Clawing Back to My Feet

If you’ve followed these blogs from the beginning, you’ll know I’ve talked a lot about leaving - leaving the country, leaving my old life, leaving the noise behind.
But every departure has a return. Every step away eventually leads back to the place you started from.

And lately, that thought has been circling my mind more than I’d like to admit.
I’m coming home soon and, somehow, that feels heavier than leaving ever did.

Someone asked me recently when I’ll be back and I gave the practical answers – flight ideas, dates, visas, all of that. But the real answer is messier. Because going back isn’t just landing at an airport, it’s stepping back into everything I tried to survive.

Coming out here has given me space, not freedom exactly but room to breathe without analysing every doorbell or every passing face. Time makes distance and distance sometimes makes healing possible.

And yet, the idea of going home brings all of it back into focus.

There’s excitement, absolutely. I miss my family in a way I can’t put into neat emotional sentences. The people who held me upright when I couldn’t stand. The people who saw the human, when everyone else saw a headline.

Home is them. It always was. But injustice teaches you the meaning of family in a way nothing else can. When the ground disappears under your feet and only a handful of people refuse to let go - that’s family.

But there’s also fear.
Fear that one comment, one look could knock me back down again.
Fear that I haven’t healed enough or maybe haven’t healed at all, just gotten quieter about the pain.

My sister told me recently that someone had said to her, “It’s good to see him back on his feet.” They meant it kindly and I’m grateful for that, but something in that sentence sat strangely with me, not because of them, but because of what it stirred.

Because I didn’t just “get back on my feet.” I clawed my way there. Scraped. Dragged. Staggered. There was nothing neat about it.

These experiences shape you. They get under your skin. They change how you see yourself and how you prepare for what comes next.

Returning home feels like standing on a fault line - excited to walk back into the arms of the people who saved me but terrified of the world around them, the same world that had no hesitation throwing me away.

But maybe that’s what growth looks like. Maybe the fear doesn’t disappear - it just becomes something you learn to live beside. Maybe coming home isn’t proof that I’m “back on my feet,” but proof that I’m still fighting to stay upright.

Because the truth is, I don’t know if “home” will feel safe.
I don’t know if Scotland will welcome me or remind me why I left in the first place.
I don’t know if I’ll ever walk into a room without feeling the weight of my own past dragging behind me like a shadow I didn’t create.

What I do know is this, being away has shown me I’m still capable of rebuilding parts of myself, even if those parts are fragile. I’ve learned I can laugh again. That I can meet new people. That I can exist without an apology.

And maybe coming home isn’t about final answers.
Maybe it’s about facing the questions I’ve been avoiding.

So I’m preparing myself, not for a new life exactly but for the next part of the same one. The part where I stand on familiar soil knowing I’m not the same person who left but somehow still trying to become him again.

And as I try to find the courage to return, I keep thinking about that comment “back on my feet.”

Because, if I really have managed to claw my way upright, then maybe coming home is the moment I finally look up, instead of just down at the ground I almost didn’t get back up from.

So I’ll leave you with this:
If the place I’m returning to still sees the headline before the human, still measures me by what was said rather than who I am, can it ever truly feel like home again?