnant through rape (and how else could a 13-year-old be pregnant, legally or morally speaking?) to carry a baby to term? Why is the unborn baby so important that its needs trump those of the actual, already living person carrying it? It smacks of a weird preference for the potential over the actual, a prioritising of ‘Life’ over somebody’s actual lived, embodied, conscious reality. I cannot pretend to know what is in the mind and heart of another person but sometimes it seems to me that pro-life advocates think the pregnant person has been sullied by the world and is beyond help, but this pure, clean, new Life might somehow be better and so deserves a chance.

I get why people are afraid of the consequences of repealing the eighth amendment, I really do. Personally, I am scared at the thought of a future in which the right to life rests on some utilitarian calculus. I hate the idea of poor women being forced to abort wanted pregnancies due simply to economic disadvantage. I find the idea of abortion as contraception disquieting, whether I think about the wellbeing of the baby or that of the pregnant person. I consider it tragic that people might feel unable to raise a child with special needs in our society, and that they might feel they have to terminate a wanted pregnancy on that basis. But these are hypotheticals — outcomes that MIGHT come about if we skidded obliviously down some theoretical slippery slope. They are not inevitable outcomes of a ‘yes’ vote. What is inevitable is that, if we vote ‘no’, we, as a society, will be completely unable to help pregnant people who desperately need to terminate their pregnancy, no matter how ‘good’ any of us might judge their reasons to be. The eighth amendment, and the Protection of Life During Pregnancy act, have not worked. If we want anything whatsoever to change in how we care for pregnant people, we must vote ‘yes’. In this referendum, ‘no’ is radical. ‘Yes’ is the middle ground. ‘Yes’ is the safe option. ‘Yes’ is the conservative, prudent choice. Perhaps, for you, like for me, it may be a slightly trepidatious ‘yes’. A ‘reluctant’ yes. A gritted-teeth ‘yes’. An I-don’t-trust-politicans ‘yes’.  A small, quiet ‘yes’.

Fine. So be it. Any ‘yes’ at all keeps our options open, individually and collectively. But a ‘no’ shuts off much-needed choices for individual girls and women, and for us as a society. After all this is over, when the posters have come down and the hashtags peter out, if we vote ‘yes’, it will still be possible to work to prevent abortion in almost all circumstances. There will still be charities, NGOs and civic groups crying out for resources to help families in difficult situations, trying to make it easier for people to raise children. There will still be scientists seeking to improve the outlook for mothers and babies in all kinds of pregnancies. There will still be opportunities to teach young people to deal with their sexuality in healthy and responsible ways. It will still be possible to eliminate the need for abortion in many cases, if that is what we truly want. Despite the rhetoric of the pro-life side, there are no ‘easy’ cases of unwanted pregnancy. If you are pregnant and cannot or do not want to continue the pregnancy, you are in a crisis pretty much by definition. If we repeal the 8^th amendment, there is still so much we can do to drastically reduce the number of crisis pregnancies. But we will never be able to eliminate the need for abortion entirely. There will, tragically, always be cases of rape or incest, and cases where there is no prospect of a baby surviving outside the womb. If we vote ‘no’, there will be no way to help people in these so-called ‘hard’ cases. If we vote ‘yes’, we can still have a meaningful debate about how we, as a society, want to deal with reproductive ethics. We can still try to limit the need for abortion. We can still help both the unborn and the born. But if we vote ‘no’, there is no going back. There is no wiggle room, no ‘hard’ cases, no second chance. We will have made up our minds, and, in my view, we will have closed our hearts and minds in a sad and frightening way.

For me and most people of my generation, the ‘yes’ to marriage equality was an easy, joyful, unequivocal ‘yes’. This time around, it may not feel quite so celebratory. But it is, if anything, even more necessary. This is life and death.

Today, the tax on sugar-sweetened drinks (SSDs) comes into effect in Ireland. This will mean a 2 litre bottle of Coca Cola, for example, will cost 60 cent more. On balance, I welcome this move. It is clear that we consume too much sugar, and that this is particularly injurious to the health of children. On its own, this measure will not eliminate any threat to the health of the population, but – with rare exceptions such as vaccination programs – this is not how public health campaigns work. Instead, public health is improved by subjecting a given threat to a death of a thousand cuts. The decline in smoking prevalence, for example, cannot be attributed solely to the workplace smoking ban, or to the provision of supports for smoking cessation, or to the increased tax on cigarettes, or to packaging and advertising laws. But taken together, measures like these have a significant impact. The tax on SSDs could function in the same way: Alone, it won’t dramatically reduce the amount of excess sugar consumption, but in conjunction with other interventions, it just might have a positive effect. If I had any doubts about the effectiveness of these taxes, they are put to rest by the fact that the industry opposes them. Their opposition suggests to me that they believe it can reduce consumption, and they, with their billion dollar market research budgets, should know.

