I’m a very fast writer. I don’t know much about the writing process of other people, but every editor I’ve worked with has given me this feedback. I suspect it’s because, by the time I sit down to actually write something, I already know what it is that I am going to write, sometimes down to the word. People always say that “writing is thinking”, but this doesn’t particularly resonate for me.
For me, thinking is thinking. And only afterwards, writing is writing.
If I sit down to write something and I find it takes me a while, I stop. I abandon whatever it is that I’m writing, and may not come back to it for months — and usually from an entirely different perspective. Because if I am struggling through it, it means I don’t know what I’m trying to say. And I therefore have no business trying to explain it to other people.
All that is to say, nearly everything that somebody will read of mine publicly is a fully formed thought that I have spent much time contemplating, and a puzzle that is already “solved” in my mind.
Now, though, I have decided to write down some of my half-thought out ideas around some of the topics that may never make it into the category I have just mentioned of “finished”, and in fact may never be revisited because they may never come back around in the context of other things I’m writing about.
I’m going to put all of these scrapbook-like “scribblings” here.
And to that end, here’s an essay about why I’m doing this.
Last weekend, I was sitting at a picnic table in Hyde Park, watching some birds, when a woman opposite me caught my attention. My god, she was stunningly beautiful. Whatever you may think of her movies, Keira Knightley has to be one of the most aesthetically encapsulating humans on this planet, and seeing her in real life blew me away. She is a living piece of art. The cool just oozes out of her.
However, nearly a week later, it’s her husband that has me preoccupied. As I was telling my friend Claire this story, she mentioned “didn’t her husband used to be in a band or something?”. Why yes, he did!
He was in The Klaxons. Remember them?
I have spent the last week going down a musical memory lane. Klaxons, Wombats, Sunshine Underground, Muse, Editors, Placebo, Kasabian, White Lies, and more. And what I have found while traipsing down this lane has felt bittersweet, perhaps bending more towards the bitter than the sweet.
You see, this music was the soundtrack to my youth. And while another version of this discussion (that could fit into the fully-formed-thoughts category) could be about the ways in which the music industry has changed between then and now, and about commercialization and financialization of art (and indeed, I have written a book that pretty much does this in great detail), and that THEY JUST DON’T MAKE MUSIC LIKE THIS ANYMORE (shakes fist at sky), what comes to mind first and foremost are questions around my own life, and how I have changed since I was sixteen years old.
And when I say “how I have changed”, what I perhaps am really trying to get at is: does anyone go back and look at earlier versions of themselves? I have written before about how the people who control the economy, and thus our lives, are also people who have not changed since they were sixteen – which is not only disconcerting but actually pathetic.
So yes, we should want to be constantly evolving animals. The question on my mind this week, though, isn’t why we change — because this is inevitable — but what younger versions of ourselves we carry along with us.
Sadly, until listening to The Klaxons, I had completely forgotten about this very specific, music-obsessed, younger version of me.
There are obvious reasons for forgetting about our sixteen-year-old selves. Some reasons are intentional, in that looking at who we used to be may make us realize one of two things: that we were either assholes back then, or we have turned into assholes today. (Coincidentally — this question has powered a whole genre of romance movies; the former about the other, the bad-guy-turned-good-guy-for-the-right-person, à la A Walk To Remember; the latter being about ourselves on a path to redemption through love, à la Sweet Home Alabama).
Then there are the unintentional ways we forget about early-us. Mostly, that we’re busy and… I can barely remember what I did last week. How can I remember what I did when I was sixteen, let alone who I was? My personality changed roughly once a week back then.
What I found this week, relating to all of this, is simple but feels more complex:
When you’re young, you’re fun
I used to play the trumpet for several hours a day. Orchestra, scales, improvisation, transposition, blues, bands. But not only that, all my friends played music too. My friend Millzy was the drummer in a band called Waiting for Godot, of which I am a lifelong groupie (they disbanded by the time we turned eighteen, but the spirit lives on). As a teenager, I spent my Thursday nights in pubs listening to my friends play gigs with their bands. Same with Fridays, and Saturdays. As I got older, this translated into music festivals, living with music industry people, album launch parties, and other seemingly-cool things.
