01
Bad Blood
All this bad blood here
Won't you let it dry?
It's been cold for years
Won't you let it lie?
Bad Blood
Bastille
Prologue
Childhood hands covered in warts, some mosaic, a hymn to what was flowing in my veins. Verruca Vulgaris—so disgusting the other children would say. I was filled with shame, my hands lowered beneath the school desk. Cirrus-like, nimbus-like, inching out of my fingers; these warts protrude, bringing nothing but a clingy self-awareness. My father’s hands are just the same, covered in warts of varying sizes: insignias of belonging to our clan. You have bad blood, my father would tell me, we have bad blood, all of us. They would try to rid me of these warts: ‘Compound-w’ dropped onto my hands each night. This numbing ritual became a reflective pre-bedtime amble with my parents. One by one, plasters were stripped slowly off, revealing success or failure. This was almost always followed by a kindred commentary on our bad blood. Next my father would examine my hands closely. Then, we would ask together how much these cauliflower-like outcroppings, speckled and unwelcome, had shrunk since the previous evening. A drop, a cold tingle, the briefest experience of numbing. Then the ritual of replastering, so this acid could yet again get to work. This feeble attempt to rid my body at surface level of the signs of my bad blood didn’t always work. Some of these warts would remain; partial, hollowed-out, ugly things, protruding from my fingers. Others would grow back, made whole again, bothersome and foreboding in their aliveness.
I didn’t know it then, but I would live a life plagued by my bad blood.
My father heard on morning radio that a possible cure for warts was visualisation, an unusual segment for a 1980s Irish radio show locked into the banality of a crisis-ridden Ireland. We sat together one evening to decide on my personal visualisation. This would surely work—a calculated leap of faith for my father. If nothing else, I am sure it was his attempt to bestow upon me some gesture of freedom from my fretful insecurities, to steady my childlike concerns. I visualised a dog, cartoon-like and bulbous in my child’s imagination. Frequently hungry, he would come and nibble on the warts at regular intervals during my day. I pictured them shrinking as they nourished this famished, brown-eyed, friendly dog. These daily visualisations served as a nice distraction, a hastening of hopefulness. It seemed to work—or so we told ourselves. The warts did indeed seem to shrink, becoming smaller and smaller across the months. My father and I became firm believers in the power of visualisation, even though others thought we were mad. Yes, pure mad. This was so, even in a 1980s Ireland (a place where some imagined they saw statues of the Virgin Mary move). There was, however, no place for something like visualisation in the accepted cartography of medical and folk cures. I grew up in an Ireland where holy wells were believed to hold medical cures, where Irish pilgrims travelled frequently to Lourdes to pray for healing. This was an Ireland where placing a statue of the child of Prague outside one’s door was deemed to bring wellness and sunshine, particularly in advance of one’s wedding day. In the majority of Catholic homes, walls were adorned with paintings of the sacred heart of Jesus, pierced by a lance-wound, bleeding and bloodied. In lives subjugated to Catholic governance, cathartic holy water brought with it hope. Our visualisation attempts, however, belonged to a different Ireland, one that would eventually show its heart, as the warts on my childhood hands fell slowly away.
This bad blood has made us this way.
Mantras as a way of being
I come across Judy Chicago's "Red Flag," as I trawl the internet for art work featuring blood -hers is an artistic representation of the reality of menstruation. This emotive photograph, raw and devoid of embellishment, features the intimate act of a hand, slight, feminine and unadorned, delicately extracting a tampon. The white starkness of the hand is contrasted sharply against the vivid crimson of menstrual blood. This kind of blood, often hidden, is presented here in its true, unaltered hue, a bold red that speaks volumes about the life it represents, the cycles it completes. The background, deliberately blurred, ensures the focus remains on the action at the centre, highlighting the normalcy and naturalness of the act of removing a tampon. The lighting, soft yet direct, casts a gentle glow on the skin, accentuating the textures and the tactile nature of the interaction between body and cotton. There is a palpable intimacy in this moment, a private ritual laid bare, challenging the viewer to confront their own perceptions and discomforts.
