{"id":662552,"date":"2026-08-29T18:46:27","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T18:46:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/662552\/"},"modified":"2026-08-29T18:46:27","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T18:46:27","slug":"blindboy-unmasked-the-thing-im-most-afraid-of-is-having-to-work-in-an-office-so-now-i-work-in-an-office-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/662552\/","title":{"rendered":"Blindboy unmasked: \u2018The thing I\u2019m most afraid of is having to work in an office… so now I work in an office\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a busy beer garden in Dublin, the writer and podcaster Blindboy Boatclub<\/a> is talking about neurodivergence in writing and how the CIA funded writers in Latin America. If you leaned in you would recognise his voice from the Blindboy podcast or the Rubberbandits or his TV documentaries, but nobody leans in. He is not wearing his trademark plastic bag mask. So what does he look like? Is he …<\/p>\n

a) Hideous to behold.<\/p>\n

b) A totally featureless pink oval, like a balloon.<\/p>\n

c) The most beautiful man I have ever seen.<\/p>\n

d) Not a man at all, but some sort of beast.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll get no answer from me. Blindboy guards his real-life identity very carefully. Earlier, at a rehearsal of Animals, the new Abbey play adapted from his short stories by Dan Colley, he absented himself until the photographer was finished taking pictures. His need for anonymity has something to do with his autism<\/a>, he thinks. The psychologist who helped diagnose him said, \u201cYou have a job where you\u2019re famous, but you wear a plastic bag so you don\u2019t get bothered in the shop? A lot of people would really want to have what you have.\u201d<\/p>\n

These days Blindboy works in an office in a building among accountants, solicitors and lawyers. None of them know who he is either. He goes in in a suit and tie. \u201cI got the idea from Nick Cave when he was coming off heroin. He went and got a suit and tie and said, \u2018This is what I do. I go in and I write songs in my office\u2019 … It gives me the opportunity to meet people every day and practise small talk. It gives me purpose. It allows me, in a job where I\u2019m self-employed, [to create] boundaries.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Blindboy: \u2018I left my first day of school feeling great shame. The pain of that still rises up in me\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

He is also influenced to do this, he says, by \u201cthese monks who meditate beside rotting corpses so that they can confront the thing they\u2019re most afraid of, which is death. The thing I\u2019m most afraid of is having to work in an office … I meditate amongst the corpses. I work inside my biggest fear but I shut that door, and my office is a neurodivergent-friendly space. I get in that door and I take off my suit, and I have a tracksuit in my office, and I get to walk around, and I get to stim and do all these things.\u201d<\/p>\n

School was difficult for him and he was constantly being kicked out of class (he had a kind art teacher who let him sit making art in the back of his art room when he was kicked out elsewhere). He had a regular job just once, in a call centre in 2006. \u201cI got fired after six weeks for leaning back in my chair too much and printing out 93 pages about CIA crack cocaine smuggling,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd the other thing that got me fired was, I was expected to go and sit with people at lunchtime in my team to socialise as part of the job and no one told me that. Instead, I f**ked off to the car park because I needed to be by myself. But it was interpreted as: this guy isn\u2019t friendly.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"BlindboyBlindboy at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne <\/p>\n

Blindboy\u2019s hugely successful podcast is, for the most part, a monologue that he spends three days writing and recording. He thinks of it as a never-ending autofictional novel. Each instalment is about 20,000 words long. \u201cThe recording software that I use allows me to record my voice with the precision that I can edit words with a word processor … Ten years ago it would have crashed my computer because of the amount of data.\u201d He laughs. \u201cI write with my mouth for people to read with their ears.\u201d <\/p>\n

Sometimes mediums stretch their limits, he says. The German-American writer Charles Bukowski, he notes, \u201chad a character called Hank Chinaski, this alcoholic, terrible writer who just does college tours and is horrible to women and it\u2019s really misogynistic and it\u2019s just him. And I\u2019m reading it, going, first off, Hank Chinnaski is just f**king Bukowski and secondly, this is a podcast. Bukowski was a manosphere podcaster.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was a subsection of his fans in the Rubberbandits days who might have liked Blindboy to become manosphere podcaster but he\u2019s far too emotionally intelligent for that. He has as many female fans as male ones. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf anyone says to me, \u2018To be a man is this way\u2019, it\u2019s very rarely useful information,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat I try and focus on instead is taking gender out of it. \u2018Can I be an adult?\u2019 An adult is someone who is assertive, who understands their own emotions and is able to express them. An adult is someone who has the skill to respond to their emotions rather than react to them. And what the manosphere does is it encourages people to become emotionally reactive. It encourages men to basically say that the only emotions that you\u2019re allowed to feel are jealousy, anger, bullying, aggression. Empathy is framed as weakness. You need to be able to say, \u2018I\u2019m insecure. I\u2019m jealous of other people. I feel shame. I feel small. I worry that other people are more powerful than I am.\u2019 Unless you\u2019re going there and accepting those negative things as part of who you are, you\u2019re not going to progress into becoming an adult who can respond to the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

