Sasha Piton
Irish-French-American Sasha Piton has travelled widely outside the US but has recently settled in Dublin. In her new series for The Journal, she shares the insights of a new arrival on a country she’s trying to call home.
I’VE BEEN IN Dublin for three months now. It’s been a huge change, and for the first two months, I mostly lived in a state of what felt like joyful survival mode, while looking for housing but building connections, meeting my pen pal, visiting cities and searching for a cup of coffee that I loved.
It was chaotic, but I had to put myself out there physically and also para-socially on social media because — well, it’s my chosen job.
I haven’t posted on social media in a week, though. My sister was here, which was a huge treat. This last month, being in my new space, going on vacation, and then having family come into town so quickly has made me worry that I wouldn’t necessarily be the best host for someone who’s visiting Dublin as a tourist.
I’m so new in this city that I can’t perform in it yet; I can only just get by, get my bearings. My challenges of navigating Dublin were exposed this week, which leads me to wonder, while I’m still learning to live in this city, can Dublin show up for me the way I’ve learned to show up for myself?
Irish pub fun
Every four years, the World Cup rolls around again. I don’t watch many sports, but something my family seems to gather around is football/soccer’s pinnacle, the World Cup. We’ve watched it together across Canada, different houses in the US, France and now Ireland.
As someone who is new to pub culture, it was actually fun finding different places to watch different matches in Dublin. And instead of taking my sister to Carroll’s gift shop, we went to Penney’s looking for World Cup gear.
Like, what is my life right now? From watching these games in our small town in the US, where we felt aeons away from Europe, to now watching the games happening in the US, but from pubs in Ireland. Phones down, arm wrestling during timeouts.
Sadly, being so near to France right now, while based in Ireland, but with my grandparents having passed away, it feels almost like a stolen proximity. We have nowhere to visit in France, no homestead to connect to. But without my French grandparents and the journey we lived together in the US, I wouldn’t have ended up in Ireland at all.
It’s one of those ‘wouldn’t have one without the other’ situations, but grief still comes in waves like the sea that I’ve chosen to live near. But with my big sister in tow, walking my pace that keeps her shorter legs more at a jog, we travelled all along the DART line.
One night this week took us to Howth, one of the most highly recommended towns from anyone I speak to, and it truly was magical. And it was in Howth that we finally discovered what the famous Irish pub rounds were all about. Sitting in a pub with the sea close by, the games on, and the rounds up and running, the way only the Irish could orchestrate, was pure fun.
And you have to push to keep up. We learned that skipping a round isn’t just rude but also won’t be forgotten. We went up there with no plans and had the best night. It seems that as long as I leave room for unplanned fun, Dublin will find a way to give me little nods reminding me that the sacrifice of all the planning to get here is worth it.
Finding my feet
I didn’t drink alcohol for about 13 years at all, not a drop. And so I’m learning my way around the choices at a pub. So far, half Rockshore Lager and half Rockshore Cider is what I can get down the gullet and enjoy. Or a fancy shandy I discovered accidentally with San Pellegrino blood orange soda mixed with Rockshore Lager.
My sister, I’m pleased to announce, can absolutely split the G of a pint of Guinness, but she also enjoys a pint of the beers we used to get in France with our Pépé.
So this visit feels a little more vulnerable for me because I don’t yet feel qualified to show my sister all the best places as someone who’s still discovering this city myself. A normal trip where we would focus on making jokes online and sharing our silly shenanigans is replaced by my need for two extra hands to go to the home store so I can grab pillows, a toaster, some storage bins, a shower curtain and sadly still no coffee grinder.
As a tourist visiting Ireland in the past, I always got out of Dublin. To me, it’s a living city, not a visiting city. And the place my brain is still adjusting to. We hail from a small town in Arizona, where we went to school with the same people in Kindergarten at age five that we graduated from high school with at age 18.
My sister sees why this life is more than just a change in country and culture, but a new way of life for me. But maybe that’s how Dubliners feel anyway, where you can’t get away from the guy you dated at 16. He just keeps showing up at inopportune times, reminding you of your former self. Maybe that’s why I love this island so much… It still feels a little like a small town while offering the grunge of a big city.
A touch of homesickness
I don’t miss running into my ex, but I do miss a road trip to visit friends and family. Loading up my dogs and my cooler and prepping the playlist for a nine-hour one-way drive through the most beautiful parts of my home country just to see family at Christmas.