Reflections on a photograph depicting menstruation.
My father repeated the mantra ‘we have bad blood’ throughout my life. As a child, of course, I didn’t fully realise all of the ways that this bad blood would flow in and out of my body. I had no understanding of how it would shape my relationships and everyday life. Nor did my father, I suspect. This was an idea he was attached to, one that would become a reality for him, too, in unanticipated ways. I, he, we, were, are, plagued by this bad blood. This is the kind of blood that exiles. Through it, we can only inhabit this world in a certain way. In school, I would frequently place my wart-covered hands under the desk so other children would not stare. This was just the start. Exile in adulthood would assume more insidious forms. It has, ultimately, forced me to ponder regularly, like the anthropologist Janet Carsten does, on
‘What kind of stuff is blood.’
In Carsten’s evocative work, she reflects on blood as symbol, as identity, as a moral truth-teller about personal, political, and medical lifeworlds. Blood, in its essence, is emblematic of life. It is often seen as the force that gives life, a vital energy: as the saying goes, “blood is thicker than water”, emphasising the importance of family ties and deep-rooted relationships. Yet blood can also be a harbinger of death and sacrifice, its shedding a stark reminder of life’s impermanence. Blood can symbolise both unity and division in social and political contexts. In the sphere of spirituality, blood epitomises sacrifice, redemption, and the divine covenant, transcending its corporeal form to embody spiritual rebirth. Blood pulsates with the fervour of passion, the intensity of conflict, and the depths of animosity, encapsulating the spectrum of human emotions. It bears the duality of purity and impurity, with menstrual blood in particular embodying this contrast across cultures, revered in some and deemed impure in others. This story of blood extends to health and disease, serving as a vital indicator of our well-being, imbuing blood with new meanings tied to contemporary health anxieties and aspirations. Blood’s role in our lives is thus both celebrated and scrutinised, urging us to reconsider its impact on identity, connection, and societal norms.
It is the stuff of life, lore and legend.
Blood, in its essence, is emblematic of life.
But what kind of stuff is my bad blood ?
Bad blood, the kind of blood I have, is one that, over centuries, has woven itself into the fabric of familial lore. The story goes that some bloodlines, perhaps even my own, are marked by a predisposition towards misfortune or illness. It is as if our veins carry a legacy of sorrow. The notion of ‘bad blood’ has expanded beyond the mere physical to embody familial rifts and societal stigmas, painting a complex picture of the burdens we inherit and carry forward. It is as though our forebears have handed us a map of their journeys, marked with their trials and tribulations, asking us to navigate our own path while tethered to their legacy.
Indeed, my ‘bad blood’ has been an unwelcome teacher, unveiling difficult truths about the world I inhabit. It has exposed me to the depths of certain kinds of injustice with a quiet, persistent clarity. As it continues to course through my life, continually deepening its mark, it remains a relentless tutor, shaping my understanding of the world and myself. Such reflections on the nature of my own bad blood have urged me to craft this essay, a slow and sometimes painful writing process. As such, I write here in a series of fragments to reflect the very nature of how this ‘bad blood’ manifests within my own memories and lived experience. This mosaic of moments and feelings, where each tile reveals a different facet of this complex, bloodied inheritance. This is thus my personal story of how this bad blood has fashioned my particular, precarious way of being in the world.
This bad blood spreads its excrement through my life.
The Celtic Curse
Mucus, bile, infection: bloodletting as a tool to drain the body of its ill-health. To be ill is to be seen as imbalanced, unwellness set into bodily humour(s): blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. Brain, spleen, gallbladder, and lungs leaking personality type—maybe you are sanguine or phlegmatic or melancholic or choleric. There are a number of possible medical treatments for any of these ailments. Purging, catharsis, diuresis, but it is bloodletting that becomes valorised through a belief in the potency of blood. Leech therapy starts to dominate. Sitting in jars of rainwater, their existence is predicated on draining the body of bad blood. It is said that these medicinal leeches, hirudo medicinalis, with three jaws and a hundred teeth, can drink up to ten times their own body weight, their hunger for blood insatiable.
