“You were meant to be yourself and stand out”

BALLYEA’S Tony Griffin has been an All Star hurler, he has raised a seven figure sum for cancer charities, he has run a business and a charity, and now he has written a book which seeks to help teenagers.

The Teenager’s Book of Life draws on the experiences he has had dealing with young people over a number of years of involvement with the charity Soar, which he established in 2012 and was CEO of until 2019.

It only took around two months to write, coming very easily to him after another Ballyea man had asked him for a little bit of assistance. “Paul Flanagan asked me for a quote for teenagers, to inspire them during lockdown. Usually I don’t like doing that, most adults give syrupy one liners, they’re not very really and teenagers don’t relate to them. Our little boy had just been born, and I used to be driving around trying to get him to sleep, he had a bit of colic, and one evening a quote just came to me, which is the first quote in the book. It’s ‘The most important relationship you’ll ever have is with yourself, every other is secondary’. From there, over the next nine weeks, the rest just tumbled out, I didn’t expect it really.”

He feels that there isn’t enough focus on preparing teenagers for the inevitable challenges of life. “I had a sense from going into schools for so long that teenagers need to hear certain things at that age, which they’re not necessarily hearing. Not that it’s not being said, but sometimes it’s being said in a way that they can’t hear it. They need to hear about life, what’s coming down the tracks and how to find their way.”

While it is for teenagers, he says it will also be of interest to parents, teachers and coaches, basically anyone who deals with young people.

He describes it as being like a travel guide for a stage in life that most people find quite difficult, with everything in flux. “Every decade in life brings its own challenges, but as a teenager you have multiple things going on at the same time. Physically we’re changing. Mentally, our brains are changing. Hormonally we’re changing and our roles are really changing, we’re no longer a child, we don’t want to be treated like a child, yet we’re still dependent on our parents for so much and we’re just waiting to be released out into life.

“While the book is kind of like a travel guide in some ways, the main message is that I try to get through to young people is don’t try so hard to fit in, because you were meant to be yourself and stand out. There are also some things you need to know about life; life will knock you down, you will get your heart broken, you will feel hopeless at times. That’s life, not just teenage life.”

There is a chapter on death and one on how to negotiate hard times, while a lot of the book is about the importance of being true to one’s self. “Everywhere you turn on social media there are people, sometimes backed by multi million dollar companies, who have decided how they want you to feel in order for you to buy their products. It’s almost impossible for young people to first know who they are. The book prods at that and it challenges them quite a bit to discover who they are and then to not try and fit in, because they are meant to stand out. That may not mean being the loudest person in the room, because for a quieter person that’s not their nature. But it’s standing out and being their own unique flavour of whatever that is, rather than trying to be someone else, because they could chase that all their life, never find it and always feel not good enough.”

Tony himself has frequently taken the path less travelled, leaving Ireland to study in Canada in his mid twenties, taking time away from intercounty hurling when he was one of the most dangerous attackers in the game, establishing his own charity after he saw a need for it and more recently stepping back from it to concentrate on writing.

While he clearly has been able to follow his own path, but says that hasn’t always been very easy for him either, and there is a section of the book on coping with fears. “I travelled to Northern California to meet these two people who specialise in helping people overcome fear, they’ve written a lot on it and I really wanted to say why aren’t we thought in school what fear is, how it can be a positive and how it can be a great inhibitor. I’ve written almost a chapter on fear itself as a concept and given them little tips they can use to overcome it. I’ve found it’s always fear that inhibits people, stops them being themselves, pursuing what they want to do, saying what they want to say.”

While Tony still helps out a bit with Soar, he largely stepped away from it to write full time, but certainly hadn’t planned on writing the type of book he has produced.”I wanted to write and I wanted to start doing what I have been telling young people to do, which is to do what brings them joy and follow that. I had 15,000 words of another book written and then this one just tumbled out.”

While he had been told there would be a book out of his year’s with Soar, the concept didn’t interest him almost until the moment he began, but he loved it then. “The guy who published Screaming at the Sky (Tony’s 2010 memoir), Eoin McHugh is his name, I met him when I was writing the other book and said I’m trying to decide how to get this book out there. He said ‘Sure you have a book first to write about what you learned from Soar.’ I said those days are behind me, I don’t want to go back there again. Then I laughed when I started writing this, I realised he was right, it was in me. I got such pleasure from it, it wrote itself in nine weeks. I published it myself and Bookstation have taken it throughout the country, I’m in shock, someone in Peru bought it the other day, Australia, Canada, it hit a chord. I didn’t plan it, but it found its way.”

Tony’s home is in Kildare now, and he is the father of two sons, six year old Jerome and Jesse, who is just nine months.

Those two boys will be going through the school system for years to come, and he feels it doesn’t help everyone, meaning that the type of information in The Teenager’s Book of Life is required. “I think we have one of the best school systems in the world in terms of preparing people for academic achievement. But lot of young people go through that system and the message they get is I’m not intelligent or I’m thick or whatever words you might use. They definitely come out feeling like they failed in the whole thing, not just the final exam. I know fellas I went to school with that were very talented in other ways, but that was never cultivated.”

It’s very possible the same gaps will still exist when his own lads get to second level. “Will it change in ten years when they’re in secondary school? Well it hasn’t changed in 20 years since I did my Leaving. The Junior Cert has changed a little bit, they’re bringing in things like wellbeing but overall things haven’t changed much in 20 years.”

He believes his book can help young people by giving them some information that they won’t get elsewhere. “A friend of mine said it’s like you brought teenagers over to the corner of the room with a wink, and said look, the adults haven’t actually a clue what is going on, so you’re going to have to find out what life is about for yourself, but here are some things you might not have heard before about life.”

Owen Ryan