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Born in County Meath, Ireland, in 1983, Angela Scanlon is a broadcaster and writer. After a stint as a personal shopper in Dublin, she started presenting on RTÉ and wrote for women’s magazines, before hosting programmes such as Robot Wars and The One Show, competing on Strictly and publishing memoir and self-help book Joyrider. She lives in London with her two daughters and her husband, the Irish tech entrepreneur Roy Horgan. Scanlon hosts Virgin Radio UK on Saturdays and Sundays.
I look absolutely knackered. A sugar crash. It was my first holy communion and a big old day, not least because at communion you get to go around with your little paw out asking everyone for money. The lead-up to it was all about the dress, which is quite the thing to say, considering it should have been about God.
I am one of four girls. My eldest sister is 18 months older than me and I remember her getting her communion dress and it being this magical moment. I was furious to find out that I was getting her hand-me-down. I thought if I had to endure the humiliation of wearing a dress that had already been seen in the local church, I was going to do it my own way. I said to Mum, “I will only wear it if I can style it with black shoes instead of white, a little silk handbag and a flower headdress.” It sounds frivolous and shallow, but I was quite serious about feeling like myself, about style and identity, even then.
Aside from the exhaustion, I also look quite intense and serious. I was, and still am, a sensitive human. Even though I loved a good party, I was very tuned in to everyone else’s feelings: was everyone OK? Are all my extended family happy? Sometimes if we had guests over I would hide in the bath. I wasn’t equipped with the language to understand what was going on, but now I see the upside of that porousness, which is that I connect with people immediately. I look into their souls. But I hate it when people do it to me. It’s a real violation!
At school I was always quite bright but the teachers’ reports made it clear that I was cheeky and lively. My attention span was short and I was a distraction in class. If I were on a ship, I’d be the one causing the mutiny: there was a healthy disregard for authority and while I wouldn’t say I was naughty, I didn’t treat teachers as if they were friends. There was this one poor man who had a mostly bald head with a curtain of hair he must have shaved. During his class I noticed he had a piece of tissue stuck on a shaving cut. I got everyone in my class to make tiny balls of tissue and throw them at him. Very problematic, looking back. I thought I was charming and twinkly but I was clearly a brat.
Having red hair was tricky in my teens. As a child, I thought it made me special – three of my sisters had red hair so we got a lot of attention when we went out together, as if we were a travelling circus. As I got older, I started to believe it wasn’t the type of thing boys liked; the option tended to be blondes or brunettes – red wasn’t in the mix. In the 90s and early 00s, there was an unhealthily singular ideal of beauty. Magazines were covered in tanned blondes like Britney. I didn’t fit into that glamazon, sexy archetype and I wasn’t allowed to dye my hair – although there were many times where I was heavily into fake tan.
Aside from the hair, I struggled with the transition from girlhood into adolescence. There were friends who were thrilled about breasts appearing and all those other rites of passage, but I felt the complete opposite of excited. I didn’t want whatever came next. To some extent, I am still not sure I do. Puberty seemed to happen overnight: I was very into Irish dancing but I got an injury, and when I stopped I suddenly started to develop a new body. It was a confusing, lonely time.
Having a job in the media didn’t enter my head as an option when I was growing up. I watched a lot of Friends and RTÉ, but my life was very outdoorsy and TV was this glamorous, otherworldly realm. Instead, I got into fashion, and in my 20s I was a stylist and a personal shopper. When a broadcaster needed local fashion experts to talk about the Oscars, the woman I assisted suggested I go on and talk. The terror and adrenaline of that first live TV experience could have put me off, but instead suddenly everything made sense. It was what I wanted for the rest of my life.
By the time I started doing TV properly I was 30, so I had more of a solid sense of self than I did in my 20s, when I was much more keen on seeking external validation. I was compared to Alexa Chung a lot at first, which I found odd as she was more fashion-oriented and an It Girl. She was very on the scene, which I never really was.
Over those years working in London I built a life where I was self-sufficient and independent. I worked incredibly hard, put a lot of pressure on myself, and had developed an allergy to needing other people, which I now know is an unhealthy mindset.
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Motherhood detonated all that. At first I was terrified. I thought it might change everyone’s perception of me and my career would disappear overnight. But when my daughter arrived, I realised I would need a lot of help from others and it became a catalyst for change.
Holding this teeny baby version of myself in my arms, I realised I had to address the relentless whipcracking I had been doing for so long internally. I didn’t want to pass that on to my daughter – the little compassion I had for myself and the always striving for perfection but obviously falling short of the mark. Motherhood helped me re-engage with the childhood version of myself.
The term self-love is bandied around a lot – it’s this thing we should all strive for, a miracle you can conjure with a warm bath and a face mask. While that is important for women and mothers, self-compassion is what really changed my life. The critical voice that has always driven me has not magically disappeared but I am less governed by it. I am still someone who feels everything deeply, but that quality is something I’ve learned to like. Being sad or overwhelmed was a prospect that really frightened me, and I denied those big feelings for a long time. I didn’t realise that by throwing water on the bad emotions I was stopping the good ones, too.
As for my fashion choices, I still like to express myself. When I got married I wore black shoes in a nod to my rebellious six-year-old self. The one who wanted to stand out and be her own person. I also had a dramatic crown headdress as I walked down the aisle. It felt like this full-circle moment. Just like at my holy communion, I still believe in the power of clothing. It’s something that can give you joy – even if it doesn’t look like it from my expression.