Reflections on bloodletting
My father was right. We do indeed have bad blood. I am backpacking in Peru with my husband when a phone-call home confirms that I share my family’s bad blood. A diagnosis of haemochromatosis has established the cause of some death, and some ongoing illness in our family circle. We were all tested before I left for my trip to South America. My father reads the results out on a crackly phone line from Arequipa as the smell of overcooked cuy (guinea pig) encircles me. My father blithely quips that he always knew we had bad blood as he explains the treatment over the phone. He does so with humour, as he understands my propensity for panic with health-related matters. My mother and sister turn out to be carriers, whereas my father, two brothers and I own it in full; it courses through our veins. My father even has a nickname for our bad blood; the doctor told him that this blood disorder is also known as the ‘Celtic curse.’
We are made kin through this type of bad blood.
My path, however, was marked by a different kind of bloodletting
This bad blood, this Celtic curse, means our bodies cannot break down iron like other bodies. Instead, it leaves traces in our organs, depositing iron, building up to the point where one’s liver or heart will fail if left untreated. Regular bloodletting becomes my father’s and my brother’s way out of this. ‘It seems so fucking medieval,’ I tell my father down the phone, ‘surely there is something else they can do, a tablet or an injection of some kind perhaps?’ My path, however, was marked by a different kind of bloodletting: menstruation, nature’s own purge, which I was advised to rely on until menopause. This advice, while medically sound, felt like a dismissal, a reduction of my complex condition to a mere footnote in the vast expanse of medical knowledge. I was told to regularly check my ferritin levels. So, I do, keeping a watchful eye on my bad blood. Not entirely convinced by this approach, I am told repeatedly by my doctor that I should not worry. At this point, in the early 2000s, there was a dearth of knowledge within the medical community about this ‘Celtic curse’. ‘Are you sure you have it?’ and ‘what kind of, and which test did you get, and where?’ are some of the many questions we have all been asked throughout the years. Even during an episode of extensive blood-loss, a doctor glibly comments that, because my haemoglobin levels are still high, I am perfectly fine. I attempt, during my distress, to explain to this medical consultant what having hemochromatosis does to other elements of the blood’s composition.
The doctor responds with disdain.
In the rawness of that particular and very frantic moment, I was confronted with a truth that many of us have to traverse, a realm where our intimate realities are met with the detached scrutiny of the medical world. The idiom of this version of bad blood contains a kind of violence, an undoing, provoking a disconnection and an awakening to the often-dismissive realm of clinical interactions. Interactions that have become something of a pattern in my life.
Indeed, this bad blood will be the death of some of us.
Blood is thicker than water?
Taylor Swift sings of this bad blood—her mad love turned to bad blood. One of my favourite bands, Bastille, sings of it; their bad blood lying cold. In fiery lyrics and emphatic rhythms, they tell us that they don’t, ‘want to hear about the bad blood anymore’. Through their vivid music they voice a desire to turn away from the painful truths that ‘bad blood’ lays bare. Yet, within these lyrical expressions lies an acknowledgment of blood’s ability to act as a revealer, unmasking the many uncomfortable truths that lie beneath our relationships. On some days, the echo of these songs becomes a loop, a relentless reminder of the complex dynamics and hidden truths that ‘bad blood’ embodies.
Reflections on the music of bad blood
Blood relations are woven tightly into the very framework of our families and societies, dictating who we are to one another, who shall receive and who shall give, and with whom we may unite in the peculiar dance of marriage. It is as if our lives are mapped out by the invisible lines of blood that connect us, anchoring us to a continuum of past and future. Yet ‘bad blood’ is the fragile shadow-side to all of this. It harbours its own kind of rituals, designed not for union but for division. Bad blood brings rejection, a cold calculus for determining who belongs and who does not.
