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It’s a precious thing to be able to get back into
a place after having lost it. Just to experience it again, one last time. “Monday morning was the busiest day of the week. You wouldn’t be able to get in the door. I’d put my head down and go straight up the stairs.” it’s not for everyone. It comes with a lot of risk, a lot of grief, a serious mental health toll, but it also can come with incredible freedom, amazing community building and other ways of dealing with trauma and isolation, as well as that creative reimagining. It’s got good and bad. “ Shane adds, “The grief that you mentioned is very real. I’m particularly sentimental, it always takes me time to get over losing a place. There’s different ways to cope with that. I lived in a house between 2020 and 2022 called ‘Piss House’. I’ve really struggled to get over that. It was a really unique living situation, and I haven’t been able to recreate it since. I’ve been back, and while all the stuff has been moved, it still has that sense of home, of familiarity. It’s a precious thing to be able to get back into a place after having lost it. Just to experience it again, one last time.” I hadn’t considered that perspective before. The inevitable attachment to things and places that we, as humans, always develop. “I realized as I was walking around, if I think of how many houses I’ve lived in over the 12 years I’ve been squatting, and developed that sort of connection with, over the course of my life.”, Shane continues. “How many houses have I done that with? How many places would most people get to do that with? Each one is a whole lifetime in itself, so I feel like I’ve lived much more life than if I’d just stayed in a few places. There’s a lot of overhead to it, once you get a place it’s a lot of work to get it up and running. I work full time as well on top of that. I have very little free time as a result, but even the instability isn’t all bad. There’s a way you can look at it where there’s a positive to it. I’ve lived in so many different types of house. It’s very nice to live in Dublin 4, which I never would have known otherwise.” “I feel like squatting, you have to find a way to embrace that uncertainty and impermanence. Which feels a little like, buddhist or something, and there’s obviously grief. But there’s also that exercise of letting go, which I find spiritual and beautiful,” Sage tells me. “There was a person who came who told us that they used to come here when this shop was open, and that it used to sell Christmas and Halloween decorations, exclusively, all year round.” “In another house, we got a knock on the door one time, and we answered to this stranger outside who told us that he had grown up in the house, that his mother lived there until she had to be taken care of. She had died at the age of 99, and there was a statue that was deeply important to her. We were able to get it back to him, and he took us on a tour of the house, showing us where he built the sink.” I pet Morgan, while Sage explains to finish “These are people’s stories that end up being wiped out. Maybe they have no family. Nobody wants to claim the memories. There’s something about being in places like that,in a way, you’re bringing back the memory of the people who lived there.” @thatsocialcentre Get in touch to get involved. 19