The Conditions for Care

Written as I felt 2025 was closing out for me in early January.

We were seven.

I knew two of them already, enough familiarity to begin and the rest arrived in waves. Some were meeting Achill for the first time. Watching the place meet them was its own education: the pauses, the recalibration, the way the land slows language and mind. Achill does not impress itself upon you. It alters something in you instead.

The West was in one of its truer moods. Wind worrying the grass flat. Rock exposed down to the bone. The Atlantic moving with no interest in our intentions. Nothing designed to comfort but everything very honest.

And honesty, I am learning, is one of the preconditions for care. Walking together, my body changed before my thinking did. Breath lengthened. Attention dropped out of my head and into my feet. There was no self to maintain, no version to perform. Just ground. Just weather. Just the shared rhythm of bodies finding balance on uneven ground.

I hadn’t expected the end of 2025 to feel like this.

I thought this would be a year of endurance of sealing myself shut through competence and control. I imagined independence as a kind of moral achievement. I believed care was something you organised for yourself: professionalised, rationed, carefully earned. Instead, care appeared when the conditions allowed it.

We hiked to the old radio tower station, faces stung awake by wind. One of us brought a cat, Salmon a small orange flare against the mountain, appearing and vanishing at will, refusing containment. He walked with us without obligation, choosing his own proximity. We laughed and trusted him. This too was a lesson.

At Keem Beach, after the descent, we swam. The water was merciless. Ice-cold. An assault. We screamed ourselves into it anyway, bodies hitting the Atlantic with a collective gasp. Pain collapsed into aliveness. When we emerged, skin burning, hearts loud, dolphins cut through the bay dark arcs surfacing and disappearing, indifferent to our awe.

We missed a stopping point on a drive and pulled in somewhere accidental. Dolphins again. Everywhere. As if the land was reminding us that wonder does not require precision. Sometimes you arrive by misjudgement.

We ate together. We sang. We laughed in that unguarded way that only happens when no one is managing the room. Stories of home moved between us, some tender, some fractured, some raw. We talked about dismantling the patriarchy not as abstraction, but as daily practice: how power arranges bodies, time, care.

At Gráinne Mhaol’s castle, we stood among stone that remembers refusal. We spoke about her gender. About lineage. About how resistance lives in the body long before it is recorded in history. About queerness not as modern invention, but as persistent interruption.

One night we sang properly, voices uncertain, then finding each other. On New Years night we danced in the van as rain hammered the roof, the new year arriving sideways and soaked. In a deserted village, someone played the tin whistle into open air and we spoke seriously about communal living, about shared labour, about what it might mean to live off the land without romanticising its difficulty.

None of this was accidental. The West creates conditions. Roughness. Exposure. Slowness. It strips away performance and leaves you with what is necessary.

Queerness does the same.

Queer life, at its best, is not just identity, it is infrastructure. It is a way of arranging ourselves so that care can circulate without hierarchy, without proof of worth. It is attention without extraction. Presence without possession.

For a long time, I believed care came with terms and conditions. That it would eventually ask for repayment. That it required me to be manageable, impressive, contained.

But the land did not ask that of us and neither did the people.

Achill does not meet you halfway. You meet it fully or not at all. Your footing changes. Your pace changes. You learn where to place your weight. You learn to trust that the ground will hold you not because it is gentle but because it is there.

This is what care has looked like in my life lately. Not softness. Not rescue. But reliability. The kind that allows your nervous system to stand down. The kind that does not need to be named to be real.

As the Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue wrote: “May you know the warmth of your own belonging.”

Belonging, I am learning, is not consensus. It is condition.

As the year closes, I am less interested in resilience than the polished virtue of endurance. More interested in rootedness. In staying. In trusting what holds without spectacle. In letting care arise where the conditions allow it.

I didn’t expect to end this year held like this by land, by people, by shared cold water and shared song.

But perhaps this was never accidental.

Perhaps care was always possible here

in the West,

in queerness,

in bodies arranged differently against the weather waiting only for us to arrive and remain.

This year, I’m staying with my writing. If you want to read alongside me, you’re welcome to subscribe.