It tears families and friendships asunder, this bad blood.
A family rift; one, two, more punishing silences, formative of some of my aunts’ and uncles’ ways of relating to one another. They too enact and perform the substance of their bad blood in public ways. An aunt, a second mother, dies suddenly during the pandemic. I am grief-stricken; I continue to be. Death in a pandemic; a force harder to bear. Her elder sister, my oldest aunt, does not come to her funeral, years of silence, of bad blood. This older aunt will not even allow death to stop this flow of bad blood. My more-than-aunt/second-mother’s post-mortem tells us that she died, in part, because of her bad blood. It deposited its excrement in her organs. Reluctant for a long time to get treatment, she tried during the first COVID-19 lockdown. She was told it was not possible because of pandemic restrictions, so she retreated from medical care to suffer in silence until her death. My aunt’s death entangled with bad blood at every level. Amidst the pandemic, her passing became a poignant echo in a chorus of countless other kinds of grief. Her untimely death, potentially avoidable under different circumstances, was one among the many indirect tragedies brought forth by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Amidst the pandemic, her passing became a poignant echo in a chorus of countless other kinds of grief.
My bad blood boils for them.
Bloodied reproduction
the time i dropped your almost body down
down to meet the waters under the city
and run one with the sewage to the sea
what did i know about waters rushing back
what did i know about drowning
or being drowned
the lost baby poem
In my first pregnancy, my platelets drop so low it becomes a cause of concern. I am told I cannot have an epidural; my bad blood will ensure a natural birth even if it’s not of my own choosing. This pregnancy is followed by many years of recurrent miscarriages. My platelets only ever partially recover, so I experience a long afterlife of visits to blood doctors who tell me not to worry. My thirties become swallowed up by fertility concerns, loss and blood, by a consuming sense of failing and having been failed. I gain an unwelcome intimacy with the sight of my own bad blood. There are moments, countless moments, when it seems my body is consumed by an acute awareness of this kind of blood loss. This bad blood has acquired the power to exile me from myself, especially as I move in and out of early pregnancy units or hospital emergency rooms.
During these years of recurrent miscarriages, I cannot seem to locate myself fully, as my bad blood leads me into an underworld of anxiety and loss. I attend a consultant obstetrician but he is the wrong one. Sitting across from him, the sterile chill of his office compounds my vulnerability. He makes a presumption about where I grew up without even asking, “You see, not growing up on a farm, you probably lack a certain … perspective … on the cycle of life. Miscarriage, loss; it’s all part of nature’s course.”
I find myself on uneven terrain in these moments, besieged by the lack of compassion that miscarrying women get in so many of our hospitals. This sensation of despair is captured perfectly in Frida Kahlo’s painting, Henry Ford Hospital. In this evocative work, Kahlo lies exposed on a hospital bed, her losses laid bare against an industrial backdrop, a stark representation of her own experiences with miscarriage and medical worlds. The rawness of her depiction, the scattered symbols around her—each a metaphor for the dreams and parts of herself lost with her unborn child—resonate deeply with my own journey through the shadowy corridors of loss and longing. The vivid imagery Kahlo employs, from the lifeless foetus to the snail denoting the agonising pace of grief, mirrors the internal chaos and isolation that miscarriage brings forth.
Like Kahlo, I too found myself in a barren landscape, where the vibrant hues of potential motherhood were dimmed. Kahlo’s tethering to her lost child and to the symbols of her pain—a poignant portrayal of the physical and emotional bonds that tie one to their experience of loss—speaks to the inescapable reality of carrying ‘bad blood’. This blood, which promised life but brought forth absence, becomes a haunting presence, a reminder of what might have been. Just as Kahlo’s painting navigates the complex interplay of hope, despair, and resilience, so too does my journey through miscarriage, a path marked by the indelible scars of loss and the quiet determination to find myself amidst the ruins.
Like Kahlo, I too found myself in a barren landscape, where the vibrant hues of potential motherhood were dimmed.
Bad blood mystifies some, it makes others deeply uncomfortable.
