The first time I emigrated I couldn’t wait to go. My parents, returned emigrants who sacrificed a lot to rear their children here, wanted me to stay. But in the pre-boom 1990s, like the cattle in my native Golden Vale, I’d been bred for export. Half my extended family already lived abroad.
My favourite aunt, home from Australia, invented a game called Cycling Around the World. We'd lie in the top hayfield, feet pedalling the air, dodging imaginary country-specific obstacles, as aeroplane trails unfurled in the blue overhead. So when my time came to leave, my over-riding emotion was excitement. My mother cried at the airport. I thought she was mad.
Athens, where I got my first real job, was properly exotic. I loved it. So why did images of home assault me each day? I wasn’t homesick. But they persisted: smells from a street seller in the ancient Plaka conjured up my granny stirring stew on her Stanley; a city square carpeted with black cats sunning themselves recalled our grumpy sheepdog camped out at the back door.
Over the next few years, as I returned and left from Athens, Paris and London, I came to accept these sorts of things as normal, a sensation of displacement that only those with a heart in a few places can truly understand.
Finally, on the right side of the boom, I came home. I got a job, fell in love, bought a house. I was home and happy.
It's 2010, mid September, Madison Square Park. The sun has just dropped below the horizon, bathing the park in the diffuse light that cinematographers call magic hour. I'm sitting at a Shake Shack, eating a burger after a long day on set. My husband's opposite, laughing, telling me about his day, too. It's perfect. Except he's at home in Dublin. We're Skype dating. Over the past few months he has virtually accompanied me to a gala at Lincoln Center, walked through Central Park, and got lost in MoMA.
I didn’t mean to emigrate this time. We were only going for the summer. I’d done an MA that led to a J-1 visa, and a short film I’d made was selected for a few festivals. But then the crash hit. And when we got to New York I was offered work. I took it. When I kept being offered work we decided I’d stay, to see how viable it would be to move there. This time I cried at the airport. There’s something fundamentally wrong about leaving a person you love for economic reasons.
New York brought creative opportunities I’d never had at home. But emigrating in your 30s is different. What struck me most of all were the moments when my two worlds collided: a phone call with my mother on her birthday that lasted all the way from Bryant Park to Greenwich Village; joking with my nieces and nephews while watching softball alone in Central Park.
In the end the gap between me and the people I love proved too much to bear. It was snowing the day I returned. The troika came to town. Economically, culturally, everything seemed the same. But I was not the same. Emigration had made me resourceful, taught me resilience. Most of all it had reminded me how important it is to have a place to call home, and how elusive a sense of identity can be without it.
A few months later an earthquake hit Christchurch in New Zealand. I couldn't help thinking, What if that had been me? Soon afterwards an image came into my head, of a woman, in a pool, swimming. I didn't know it then, but this was the start of another journey, one that will culminate in the production of my play Remember to Breathe for Tiger Dublin Fringe. It's set in the Boys' School space at Smock Alley Theatre – a perfect backdrop to explore a psyche that is split between there and here, between head and heart, and the journeys we go on to find a place to claim as home.
Remember to Breathe runs from September 7th to 12th
