Z for Zwitter is in honour of the mix of male and female in our human nature. The diverse ways trees reproduce inspired me to think about gender as more fluid than we like to admit. Their network of roots helped me make connections between my seven disappointments and my despair.

During the pandemic, I thought sifting through major disappointments in my life and shaping them with words would help me face my endgame but when the war against Ukraine began, I found only despair – so many refugees fleeing their homeland because of war, want, oppression or climate catastrophes. Refugees and their children in Donegal challenged me to search for hope.  In exploring my sense of self I found seven sources of hope.

1. Gender identity: Discussion of Trans became unbearably polarised in the media during Covid. I lost heart in marketing my novel Michel-Michelle. Reading articles about young people using choking in sex brought questions about confusion between sex, gender and power. When young men describe how they need porn and images of sluts and whores to reach orgasm, it reflects our toxic double standards about freedom, equality and responsibility. I have hope that most young people have a much healthier approach to gender than the traumas which leak out into the media. I have hope they know the difference between erotic behaviour with the joys of sex, and psychotic behaviour with its delusions of pleasure in power and abuse. I have hope that a more fluid sense of masculine and feminine could undermine the polarisation between gender identities.

• Eco v Ego: Power struggles and policy failures in planting native trees in Ireland heightened my frustration and disappointment over the delays in planting a native woodland. Ash dieback in every hedgerow symbolised the carelessness of decades of neglect. When hockey, hurly and camogie sticks no longer hit with the strength and flexibility of ash we can mourn the inaction and ignorance of the past but it is not too late to plant other trees. Planting thousands of trees in Donegal in Doirinis in April 2021 gave me hope that one day long past my day, red squirrels can once again wander freely above the heads of children below. Waste wood can warm our homes and provide shelter for creatures we don’t even see. Your children and their children will teach their elders about the plants, trees and water which bind the planet together.

• Love-life: Travel restrictions during the pandemic brought disappointments which challenged my life partnership and friendships. Schorse lived and worked in Berlin when we met and we have travelled between Germany and Ireland over the last twenty-five years. The pandemic showed the vulnerability of a relationship which depended on good health and cheap flights. And what about the cost to the climate of those flights? And what about those friendships – would they survive the strain of distance and separation? Would Schorse and I ever live together? His retirement in 2023 gives us hope of sharing our endgame and friends will visit the native woodland as it grows.

• Equality and Diversity: My despair in 2022 brought questions over whether all those years campaigning for equality were a waste of time. The steadily increasing gap between rich and poor in my lifetime threatens our survival on the planet and the most exploited suffer first. Research shows a wide gap between rich and poor undermines the health and welfare of the rich as well as starving the poor. There is hope in the growing awareness of how our over consumption in rich countries feeds the dinosaurs of global finance who have a vested interest in inequality. There will be a new  economic system. Who will design it?

• Idols and Icons: When a writer in my Donegal writing group alerted me to the Kardashian family as major icons whom I hadn’t even heard of, I struggled to connect the diversity of icons in the 21^st century and what they say about us. Images of the goddess at Greenham Common merged with Brigid the pagan goddess and Brigid the first Irish woman bishop and helped me make connections between a craving for scientific certainty and the mysteries of the human spirit which connects body and mind.  I hope a stronger sense of self can eliminate the need for icons and idols.

• Ulster and Brexit: The pandemic distracted from the reality of Brexit. The threat of renewed violence and polarisation between British identity and Irish nationalism brings uncertainty. On the Ulster border no-one wants a hard border so hopefully compromise on customs and trade can avert this threat. Co-operation over the nature that binds us together on this island can offer new ways of exploring unity.

• Writing:. In March 2020, Victorina Press launched my novel Michel-Michelle at the Irish Writers’ Centre in Dublin. As we gathered we were unaware Covid was also present in the room but within days it dominated our consciousness. I retreated to lockdown in Donegal and its aftermath as we zoomed around the emerging new world order. Plans for readings to promote Michel-Michelle in libraries, bookshops and events were crossed out of the future. In 2021 I finished another novel but was reluctant to publish it. Even close friends found Michel-Michelle hard to read and reviewers from the trans community didn’t like it either.  Why release new fictional characters to live in unsold books in an unknown world?  Why create fictional characters when I am a character worth exploring. Trees led me into a labyrinth of roots and memories of the last seven decades. Trees persuaded me to share some of those on my blog. 

With the help of the ghosts of dead friends and the planting of a native woodland a new sense of self emerged from the cocoon imposed on me during the pandemic. My fingers on the lonely laptop tuned into my despair. A sense of self which is resistant to manipulation and is not dependent on the opinion of others emerged. Arthritis in my hands reminds me to search out others and cry out to the next generation to be alert to the shift into a new world order. We all have a part to play in shaping it. Inaction is dangerous and words are not enough.