For nearly every memory when I was young, there is an attached song or band. Turning up at a French lycée when I was sixteen and figuring out how to speak Français on the fly was defined by endless blasting of Muse at high volumes, as a drunk Parisian girl pierced one of my ears with a blunt sewing needle over a bottle of wine (I declined having the other one done for obvious reasons, and thus only wore one earring until I was brave enough to do the second ear aged twenty-three). Living in the Alps a few years later, listening to Brit punk rap (mostly Jamie T) while hiding on the floor of a restaurant that we broke into because we needed somewhere to sleep for the night. Many such stories that shouldn’t be publicly discussed. You get the point.
At some stage through all of this I was in a band myself, called The UV Catastrophe, and I was the drummer. (Please don’t confuse this with me actually knowing how to play the drums). I spent more time that was good for me at friends’ houses listening to riffs, hanging out and putting chords together, digging through Limewire downloads, and ordering albums from the local record shop.
When I was younger, the creativity of music was interwoven into nearly every aspect of my life. I wrote songs for friends’ birthdays, made badly auto-tuned albums with roommates at 3am, self-directed music videos, and attempted to rap my way through talent shows. And did it all exceptionally badly.
At a certain point, that stopped completely. As did the “fun things” I used to do. I have listened to the same music for the last several years, which has been frankly boring and shit, and I am stunned to realize that it’s unclear, even to me, if this is an outcome of me becoming more boring, or an input to this same fact.
I talk about, write about and research creativity endlessly, especially with regards to intentionally seeking out the people and places that are inspiring. I have theorized and philosophized nonstop about “growing up”, and work, career, life, people, responsibilities, money, tradeoffs, and more. I feel extremely at ease with the necessity and beauty of progressing through various life stages. And yet, this week I have still felt horrified and saddened by this change, and the idea that I have grown old while I wasn’t looking. That sixteen-year-old-me is staring back from an old page, waiting to be re-discovered by the same person who had forgotten her.
I find it jarring when music comes up in passing today, and I’m asked if I have any interest in the topic, as if it wasn’t once a defining feature of my life. “Maybe? I suppose I used to, but not anymore?” My piano is still in Ireland, despite living in London. My saxophone has never been played. Nor my ukulele, trumpet, or tin whistle that I used to jostle around in my handbag. I really should do something about that.
It’s hard to see yourself clearly
It might be easy to assume, because I engaged with music-related shenanigans, that I was cool. I was not. It is very difficult to explain, ex post, just how badly teenage-me fit into established groups and how little I understood social norms. I was a freak, a weirdo, an outcast, and as much as I desperately tried for that to not be the case, I couldn’t figure out how to be anything but that.
For example, The UV Catastrophe was the outcome of being in a self-started physics club, where we would meet after school to discuss the philosophy and mathematics that our courses didn’t get into. Needless to say this is, in the world of teenagers, an extremely uncool thing to do. The name of our band is itself a physics phenomenon relating to invisible wavelengths. As you can see from our “band photoshoot” below, which was taken at … drumroll … the planetarium, we were not exactly Rolling Stone material.
Recently, after twenty years of lost contact, the guitarist from The UV Catastrophe (front, right) reached out to me quite randomly. “I’m going to be in London, let’s meet up!” I was actually very unsure about accepting this offer, as I didn’t know if I even wanted to revisit my sixteen-year-old life so suddenly. What could I possibly have in common with this person, after all this time? Which is another way of saying, what could I possibly have in common with my younger self?
It turns out, quite a lot!
We picked up where we left off instantly, as if twenty years never happened, walking around Hyde Park for hours and talking about the same shit we did when we were younger — except now, the 2026 version. The Epstein files had just been released; “the government” was still up to no good; China is winning at physics; something about surfing; and of course music. Did he still play the guitar, which was his defining passion when I once knew him? Like me, he had not picked up an instrument in a while. He wanted to play more, and also like me, was going to put in the effort.
There were also new things. We went bird watching and talked about our aging parents, children, and career tradeoffs. Adult-us were similar, too, despite the fork in our lives.
We talked about the past. Were we cool when we were younger? He seemed to think so, even though our peers at the time would have staunchly disagreed.
It’s crazy, how terrible we are at witnessing our own lives, and how memory has a way of trapping us inside our own, strange perspectives. Feeling like a freak, and being a freak, are entirely different things. We were curious, creative, and built things with our friends. We were performers, we were audiences, and we were weird with purpose. The things I despised about myself back then, are the things I am grateful for having been, today.