A huge proportion of the podcast\u2019s fan base is outside Ireland. He recently sold out a live show at the Sydney Opera House. Does he notice a difference in the audience? He laughs. \u201cThey take me seriously. In Ireland, I\u2019m still the f**king eejit with the bag on his head, and that\u2019s fine. In Australia I\u2019m not that person. There are people in Australia and people in Britain, and if I post a video of me with the bag on talking, they actually get weirded out. And I love that, to be honest.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Blindboy: \u2018All I want is to live a boring life\u2026 I have no interest in fame. I couldn\u2019t give a f**k about it\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

He\u2019s not sure why his listenership has spread like this. \u201cOne thing that spreads my podcast is the amount of Irish people who are English teachers … If they have students that are very advanced English learners, they\u2019ll give them my podcast as a little challenge. Going, \u2018All right, can you understand this fella?\u2019 I actually end up with a lot of international listeners from that. And then they spread.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"BlindboyBlindboy at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne <\/p>\n

There is also, if you listen to the podcast and read any of his three short story collections, a continuity between the two forms. He is viewed by some, this interviewer included, as a unique and important literary talent, but he\u2019s been a bit wounded in the past by negative reviews. <\/p>\n

\u201cI do want to be embraced by the literary world,\u201d he says. \u201cBut the part of me that wants to be embraced is a toxic, insecure part of myself. So I want to be the best writer that I can be. I want to be the best version of me. I write books because I love the process. And I write books so that I can have an opportunity to write another one. And that there is the joy for me. The part of me that wants to be accepted by the literary establishment is the little autistic kid in school that was called stupid. I don\u2019t have a Leaving Cert. So I have a lot of shame around wanting to be called a good boy … I\u2019m wary of the part of me that wants approval.\u201d<\/p>\n

For him, writing also has a therapeutic function. \u201cI did train to be a psychotherapist in my 20s, and journalling is a huge part of becoming a therapist, to try write my emotions as raw as possible. There\u2019s bits of me in all the characters. The Donkey is a fictional story about a man trying to save an abused donkey, \u201cbut a huge amount of it is when my dad died when I was 21 of a brain tumour and I lost the ability to cry. If I feel something intensely, I always try and write it down in the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Donkey is in his most recent collection, Topographica Hibernia, and is also included in the new play, as is another moving story, The Cat Piss Astronaut, about a boy with an obsessive interest in space being assaulted by a grown woman. \u201cAbout 90 per cent of that is autobiographical,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen I was about four years of age, I was in a playground, and there was a grown woman there, probably the age that I am now, and I started telling her and her little daughter that one day the sun was going to expand and that it would engulf us all. And I think what that did is it actually frightened that woman. Her daughter got upset too, and I think she did not know how to soothe her daughter so she beat me the way you\u2019d beat an adult.\u201d <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Blindboy Boatclub: \u2018I had the choice of being a psychotherapist or a mad bastard\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

In discussing his influences, Blindboy references Flann O\u2019Brien, Ernest Hemingway and Mariana Enriquez, but that story was influenced by Frank McCourt. \u201cHe won the Pulitzer and he won it for a good reason,\u201d he says. \u201cThe opening of Angela\u2019s Ashes, the first few chapters, where Frank McCourt does first person from the perspective of a three-year-old. It\u2019s just brilliant. I was trying to go to the earliest, earliest memories.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other stories are more fantastical. I\u2019ll Give You Barcelona began when he was in the gym and a man in his 50s came in and \u201cshaved his arsehole at everyone. I wondered what his dreams would be like, and that dream came to me: him ripping the skin off, wrapping it around the dog. That\u2019s so stupid. I cannot fail now because I started with failure and [then] I\u2019m trying to unfail … I always begin the process with failure. In order to write, the biggest barrier is the fear of failing. So if you\u2019re trying to write something good, you\u2019re going to fail. I start with the worst idea possible and write my way out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"RehearsalsRehearsals in the Digital Hub for the new Blindboy play at the Abbey Theatre. Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne \"RehearsalsRehearsals in the Digital Hub for the new Blindboy play at the Abbey Theatre. Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne <\/p>\n