So SSD taxes might play a part in reducing excess sugar consumption. Good. I’m all in favour of that. But. But. The point of the SSD tax is not to reduce consumption of sugar; it is, we are told, to reduce childhood obesity. This is where I find myself getting uncomfortable. I believe this is harmful to both slim and fat people. First, when public health messaging constantly links SSD taxes with obesity, it sends the message that SSDs and other high-sugar ‘foods’ like sweets and cakes are only bad for you if they make you fat. It is the case that, if you are genetically predisposed to weight gain, environmental and behavioural factors will cause you to gain weight. But it doesn’t follow that SSDs and other sugary junk are perfectly safe to consume as long as they don’t cause you to gain weight, and it is disingenuous to push this message on parents and the public in general.

In fact, there are lots of good reasons not to let children consume too much sugar, even if they never become overweight. For one thing, the link between sugar and tooth decay is well established. But I think there are deeper worries that deserve consideration here too. I admit this is somewhat intuitive, and requires both more evidence and more argument than I can give here, but my sense is that it is just not healthy to encourage children to develop a taste for extremely sweet junk foods many of which are, in my opinion, deliberately engineered to be ‘more-ish’. I think there is a danger that letting kids consume these things on a regular basis inhibits their ability to appreciate real, healthy food, and disrupts the natural relationship between their bodies, food and drinks. If you are constantly consuming high-calorie ‘foods’ that don’t give you a feeling of satiety, mightn’t this affect your ability to regulate your behaviour in response to hunger and satiety cues? This is potentially most dangerous to families in poverty, who may lack the resources to make a habit of eating fresh, home-cooked food. (Imagine trying to avoid giving your kids SSDs and sugary, processed foods while living in emergency accommodation.) As has been pointed out time and again, unless it is accompanied by measures to improve health education and access to good food, an SSD tax is basically just another regressive tax, impacting hardest on those who can least afford it. In short, the idea that SSDs – and rubbishy ‘treats’ in general – are fine as long as you don’t get fat seems potentially harmful to me.

But if this messaging is potentially harmful to slim people (and slim children in particular), it is even more harmful to fat people, including overweight and fat children. This is because it reinforces the stigmatising conflation of unhealthy eating with fatness. Yet again, our public health institutions are pushing the notion that, if you are fat, you must be over-consuming, and if you are not fat, your consumption must be fine. Yet again, we are being encouraged (subtly, implicitly) to consider weight as the be-all, end-all of health, and to consider fatness as the greatest threat to our collective health. Yet again, fat people – including children – are being constructed as the living embodiment of all that is wrong with western society. But, it is not clear that fatness is always so dangerous, and it is not clear that weight loss is the best or only solution to the problems that are associated with overweight and obesity. In fact, many of those who maintain clinically-significant weight loss certainly would not look slim or healthy to the average person on the street, who has learned what ‘healthy’ looks like from our public health messaging. In short, as fat acceptance advocates are weary from saying, you can’t tell how healthy somebody is just by looking at them. Yet governments and others, whether by accident or design, keep pushing the idea that body size and shape are clear and direct manifestations of over-eating, under-exercising and other unhealthy behaviours. This contributes to the shame and stigma experienced by fat people. Shame and stigma are harmful in themselves, and they are not good motivators for positive behavioural change of any sort.

This kind of problematic anti-obesity messaging is presumably justified on the grounds that it leads to an overall improvement in the health of the population and that this is good for individuals. I think of this as ‘trickle-down’ ethics, and to me it is just as worrisome as its economic counterpart. Just as, in Reaganomic-type economies, the money stops trickling down well before it reaches those who need it most, so the benefits of anti-obesity policies do not make it to fat people. Rather, I suggest, public health anti-obesity messaging is extremely harmful to actual fat people. In short, while this tax may be a good thing for our collective health, the way it has been announced and justified seems to be yet another case of an ‘anti-obesity’ policy that looks, walks and quacks like an ‘anti-obese-people’ policy.