My body sometimes forgets to tell me that it has miscarried; it continues to pretend that it is pregnant, so I have no way of knowing otherwise. It is only with a scan that the muffling comfort of early pregnancy is turned on its head—there is no baby, I am told, only empty pockets that your body will slowly reabsorb. Before the successful abortion rights campaign in Ireland, many doctors would ask you to return, perhaps as many as a few weeks later “just in case”. They would then eventually hand you misoprostol to take that night and the following day, and a midwife would advise on what to do and when. There is so much waiting in these moments, so much false hope, so much uncertainty. I now know that I am not good with these suspended moments of time. I shrink into their crevices, dreaming of some kind of release, but it never comes. I experienced infections after some of my miscarriages, which ultimately meant more bleeding, sometimes for weeks. On one occasion an impatient midwife on the phone tells me to come in, and to get some antibiotics, and to calm down. I do so, and on a separate hospital visit to my mother-in-law awaiting surgery a few days later, blood begins to trickle down my leg as I am walking away from her ward. Then it becomes excessive. I feel its weight; it moves in front of me, spilling onto the staircase that I am walking down.
There is so much bad blood, I think I am going to die.
My husband tells me not to worry and I am rushed into the emergency room. They decide that it is the infection from the miscarriage that has caused this excessive bleeding; it takes weeks and weeks for it to properly stop.
as I move through these bloodied days with a weariness that seems to seep into my bones
I walk around bleeding when I should be in bed. The blood comes stark and heavy some days. On other days, it is barely noticeable. This movement and stoppage is simply unmanageable. This bad blood maps out a life of suspension at a time when I feel I should be embracing vitality. This is the hardest thing to deal with. Each step I take is measured, a careful negotiation with my own body, as I move through these bloodied days with a weariness that seems to seep into my bones. There is a surreal quality to this kind of existence, where the very act of walking, of being upright, feels like a defiance of the state my body insists I should be in—horizontal, resting, healing. Yet, I attempt to navigate everyday spaces with a stoicism that belies the turmoil of bleeding for weeks. I give a conference presentation, feeling like I am somehow championing my bad blood, when instead I am merely being foolish. I stand before a sea of faces, the bright lights of the auditorium casting long shadows. My voice, steady and clear, belies the physical betrayal I am experiencing. With each word I speak on sustainability, resilience and overcoming, I am acutely aware of the irony. Inside, I am churning with the foolishness of it all, the folly of pretending and of standing in front of these academics whilst bleeding so profusely.
I still wonder why I felt I had to do so?
How much of all of this can my bad blood absorb?
Ebb and Flow
The sculpture is a hauntingly beautiful visage, capturing the essence of life itself. Moulded from the artist’s own blood, it stands frozen in time, a poignant reflection of human fragility and the transient nature of existence. Its crimson hues, deep and vivid, evoke a sense of life’s vitality and the inexorable passage of time. This piece, a stark embodiment of personal identity and mortality, invites onlookers into a deep introspection of the self and the impermanence that defines our being.
Reflections on a blood sculpture (the work of artist Mark Quinn)
Deep on the seafloor of my late adolescence lies another memory. My bad blood sits into this one too; an emissary of fear, a truth-teller. I am in university, and it is Easter break. I go hitchhiking with a friend in France. On the ferry from Ireland to France, we meet an exchange student that we had gotten to know during his year in Ireland. He invites us to spend the first night with his friends and family in pretty Rennes. We gleefully jump into his cousin’s bright yellow Citroën 2 CV (deux chevaux) at the ferry port. A few hours later, at a party, after many conversations and much good advice about places to visit on our trip, I find myself alone with him. He changes. It is a stark, unexpected change. We are alone together in a room without space for no. Then there is force. My bad blood spills over his bed. “Look what you have done,” he says. My bad blood sits there without my consent. “Look what you have done,” he repeats, his English jarring, cut through with a strong French accent. There is nowhere to go to. I am alone with him in a house in rural France, so I stay until the morning light creeps in, while he sleeps undisturbed. The next day, my friend and I find a train to Paris. I tell only my travelling companion and together we decide that this will not be a measure in my life. She helps me box it up. We seal it, enclosed in its own singularity. In the arrogance of late adolescence, we do not understand that this too will leak. It will steer me off my axis in ambivalent, twisting forms, as my bad blood so frequently does.