Earlier, in the rehearsal space in the Digital Hub<\/a> in Dublin 8, we watched Dan Colley and choreographer Jessie Thompson guide seven actors through a beautiful and grotesquely physical performance of the story I\u2019ll Give You Barcelona. I watch as the character\u2019s \u201cskin\u201d is ripped from one actor by the rest of the cast in a sort of surreal dance. The play interweaves seven of Blindboy\u2019s stories. There are 12 performers and 90 costumes. Blindboy wanted to work with Colley because Colley had previously worked on adaptations of the work of the fantastical writers Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez and Jorge Luis Borges. \u201cMe and Dan, we\u2019re on the same wavelength. I\u2019m handing my album over to a brilliant DJ to remix.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the pub, later, he seems in awe of Colley and Thompson and all of the actors. \u201cWhat I love is learning the ability to shut the f**k up, to notice when someone else is really good at their craft.\u201d <\/p>\n

He is creatively voracious. He constantly makes synth music (to the extent he\u2019s been offered a record deal that he declined: \u201cYou have to have a hobby. Not everything should be monetised.\u201d) He wants to write a novel next. He\u2019d love to make nature documentaries. His last RT\u00c9 series, The Land of Slaves and Scholars, won a Grierson Award. But he worries about the commercial expectations of many broadcasters. He loves classic 1970s documentary series such as The Ascent of Man, Ways of Seeing and The Shock of the New. \u201cThey can really only exist in pure public service broadcasting … \u2018Here\u2019s a bunch of money to do your thing\u2019 … If you can fund something the way you fund science, you get occasional excellence. When you fund anything on a commercial model, where you must have a return, you get consistent mediocrity.\u201d<\/p>\n

He sighs. \u201cAnd it\u2019s so toxic in your industry,<\/a>\u201d he says, meaning journalism. \u201cI love doing this interview. I love chatting with you but I am afraid of this interview because I know it will end up as an Instagram post, and some of my words will be taken out of context by an online editor. When that happens, the tone is, \u2018Get a load of this prick\u2019. And I know that the caption is designed not to tell people that I\u2019m in the Abbey, but \u2018How can we get the dads in the comments pissed off?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Great art, he says, is replenishing but he finds the internet depleting. He has a second phone that\u2019s free of social media in order to read or work. \u201cI think with the written word, in particular, because you\u2019re hearing it in your own voice, you\u2019re hearing it in your own mind. Reading is a participatory act. When you do a good hour of reading, you come away from it feeling recharged. When you come away from an hour of doomscrolling, you do not feel recharged.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"BlindboyBlindboy at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne <\/p>\n

He has an interesting take on most things, and even his perspective on AI<\/a> is strangely uplifting. \u201cIn Greek mythology thousands of years ago, Prometheus and Zeus were bored. Prometheus says: \u2018Let\u2019s make a little world of people like us.\u2019 Zeus goes \u2018chill the f**k out. What if they become smarter than us?\u2019 Prometheus falls in love with them, gives them fire. The second they start creating art which is beautiful, Zeus creeps out and goes, \u2018Oh s**t! This AI is going to become more powerful than us\u2019, and he introduces mental health problems via Pandora\u2019s box to limit the AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

He laughs: \u201cWith Irish mythology, you have a race in Ireland [the Tuatha D\u00e9 Danann], the gods, and then you have, coming from somewhere around Spain, the Milesians. The gods go, \u2018Let\u2019s keep them away by casting a spell.\u2019 The humans, the Milesians, they use poetry and art to beat the gods. Then they come to Ireland and they banish the gods underground and they become the fairies. So if AI wins and takes us over, we\u2019ll have rogue humans who are trying to break the AI through code.\u201d He smiles, and I can see his smile because he has no mask on. \u201cWe\u2019re the fairies now.\u201d <\/p>\n

Animals runs at the Abbey Theatre<\/a> from September 23rd-November 7th as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a busy beer garden in Dublin, the writer and podcaster Blindboy Boatclub is talking about neurodivergence in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":662553,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[75],"tags":[112771,289,11357,149233,117481,18,117,19,17,361],"class_list":["post-662552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-abbey-theatre","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-autism","tag-blindboy","tag-digital-hub","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-magazine"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117180288710655089","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=662552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/662553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=662552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=662552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=662552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}