My preferred method of philosophy is phenomenology. “What is philosophy?” and “What is phenomenology?” are love-hate questions for me. I want to explain, because I think they’re beautiful and important. But they’re so beautiful and important that, no matter what I say, it seems clumsy and ignorant and ugly compared to the answer I feel I should be able to give. But, feck it, we’re on snow lockdown here — and my health has not been great lately so I don’t have any interesting new fitness activities to reflect on — so here goes. What is phenomenology, you ask? Well…

A lot of people seem to like the idea of phenomenology. It has been taken up in disciplines like psychology and nursing studies, where researchers want to do serious theoretical research without getting too far away the real experiences of actual people who might be affected by their research. Philosophy can often seem arcane and confusing, so there is something appealing about a method of philosophy that prioritises concrete experience over abstract theory. But there is more to phenomenology than just talking about individual experiences. To do phenomenology is not just to pay attention to experience, but to carefully and critically sift through that experience, looking for patterns and structures, thinking not just about particular experiences but about experience in general.

There are different ways of doing phenomenology, but what they all have in common is that focus on direct experience. My kind of phenomenology is that described by Edmund Husserl in the early 20^th century. Husserl said that every experience we have can be a source of real, certain knowledge – if we learn how to analyse it properly. Lots of people are familiar with Descartes’ famous claim, “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes meant that I cannot fail to believe in my own existence, because even by doubting that I exist, I’m proving that I exist. I might be completely mistaken about my true nature – maybe I’m dreaming, maybe I’m in the Matrix, maybe I’m a Cylon … – but I must be something because something must be doing this wondering right now. For Husserl, this was the beginning of a whole new approach to philosophy. Descartes (according to Husserl) went off on the wrong track, trying to use logic and inference to argue that if I exist, other things must also be true. But Husserl thought that, instead of trying to use my existence as logical proof of something else, I could just stay with the experience itself, and examine it to see what else it might be able to teach me.

In a way, Husserlian phenomenology is a bit like mindfulness meditation. (Oddly, I don’t mind talking about meditation even though I’m absolutely not an expert and I’m almost certainly getting it wrong or only giving a very limited account of it. I suppose I feel with philosophy and phenomenology I should be able to explain, but with mindfulness, it’s okay that I’m not an expert.) In meditation, as I understand it, we try to simply be receptive to our experience as it comes to us, without judgement, without getting caught up in stories of the past or the future. We try to simply be with what is here now. We focus on what it is like to be breathing, what it is like to have hands or feet, what it is like to be able to hear sounds or watch a candle flame. It doesn’t matter what we focus on. Meditation (at least in the Buddhist-influenced mindfulness tradition as it’s come to be taught in the west) is not about withdrawal from the world. It is not about falling asleep. It is about waking up to the present moment. The same is true of phenomenology. The goal is see what is really given in experience. Husserl says we need to ‘bracket’ our assumptions and prejudices. We can’t just decide not to have them. They are there. But we can choose not to act as if they are true. A person in the desert might realise that the oasis she sees in the distance is probably just a mirage, but that doesn’t mean her experience of the mirage vanishes. She might still see it. But she can choose not to waste her energy trying to get to it. In the same way, in meditation, I might have a thought that I need to immediately get up from my cushion and go running off to make a phone call or take out the rubbish or whatever. But I can recognise that this is just a thought and I can choose not to act on it. I can choose to stay on the cushion for a few more minutes, knowing that the phone and the rubbish will still be there when I’m finished. I can choose not to waste energy on fighting the thought. I don’t have to tell myself I’m a failure for getting distracted. I can just let the thought be there, but refrain from acting on it.

Phenomenology, as Husserl describes it, can be said to begin with a kind of philosophical meditation. In order to do phenomenological investigation, I start with my own experience, as best I can letting it all be there, without assuming it is real or illusory, without feeling I need to rush to argue with it or act on it. In meditation, if I am focusing on my breathing, I’m focusing on my experience of breath. My goal is not to think about breathing. I’m not trying to label my breathing with words (shallow, deep, even, ragged), and I’m not trying to figure out how breathing works from a biological point of view. I may find myself doing these things, but once I realise I’m doing them, I gently try to shift my focus back to the direct experience itself.

Meditation works by accepting that we cannot stop thoughts or distractions or reactions, but we can cultivate a state of mind in which we are able to ‘wake up’ again and again. Over time, we become more awake, more able to stay with our experience itself. Phenomenology is a method of applying this ‘woken up’ state to philosophical questions. It starts with the recognition that we never get outside our own experience. Even when we think we’re being ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’, this is just another kind of experience. That doesn’t make it wrong or illusory, but it does mean I must be careful to distinguish what is really happening in the experience from what I am just assuming about it.

