When I was little, mum and I would scamper away from the platform to hide inside the station if I saw or heard an orange train bombing toward us down the line. Remember them, the orange trains? If you’re young enough you probably won’t, and take that as a blessing because they were horrific, especially for children. First of all, they looked bloody terrifying. They were a shade of dark orange that I haven’t seen anywhere else in about 25 years, and they had an ominous black bar stretched across the middle of every carriage. But it was the noise it made which caused mum and I to retreat indoors.
We’d get the Dart from Blackrock and, with the right amount of quiet, you could honestly hear these things coming from the next stop in either direction. You knew it was coming well before the track started whistling like a kettle, that’s how loud they were – at least, that’s what a six-year-old me remembers. Mum used to pretend that she was scared of them too, so the two of us would press our hands against our ears and wait out the thunderous roar together as it shot past the doorway at a gazillion miles an hour. Then she’d take my hand and bring us back to the platform, at which point it’d probably already be in Mosney or wherever the hell these trains actually went. Remember Mosney? If you’re young enough you probably won’t, and take that as a blessing too because that was also horrific.
These are potentially my earliest memories of experiencing fear and, more importantly, my earliest memories of hiding from it. Twenty-five years later, I still hide from it, but that’s what I gave up 24 days ago as a New Years resolution, being afraid.
My auntie wanted me to knock the smokes on the head, while the aul’ lad would’ve preferred that I resolved to join a gym this month and he was a little more overt in his annual December hints than usual – “I see Ben Dunne is doing a deal on memberships” – but giving up fear is fair. Reason being, it’s a far bigger detriment in my life and to my life than smoking or not exercising right now.
Before Christmas, I made a list of all the personal, professional and romantic opportunities that I’ve passed up down the years and realised that every single one of them led back to an ultimate fear of rejection. That was the common denominator, a very visceral and deep-rooted fear that a potential employer would find out that I’m not as impressive as my CV read, or a woman would discover that I’m not as funny in real life as I am on Tinder. I hate disappointing people.
In 2016, for example, I turned down the chance to cover a major sporting event live from Rio de Janeiro because I was frightened that my then-boss would find out that I sometimes stutter when I’m nervous and regret asking me to go, in case I shit the bed and stuttered in front of a packed-out press tent and made a show of the website or something. The painfully ironic thing here is that it was The Paralympic Games, an event where the courage to overcome handicaps is celebrated, so stuttering – if it happened – probably wouldn’t have been that big of a deal? Who knows. What I do know is that I have a bunch of tales of self-sabotage like that and the idea of adding more to the collection, denying myself further opportunities in life, is far scarier than anything else I can think of right now.
A couple of years ago, on the Dart to Malahide, we passed a station which was like a boneyard for loads of beaten-up old trains that had been phased out. To the left of us, on a track that goes nowhere, there was one single carriage from an orange train, sitting there for God knows how many years.
It was sad, partially because it reminded me of my mum, who is no longer with us, but mainly because it seemed like the loneliest thing in the whole world. I don’t go around sympathising with big inanimate bits of machinery all that often, but this seemed particularly poignant because I wonder if the same thing happens to us when we fly instead of fight when faced with scary situations, be it the beginning or end of a relationship, a new friendship or a want to find a new career – anything. I wonder if eventually we’ll lose our connections, our status, our purpose and we’d forever remain stationary and alone, like this relic of a train carriage, if we flat-out reject change in fear of the unknown.
And that’s a track I don’t want to be on any longer.
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