Help support our writers and keep our site ad-free. My acceptance letter into the Modern Literature graduate program at University College Dublin came to my house in Hamilton on August 20th. The course started on September 4th. I had nowhere to live and nowhere to go. I was deeply in love with my roommate who was seeing my friend behind my back. My mother came with me to Dublin, apparently for the express purpose of dealing with her grief of me leaving by having late night screaming matches constantly for the four days we shared a hotel room.
My first apartment in Dublin was somehow over two bars. It was the swing of the Celtic Tiger. You have to understand that Ireland was so poor for so long, that when they got rich, it completely went to their collective heads.
When payday finally comes, you go nuts and buy a round for the whole bar. Imagine if an entire country did that. I was broke, lonely and heartbroken. I stopped sleeping, stopped eating, started sleeping around a lot and eked out a disappointing European existence.
My dreams of becoming a literature professor myself were quickly extinguished by the utter hopelessness in the eyes of my own professors at University College Dublin. The thousand-yard-stare of these professionals who dedicated their live to a love of text, only to have their magnum opuses read by other members of a small incestuous community of academics. The first time I got this call, it was to say the least, awkward. The second time, I was a little bit better prepared, or as prepared as one can be.
It was some strange coincidence that during my years in Dublin, more than once I began to pursue a Vocation. More than once I sat down with a nun at my local churchβwhich I attend more than weeklyβand spoke to her about the process of a life of devotion. I stood there in church every Saturday and most Sundays and felt every fiber of my being lit up with belief. God was something that I felt personally in my life every day.