Like meditation, phenomenology reveals that our experience is more all-encompassing than we think, but also more limited than we think. If I look out the window, I can only see one side of my neighbour’s house, but I experience this as a whole house. When I look out the window, I don’t think, “Oh look, the neighbour’s put up that Blazing Saddles fake house façade again today.” I really do experience the whole house – and any knowledge or access to this house that I ever have will always come to me via some form of experience. Yet even if I explored it from foundation to attic, I could only ever see the house in partial, fragmented views. We could go hard-line sceptical and say this means all our experience is some kind of crazy delusion. Or we can take this as a pretty useful piece of knowledge: Whatever houses are, this is how they are experienced.

Meditation and phenomenology are not the same in every respect. They don’t always have the same goals. Phenomenology can be used for strictly academic purposes, while meditation is often undertaken for spiritual reasons. But both meditation and phenomenology can be seen as philosophical methods. Philosophy is, literally, etymologically, the love of wisdom. What is wisdom but the ability to know and accept what really is, as it is, in all its isness?

Ar mo bhealach ar ais ó Loch Garman go Chorcaigh maidin dé Luan seo caite, chaith mé an t-am ag éisteacht le cupla eipeasóidí Motherfoclóir, an podchraoladh a bhaineann leis an cuntas Twitter @TheIrishFor. (Má tá suim agat san Ghaeilge nó i gcúrsaí teanga go ginirealta agus mura leanaíonn tú @TheIrishFor, ba chóir duit é a dhéanamh láithreach.) Bhí mo chuid mothúcháin meascaithe agus mé ag éisteacht le na podchraolta. Bíonn an taithí céanna agam go minic agus meain sosialta na Gaeilge á léamh nó á úsáid agam. Ar taobh amháin, cuireann sé an-áthas orm daoine óga a fheiscint ag úsáid (nó ag caint faoi i gcás @TheIrishFor) an Ghaeilge i slí atá éirimiúil agus oideasach ach, ag an am céanna, greannmhar agus nádúrtha. Ach, fite fuaite leis an t-áthas, bíonn saghas brón orm freisin, mar cé go bhfuil an-suim agam san Ghaeilge, ní féidir liom í a labhairt go líofa, agus nílim compórdach leis an fíric sin.

Orm féin atá cuid mór den locht. Bhí múinteoirí maith agam, a cur béim ar an teanga beo agus an ghnáthcómhrá chómh maith le cúrsaí litríocht, scríbhneoireacht agus araile. Bhain mé sult as an Ghaeilge ar scoil, agus d’éirgh go maith liom san árdteist, agus san scrúdú béil ach go háirithe. Rinne mé cúpla cúrsaí in Ionad na Gaeilge Labhartha UCC, agus arís, bhí múinteoirí den scoth agam. Éistím le Raidio na Gaeltachta, breathnaím ar TG4 (caithfidh mé a adhmháil go bhfuilim gafa le Ros na Rún). Tá stór focal agus tuiscint cuíosach maith agam.

Ach “beatha teanga í a labhairt” agus ní labhraím Gaeilge go rialta. Níl an iomarca cairde agam atá Gaeilge acu agus bíonn cotadh orm ag caint le strainséiri fiu i mBéarla. Fiú i rang Gaeilge, is deacair dom bheith ag cómhra le daoine. Bíonn náire orm. Taobh amuigh den seomra ranga, bíonn cúrsaí níos measa fós, mar bíonn fhios agam go bhfuil botúin á dhéanamh agam i beagnach gach aon abairt agus cuireann sé sin isteach go mór orm. Bíonn mo chuid Béarla an-cruinn ar fad, idir labhairt agus scribhneoireacht. Ach as Gaeilge, ní mar an gcéanna atá an scéal ar chor ar bith. caithidh mé rogha a dhéanamh idir líofact agus cruinneas. Is féidir liom bheith ag caint cuíosach ar mo shuaimhneas (le deoch nó dó ionam ach go háirithe J), nó is féidir liom roinnt bheag cruinneas a fháil amach trí mo chuid ama a ghlacadh agus dianúsáid a bhaint as an foclóir (táim thar a bheith buíochasach as foclóir.ie agus teanglann.ie!!). Dár ndoigh, nílim in ann an dá rud a dhéanamh ag an am céanna.

