Doireann Garrihy has admitted she quit Spin 1038 after she suffered a scary panic attack in work.
The RTÉ star decided to leave her job as co-host of The Zoo Crew on Spin 1038 at the end of 2018, and at the time, she didn’t know what she was going to do next.
Looking back at that time, Doireann told the Sunday Independent: “When I think about it now, I’m like ‘why the hell did I do that?'”
“I mean, it has worked out – so I’ve no regrets at all, but I’m like ‘I was a bit brazen to go…'”
Explaining why she decided to quit her job, Doireann said: “I reached a bit of a point. Everything took off for me in 2017. But I was doing too much, and I reached a point of overwhelm. I wouldn’t say burnout, but I kind of hit a bit of a wall.”
Doireann said one day she was on the phone to her mother Clare in work, and she became increasingly overwhelmed.
“I was ranting. I was up to 90. I think it was a fight I’d had with a friend. Something just clicked in my brain.”
After hanging up the phone, Doireann went into a bathroom cubicle.
“I couldn’t catch my breath, I was shaking like a leaf, sweating. I started bawling. I was in there for about 45 minutes. I’d never had a panic attack before.”
“It knocked it out of me. And then you start Googling things: ‘how long should it take to recover from a panic attack?’ And it says ‘usually an hour’. It had been three weeks – and I still felt shook,” she confessed.
“I realised it wasn’t just a one-off thing. It was obviously my body or my mind’s way of saying ‘Doireann, cop on. You need to mind yourself a bit better.’ Because in my mind I was like ‘I’m 25 – I can do whatever’. But you can’t.”
Thankfully, Doireann’s decision to quit worked out in the end – as she landed the breakfast show on RTÉ 2FM just a few months later, alongside her co-host Eoghan McDermott.
But before Doireann pursued a career in radio, she had dreams of becoming an actress, and studied Drama and Theatre Studies for four years in Trinity’s Samuel Beckett Centre.
But sadly, she gave up her acting dream after college, as she realised there was too much focus on her appearance.
“I got to a point where I was really like, ‘ugh, it just matters so much what you look like’, and I couldn’t hack that,” she admitted. “And especially when AoibhÃn looks the way she looks? I mean, come on…”
“If I had an audition coming up in three weeks’ time I’d be like ‘oh God, I’m not going out, I’m not eating this, I’m not doing that’. That’s not even what I set out for it to be. I’d never given a shit how I looked.”
“I mean of course I take pride in my appearance, but I wouldn’t be like, fitspo-mad, ‘I need to look this way.’ Every audition, you’d think you nailed it, and then it’d be like naaah.”
“And you’d wonder ‘oh was I too fat, too ugly, too tall, too shit in the audition? Was I not endearing enough?’ You question yourself so much.”
After she realised acting wasn’t for her, Doireann’s sister Aoibhin suggested she sign up for a course in the Today FM School of Radio & Podcasting.
“I loved it from the get-go. I think what I really loved about it in that time of my life was it didn’t matter what you looked like,” she said.
“Because I was in such a mode of ‘oh God, I need to look a certain way.’ And then I just sat in front of the mic and had the craic. I was like ‘I can just sit here and be me’.”
On this week’s episode of Goss Chats, Goss.ie CEO Ali Ryan chats with award-winning makeup artist and MRS Glam creator, Michelle Regazolli Stone.Â
The celebrity MUA opens up about the ups and downs of living through the pandemic, and how her makeup range saved her.
#GossChats is sponsored by top Irish aesthetic clinic Haus of JeJuve.