Or a five-hour drive through Yellowstone National Park, watching wildlife while listening to Queen Latifah albums, processing life’s most recent life-ing moment—whether grief, work stress, or just needing to exhale — there is something truly special about not feeling like five hours one way is inconvenient to celebrate your friend being able to adopt her son, finally. The States are vast, but finding those who will literally climb mountains for you is a great privilege.
I also miss the summers in Idaho, where the air smells like BBQ, kids walk barefoot holding damp towels at the end of the day, and fireworks light up the neighbourhood skies for the entire month of July. Families with sparklers and neighbours sitting on their front lawns to get the best views of the four-way stop sign, the prime spot for lighting off the wick, held up between bricks so it doesn’t fly sideways and into our garages. (Read: they sometimes fly sideways and into our garages). I might have lived three hours from the closest international airport, but the wide open skies gave me sunsets that took my breath away.
But Dublin did gift me a piece of home this week. Olivia Dean. I’d been trying to get tickets to one of her shows for a year across five cities, still unaware at the time that I’d be moving to one of them. Eight days before her Dublin show, I got an email giving me two minutes to decide on a standing ticket. I said ABSOLUTELY and asked questions later.
Is this indoor or outdoor? Will there be food there? I did not look up how many people could fit there. Forty thousand, as it turns out. But standing in that crowd, overwhelmed as I was, I kept feeling like this was the closest thing to a windows-down road trip I could get in this city.
Emotions ran high, and my eyes welled up many times seeing this artist experience the biggest crowd of her tour! Watching her listen to 40,000 people sing her songs back to her kept bringing tears to my eyes. You know how some artists reach all-time fame, and you can see and feel that it’s too much for them. Some artists will drink heavily during their concerts, some will just seem a little zoned out, but she was looking into the faces of the people staring back at her.
She even said, “I’m gonna give you everything I have and all I ask is that you be present with me.” My brain said “I know she says this in every city she’s in” but I could see the awe on her face and I just wanted to show up for her. So for her opener my phone was in my pocket. I just wanted my memory to be what captured the moment and to see her through my actual lenses versus the lens on my phone.
I sat in that in-between space; part of the crowd, but also stepping back and witnessing it. Watching people sing with their best friends, phones up and seeing Olivia take it all in, once the camera showed her just how many of us were there. She sang about her grandma emigrating from the Caribbean and relocating her family tree to London, and that song is about how SHE can exist because of her grandmother’s bravery and courage. The song is about something that happened two generations ago, but it feels important in this time. And this huge crowd choosing to cheer for her, for that song, I was overcome. And tears ran perpendicular to the glitter I put across my cheeks.
God, the crowd. It was huge, and not what I’m used to. She sold out Marlay Park two nights in a row. 40,000 people, twice. I know some people didn’t even go in, and others left early, a little overwhelmed by the numbers, even though they’d spent real money on those tickets. That says everything about how intense it was.
At one point, I leaned over to my sister and asked if she’d be okay leaving early because there were just so many people. I’ve never been so glad for the tools I’ve gained over the years; breath work, tapping my fingertips, swaying in place, because holy hell, I had no idea what was coming, and it gave me everything my soul needed.
Her last number, her number one single, Irish dancers pranced out on stage in a surprising delight for us all! Maybe other places she can bring out a local artist, and maybe she did… but for me, nothing could ever beat this. It was a call and response (that was, of course, pre-planned), but we loved her, standing for hours, spending so much time and money to get to this venue, and in return, she has Irish dancers do their thing to her music. I just sobbed.
This is the ONLY place in the world she could do that. And it just felt special. Then confetti popped, and fireworks lit up the summer sky. I just sat in all my senses. Hearing her sing my favourite song, the whole crowd singing with her, the smell of the fireworks, the explosion of them, the disco ball on the stage sending fractals of light across all of us dancing. I wanted to give her my all. My complete and one hundred per cent presence to honour this Irish gift. And she gave me a piece of an Idaho summer: fireworks lighting the sky where the sun was still setting at 10 pm.
There is so much in the world that is heavy, but there is also so much good. And in that moment, all the goodness in the world was FELT. The Irish culture, this British woman, my American heart.
Olivia’s grandmother got on a boat and changed the course of her family history. I don’t know yet what crossing this ocean will mean for mine. But I put my phone down, I let myself have the fireworks, and I let Dublin remind me that I’m exactly where I meant to be right now. I just got here. I don’t have to have it all figured out, and somehow Dublin already knew that.
Sasha will be back with more insights into her adopted home (yes, Ireland) and city (yes, Dublin) next week.