Ach, nach cuma? Níl Gaeilge líofa agam. Ní coir é. Ba chor dom socraidh síos. B’fhéidir go bhfuil buntaiste ag baint leis an meon sin ach tá sé deacair domsa an leagan sin a cur ar an scéal. Níl ach teanga í, is fíor sin. Ní teanga speisialta cosúil leis, abair, an módh ina úsáidtear Laidin san Eaglais Caitliceach, mar teanga na deasghnáth, ach ghnáththeanga, a usáidtear gach lá le haghaidh obair agus caidreamh agus rudaí leadránach a dhéanamh. Is fíor é nach bhfuil ach teanga í … ach, fós, is teanga í, agus seanteanga, le taisce mór litríocht, miotaiseolaíocht agus béaloideas. Agus, i slí éigin, is mo theanga í cé nár togadh mé léí. Is Éireannach mé, agus is í an Ghaeilge príomhteanga na hÉireann. Agus b’fhéidir go bhfuil tírghrá dall, ach i mo thuairim is teanga álainn í. Toisc go bhfuil roinnt Gaeilge agam, is féidir liom an méid atá caillte agam a fheiceáil. Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam – agus más rud é gur Éireannach gan Gaeilge thú, b’fhéidir go bhfuil cuid de d’anam saghas as usáid. Tá tú i dteidil oidhreacht saibhir na Gaeilge mar Éireannach, ach níl tú in ann é a ghlacadh chugat féin. Níl fhios agam. B’fhéidir gur ráiméis rómánsuil é seo. Ach b’fhéidir nach bhfuil mé i m’aonar. B’fhéidir go mbaineann saghas tráma leis an Gaeilge in intinn chuid suntasach de muintir na tíre, tráma an Ghorta Mór, tráma an chóilíneachais. Níl ormsa atá an locht go léir gur teip orm Gaeilge líofa a fháil amach. “It seems history is to blame.” (“History” … nó “the Brits” más maith leat.)

Léigh mé áit éigin go glacann sé céad bliain chun cogadh cathartha a chur thar daonra tír. Táimid thart ar céad bliain ó tús an Gaelic Revival agus Eírí Amach na Cásca, agus, i mo thuarim, tá comhartha dóchasach ann don Ghaeilge. Is í Bliain na Gaeilge í 2018.  Ní chómhtharlú é sin. Tá tráth an bhróin thart, agus is féidir linn caidreamh nua a dhéanamh leis ár teanga dúchais. Tá an óige chun tosaigh: Tá glúin ann anois, dream na Pop-Up Gaeltachta agus slua eile, atá ag úsáid an Ghaeilge i slite atá fite fuaite lena meain soisialta, go h-iomlán chómhaimsirthe ach síoraí. Tá na daoine seo ag léiriú conas an Ghaeilge a chothú ní amháin i measc cainteoirí líofa ach i measc an pobal mór fosta. Caitheann siad a saol as Gaeilge, mar tá grá acu don Ghaeilge. Mar a deireann Rose i The Last Jedi, “We’re going to win this war not by fighting what we hate, but saving what we love.” B’fhéidir nach bhfuil grá ag gach Éireannach ar an Ghaeilge (“b’fhéidir nach bhfuil?” says you!), ach tá grá ag an chuid is mó dúinn ar an craic, an greann. Tá neart craic, greann agus níos mó ag baint le na meain sosialta #asGaeilge agus leis an Ghaeilge í féin. Is féidir le beagnach gach duine é sin a thuiscint, agus tugann sé deis dúinn ár féiniúlacht náisiúnta a feabhsú agus, más maith linn, is féidir linn áit lárnach a thabhairt don Ghaeilge.

Ba mhaith liom páirt a ghlacadh san athbheochan seo. I mbliana, mar rún na bliana úire, cinnim go labhróidh mé an Ghaeilge níos minic, agus tá súil agam go ndearna daoine eile cosúil liom an rud céanna. Ba chor dúinn, na breacGaeilgeoirí, na Gaeilgeoirí leathoilte, ár ndícheall a dhéanamh. Níl sé ceart an obair ar fad a fhágáil dona cainteoirí líofa ina gcónaí san Ghaeltacht, nó do locht na hollscoileanna, nó do na múinteoirí, nó don rialtas, cé go bhfuil obair tábhachtach le déanamh acu freisin. Má tá teanga beo ag teastáil uainn, caithimid go léir ár bpáirt féin a glacadh. Agus ba chor dom é a dhéanamh ar son an fáth is Éireannach riamh: Píosa craic a bheidh ann.  Craic, agus cinnte bhotúin agus tostanna míchompórdach agus frustrachas agus míthuiscint. . Is teangá mór í an Ghaeilge; tá neart spás inti  don saol mór, idir craic agus brón. Déanfiadh mé mo dhícheall í a labhairt go minic i mbliana. Mar a dúirt mé ar Twitter cúpla mí ó shin, “Is fearr Gaeilge briste ná post-colonial passive aggressive self-loathing.” Agus dá dhéanfainn botúin, lochtaigh na Brits.