I was born in Illinois and came to Letterkenny in Co Donegal in 2005, just before my 31st birthday. I was married to an American who was recruited to come to Ireland.
I was very isolated at first, in a house all day with two yet-to-be-diagnosed special needs kids, who came everywhere with me. My marriage was not good and my confidence was very low. But then I auditioned for a band and that changed the trajectory of my life. I was socialising and meeting people, and realised people might actually like me. That’s how I escaped, through music.
When my husband and I separated in 2007, I didn’t want to disrupt our sons, who had since been diagnosed with autism. We shared a house for a while, before I got a house in the same estate just a few minutes’ walk from his, which was brilliant for the kids because everything was familiar.
I’d always been interested in gardening and making my own things, but financially it reached a point where I needed to grow some food and figure out how to make skincare products for my son who had extreme childhood eczema, because I couldn’t afford to buy them.
I learned how to produce crops in a tight space in a housing estate, how to compost. I gathered urban resources like coffee grounds from local coffee shops and cardboard from behind stores for weed matting, and made my compost bin out of pallets.
While doing this, I taught workshops on how to rebuild your self-confidence after trauma in schools, Women’s Aid and community organisations.
When the pandemic hit, the work and music dried up. My landlord wanted his house back, so my partner and I moved into a property in Termon together. The house has problems, but the land is fantastic, and I started growing food on a larger scale. My friend Sandy was sick of me talking to her about it and told me to go on TikTok to make friends with mutual interests.
Before lockdown I was making body butters and soaps to give to friends. I couldn’t afford to keep doing it for free, so I started charging cost price, and more and more people started to buy my products. The business grew because of TikTok. I used to make 18 bars of soap every couple of weeks, now I make seven, eight, nine batches a week.
My prices are still very low, so I’m not making crazy money; when I was subsistence living and I couldn’t afford these things, some people kept their prices affordable. I want to empower people. I want to sell soap, but I also want to teach people how to make it in case they are in the same position I was in and can’t buy it. I sneak mental health into my TikToks by example, too.
Soap is so easy to make; all you need is some sort of fat or oil, lye and water. You make a lye solution, and if you have it in the right proportion to your oil, that creates soap.
I didn’t want to use palm oil, but needed an oil with palmitic fatty acid in it, which makes the bar harder, last longer and gives it a nicer texture. I researched and realised you can get that texture from tallow – beef fat – and that I could render it myself. Tallow makes beautiful soap. The local butcher in Termon, my neighbour, saves cuts for me for free.
[ ‘I really wanted to proceed from nursing to veterinary medicine’Opens in new window ]
When I first joined TikTok, I was posting up to 10 times a day just saying what I did, with no editing, because I had no idea what TikToks were supposed to look like. The tallow videos could get 20,000 views in five or six minutes. Beef fat! I could not understand it. The video quality wasn’t great, but people seemed to like them, so I kept posting, experimenting, figuring out what worked and what didn’t.
The attitude here in Donegal is, as long as you’re a genuine person, even if you’re problematic, people are okay with you. I’m extremely quirky and I get so much grace here. People are nice to me in a way that’s almost unfair, because I know other black people who have moved here and not received the same amount of grace and embracing that I have. I think that’s the privilege of being American and black, it is different than coming from another country.
I have to move house, so I’m closing down my homestead. I need a permanent place to live. This house has black mould on the kitchen ceilings and the radiators don’t work properly, so it gets damp, and it costs a lot to heat. I have a dream to open a teaching homestead accessible to everyone, regardless of who they are or where they come from. I got a job teaching voice lessons for the ETB and I’m doing more workshops in the Shandon Hotel in Dunfanaghy on self-image and self-confidence.
I’m so excited to turn 50 next year. I love the wisdom that comes with age. I’m looking forward to getting some more grey hairs; I only have a couple and I want a silver afro.
In conversation with Ellen O’Donoghue
