Cork man's poetry portrays his own battle with addiction

Glen McCarthy describes his book, Me, Myself and Eye, as “My journey of poetry from darkness to light”.

The 45-year-old Hollyhill native says he has suffered, as he puts it, “with this thing called ‘The Head’ for years”, and he says addiction has followed him, and he has followed addiction, for most of his adult life.

Glen’s experiences have shaped and scarred his life, but he is in recovery now, and, he says, he takes each day as they come.

He has put together a collection of his poetry, works he wrote during a six- or seven-week period when he was in the grip of an active addiction, suffering from a psychosis born of alcohol and chemicals.

He says he found it a “brutal” process to read some of the poems, but there is an honesty in his writing which does not spare the reader or the writer.

Me, Myself and Eye is named after the voices in the author’s head, with Me and Myself constantly at war, and he describes Eye as “the eye of awareness in me, it’s like the guardian angel that was minding the two of me”.

Glen says he took his first drink at the age of 13, but a childhood love of sport kept him more-or-less on the straight and narrow until later in his teens, and he was good academically, but he says he was “never college-bound” at any point in his young life.

“Hurling, football, basketball, I was on the Munster team for basketball, and I had tries for the Irish team; at 16 or 17 I took a drink, or a drink took me, or addiction found me, or I found addiction straight away.

“I started taking ecstasy and I found Sir Henry’s and I just loved the scene, and I got pretty good at that and staying out and I never really came home, I would have been 17, 18, 19, around 1992. I loved Henry’s, I used to live for that place.” 

Taking a toll

He says the start of that period of his life was enjoyable, but the ecstasy and it soon caught up with him. He remembers being out and he would ring what he thought was a taxi firm’s number to take him to the next party but he would unconsciously ring home instead.

“My dad would be on the phone and he’d say ‘Would you ever come home, your mam will burn down the house with all the candles she has lit for you’, and that happened loads of times.” 

He says he was eventually hospitalised from the strain his lifestyle was placing on his body, and then “if it all hit the fan and I had enough, I’d go away to a treatment centre or I’d be put away”.

That cycle continued for years, and he adds: “It’s not like I was a bad, bad person, but it was all about me when addiction came calling, I was gone, and I would do anything by any means necessary then to fund that, but I even lost the ability to do that in the end, and my head started at me, and my mind started coming at me.

“The minute I took a substance, it was cocaine for me, I would be straight into paranoia, psychosis thinking, straight away, and then I’d have to drink vodka to get rid of that, to numb that, and then I was off on a merry-go-round for six or seven weeks, and I’d end up hospitalised again,” he says.

For years in treatment, he says, he was told “no offence” and was asked if he was a storyteller, and when he would reply that he was a painter and decorator, he would be told that he should take up creative writing.

“I used to take fierce offence, thinking they were accusing me of dramatising my story, or making things up, but then, over the last few years, I started putting pen to paper and a lot of what is in the book is from that.

“The writing is new to me, it’s like the dam is open to me, I’m after finding something that helps me, and they all started as scribbles and they’re here in the book as poems,” he says.

A recent appearance on The Two Norries podcast has allowed him to tell his story to a wide audience, and with the book he has further put shape and meaning to that story.

Glen married Jen, “the love of my life,” last year, and his book is dedicated to his children Charlie Mac and Rhia Rabbit. He’s currently training for an Iron Man. He remains in recovery, one day at a time.