I don't know what I'd say if someone asked when exactly I got comfortable with this. I'm not sure I have, if I'm being honest. Or maybe I have and I don't recognise it because comfortable doesn't feel how I expected.
I started five years ago. Skint, the cleaning work wasn't covering it, I knew someone from college who was doing well out of it. I went in thinking three months. Three months became six, became two years, became this. It's apparently a cliche, that timeline. Most women I've spoken to have some version of it.
What I find strange, and I keep coming back to this, is how normal the abnormal things become. The first time I talked money with a client, actually negotiating terms like a transaction, I felt the weirdness of it sharply. Now I barely notice. I say the rate. They agree or they don't. I've lost the self-consciousness of it and I'm not sure if that's a good thing or just an inevitable one.
Galway is an odd place to work. Small, gossipy, everyone knows someone who knows someone. I've had close calls. A fella I half-recognised from somewhere turned up once. I handled it, he was discreet, nothing happened. But your heart goes for a second. More than a second.
I do the holiday let cleaning in summers because the money's decent and I like the variation. I like having a thing I do that's entirely normal and public and involves no secrecy at all. There's a relief in it. I go home smelling of bleach and nobody asks anything tricky.
I've been trying to draw things lately. Not for any reason, just for myself. The Burren mostly, the coast west of Barna. I'm not very good. But it's the kind of thing I can do after work and it requires no performance and it belongs only to me. I think that matters more than I'd understood. Having things that are only yours.