Which leaves me with another question for longer thought. If teenager-me was such a bad judge of who I was back then, what makes me think that current-me is any better about judging who I am today? Perhaps our certainty about the extent to which we know ourselves is overplayed; time, as well as somebody else’s perspective, nearly always changes how we end up understanding ourselves, in the good, the bad and the ugly. Maybe my worst qualities today aren’t that bad. And maybe my best aren’t that great.
The world is too high-stakes
I think the crux of my bittersweetness this week, as I walked around Hyde Park endlessly while air-drumming to Arcade Fire after having seen Keira Knightley, is the enormous dissonance between the feelings of freedom and possibility when I was younger, versus the caged-animal I feel to be today.
In short, the following seems to have become more clear:
Everything in the world feels like it has become an unbearable game of high-stakes poker. Is this a function of age? Of career? Of the economy being upside down? The world being on fire? Of strategies, and performance, and motives, and politics, and the AI that will kill us all, and the AI that gets everything wrong, and that AI that will make us jobless, and trillionaires that will steal our tax monies, and the entirety of the internet that will cancel you if they learn your name, and the capitalism that requires the entirety of the internet to even know your name just so you can get a paycheck, your one and only, before you do get canceled?
As I write this, it feels like my lungs are slowly rotting from the inside. I have been sick for nearly three weeks, having lost my voice for one of them, and my chest infection has thrown a spanner in the moving parts of my life. The emails from people wondering if I died are piling up, forming a pile equal in size and stress from the people who are reminding me, for the fifth time, that I have not “done the thing” yet. Edited the article, redrafted the pitch, met the person, discussed the thing, powerpointed the strategy, taxed the taxes, booked the flights, reviewed the audit — all of which should have been a top priority and completed a long time ago. “Can you please see to this urgently?”. UGH.
I don’t know when, but somehow the things I loved to do for fun, became the things that I cannot afford to get wrong. The stakes felt like they were nonexistent when I was younger, and I suppose that was the point. I did everything creatively because I never felt the enormity of the downside or so paralyzed by tradeoffs. As you get older, they say you get wiser, in that you learn what things actually cost (because you've paid for a few of them). But the flip side to the knowledge that makes you wise, is the knowledge that makes you cautious. Every scar is a lesson hard learned, and as you get older, every lesson learned is another reason not to buy a drum kit and join a band.
I love writing, just as younger-me once loved music. But it’s going to slip through my fingers too, unless I find a way to do it the way I have mostly always done it — by writing random stuff for myself, that I happen to post online, and that people may or may not read, just for shits and giggles. Without big theories, or spending hours editorializing, and likely with imperfect spelling and ideas that go nowhere (for now).
Which is quite a long way to say, that’s what this is. If you want to read these moving forward, then great! And if not, also great!
Post Script
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Also this:
Come with me, come with me, we’ll travel to infinity.
Also also, here are some lyrics to a song I wrote while surfing in Donegal, with Colm on guitar. Colm and I met at Harvard, and we moved back to Ireland at the same time. We performed it at the leaving party of our friend (Irish Ron), who we also met at Harvard, and who also moved back to Ireland around the same time. (After Ron’s leaving party, Colm left to go back to the US, and I subsequently left to go to London).
Back in Boston Bay, it all seemed ok
You never once wished your life away,
It was lonely at times, but otherwise fine,
Since your dreams and your future were intertwined.
But In Ireland…
We don’t have this type of currency
We won’t play snakes and ladders with your property
We might have good ideas and youthful energy
But we’re not D4 aristocracy
Spending sprees before the GFC,
Helen McEntee with no constabulary,
The Ireland we thought was our sanctuary,
Turns out it was all imaginary
You didn’t build gaffs, you don’t give a crap,
We moved back just to watch society unwrap,
Far right demons, data centers for Siemens,
Our future is something the Dail keep stealing
You can’t get the ride cause yer ma is inside
You thought you’d have freedom before thirty-five
This life isn’t living, there’s too much that’s missing
Fine Gael, you know you’ll never be forgiven
I enjoyed reading that.
Well done Sinead. I love your brilliant articles. I spent 10 years researching the fate of Southern Protestants who have all but disappeared. My father was the Dean of Coyne. Book called BURIED LIVES. THE PROTESTANTS OF SOUTHERN IRELAND based on an MPhil from TCD.
Keep up the superb work.
Regards
Robin Bury