“I can’t tell you how excited I am,” I told John before the series began. “It’s literally a show about my life.” Just hearing a Derry accent on TV is a novel treat for me, but this… This was to be a show about growing up as a teenage girl attending a convent school in Derry in the nineties. AKA my life. The show’s writer was a few years ahead of me at school. There are specific nods to our alma mater dotted throughout the show, from the motto embroidered on the uniform to the name of the school magazine.
The season finale of Derry Girls aired last week. A hit from the word go, and not just in Derry, it was a well-executed comedy that showed the normal life that continued in spite of the Troubles. It’s safe to say the whole of Derry (population circa 100,000) was watching it and the consensus was that it was well done and very funny. But with the final episode it became something more too.
[Spoiler Alert] The final sequence cuts repeatedly between two scenes. One is the teenagers dancing around like eejits on stage during the school talent show. The emotional and comical climax of ordinary teenage drama. The other scene is of the adults at home – parents and a grandfather – standing staring at the TV as news of the latest atrocity breaks. A bomb. No warning. Many dead. Death toll not yet confirmed.
The first response I saw from a Derry person on Facebook afterwards was the crying emoji. And not the one with a single teardrop. The one with a river of tears streaming from both eyes.
Critics praised the “poignant” ending. This was a comedy with heart that wasn’t afraid to let us see the other side of the hilarity and normal everyday life. But for the children of the Troubles and even the Ceasefire Babies, I suspect it’s more than just a comedy show with heart. It’s therapy. Seeing your story played back to you in a way that let’s you not just indulge in nostalgia but also acknowledge the pain and fear in the midst of it all is profound and healing.
I listened to the most recent Brené Brown interview on On Being over the weekend. She talked about the paradoxes we must live with and the wild heart she raises her kids to have. A heart that is at once brave and afraid, tough and tender. Holding the tension between these things is the real work of life.
The juxtaposition of those two scenes at the end of Derry Girls was a reminder to me of the courage it takes to live a normal life in the midst of pain and trauma. Holding the tension of those two scenes in your heart is a brave and vulnerable endeavour. Which is perhaps why I don’t often connect with it.
If you ask my generation they’ll usually tell you what I would tell you. That we didn’t really experience the Troubles. That the worst was over by the time we came along. And it’s true that the intensity had reduced by the nineties. But it doesn’t diminish the extent of what we did live through – even if our streets were not full of bombs, killings and riots, the news was. Nor does it diminish what the Ceasefire Babies grew up in the shadow of. Suicide rates for those born around or after the Ceasefire are staggeringly high. You don’t have to have directly lived through war and trauma to suffer its effects.
In the On Being interview Brené Brown said, “I think one of the greatest casualties of trauma is the loss of the ability to be vulnerable. And so when we define trauma as oppression, sexism, racism, I have no choice but to leave my house with my armor on and carry the 20 tons of that through my day, no matter how crippling it is, no matter how heavy it is…”
When we think about what the generations before us lived through and when we think about trauma as Brené defines it here, we see how brave we all must be to hold the tension of, as Brené says, soft fronts and strong backs. To be vulnerable enough to experience true joy and fulfilment in a world that is also scary and filled with pain is not easy for any of us. Our task is to find a way to be fierce and gentle at the same time.