I have found comfort in these strange blood sculptures.
Recently, I came across the work of artist Mark Quinn. Stumbling upon Quinn’s “Self” series was like encountering a mirror reflecting not just the artist but also the echoes of my own journey. In a series of striking self-portraits, fashioned from Quinn’s own frozen blood, there is a raw examination of identity, the passage of time, and the essence of life itself. Each sculpture, a frozen snapshot, seals a moment of Quinn’s existence within the fragile, transient medium of blood, resonating with my own path of piecing together a self in the wake of boundaries crossed and consent overlooked. Throughout the times where my sense of self seemed to vanish, only to be slowly pieced back together, I see a reflection of Quinn’s “Self”. His blood sculptures, demanding meticulous care to preserve their integrity, mirror the tender process of nurturing oneself back to wholeness after trauma. It is a journey of mending, introspection, and a reclaiming of one’s space. Quinn’s work stands as a profound meditation on human vulnerability and strength, a cycle of breaking and healing that mirrors the rhythms of our own lives. I have found comfort in these strange blood sculptures. In so many ways, they speak to the core of who we are, constantly shaped and reshaped by the forces around us, always in pursuit of a sovereignty over our being that feels perpetually just out of reach.
Lifting the Crimson Veil
I have come to understand that blood is more than just a physical substance coursing through my veins; it is a symbol of connection and identity in messy and often complicated ways. This journey, in the company of my own bad blood, has opened a quest for recognition in spaces too-often eager to distil this story of blood to mere data points and clinical abstractions devoid of lived realities. Blood, in its boundless complexity, is the custodian of our past, a beacon illuminating our present, and a legacy flowing into the future. It is the vessel that carries the echoes of our ancestors, their stories pulsating within us, moulding our essence and sowing the seeds of tomorrow.
What wisdom has this lifelong confrontation with “bad blood” bestowed upon me: indeed, if any?
An intimate knowing of the spirited essence of bad blood sits deep in my bones. This is a wisdom that has given me an understanding that to live is to be in constant dialogue with the forces that both create and unravel us. It is the kind of knowing that shows how, within each of us, lies a universe, a fractal of the broader human story. As the stories of my blood unfold throughout my life, they stand as reminders to listen, to understand, to connect and to hold space. It is ultimately in and through the fragility brought about by inhabiting an everyday life, permeated and wounded by bad blood, that I have eventually found some strength, and most importantly, a kind of gentle home.
This bad blood will no doubt eventually be the death of me too.
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- Fiona Murphy is an anthropologist at Dublin City University. As a creative anthropologist, she is editor-in-chief of the Anthropology and Humanism Journal. Her research focuses on trauma, memory, mobility, resilience and displacement with a refined undertone of experimenting with new forms and genres.
- Priyanka Borpujari is a journalist, artist and PhD candidate at Dublin City University researching gender, ageing and social media. She reports on human rights and justice across different geographies and occasionally dips in watercolours.
- Personal essays such as this one are indeed not easy to write-the stakes are high when one writes with vulnerability. This one was written with the care and support of one of my soul friends who also happens to be a brilliant editor-critical, careful, and ethical in his detailed reading and re-reading of this piece that is so very precious to me. Many thanks to Keith Egan for such attentive editorial support and for bringing beauty into the parts of this piece that so needed it! Thanks also to Nomi Stone and Rose Skelton for their wonderful writing workshop where this piece was first partially developed (https://field-studio.org/about-rose-nomi/)Their advice and feedback was hugely helpful in the development of the essay. My family too are core to this piece -they know that my every turn of phrase carries them within and forward. Onwards!