Going Home

“The pavements were full of people going about their messages, and nobody paid any attention to others. They moved independently, in oblivious, anonymous, take-it-for-granted freedom. The people didn’t even nod hello to each other, and Shuggie could bet their wasn’t even a single cousin amongst them.”

An excerpt from ‘Shuggie Bain’ by Douglas Stuart describes Shuggie’s return to Glasgow from the outskirts.

There were lots of things I loved about living in the countryside. The feeling of the earth under my feet, the idea that I didn’t belong here, the empty space, and the absolute beauty of the night sky. But for some reason, it was also suffocating. I like to dip in and out of life, to be alone in a quiet place where I can hear myself think. Strangely it’s something I’ve always found easier to do in a city. Maybe that’s because it’s where I grew up.

I’m used to the rhythms of the city’s impersonal imperfections. If you’re from a city you’ll know what I’m talking about. In the country, it was as if my heartbeat was out of sync with my rural surroundings. Here my pulse was slower. Ironically it sometimes felt like people in the countryside were in more of a rush and that unnerved me. I expected the opposite. I understand the pace in a city that sweeps people relentlessly downstream, but here it felt unnecessary like people didn’t have to get caught up in the mad pace of modern life. Yet society’s relentless progress demands it. It’s as if people have been forced to become the opposite of their surroundings. Maybe, like in the towns and the cities, lockdown will leave behind its own lessons for rural Ireland. The seeds have been sown. It will require an ability to trust nature again and the awareness that the land is there to be nurtured rather than owned as a commodity. I’ve seen first-hand the damage it can do. In the country, it’s land, not love that often ends up tearing people apart.

People’s curiosity was also suffocating. In the city, as Shuggie found out to his liking above on his return to the Glasgow tenements you can be anonymous. Down the country, I soon concluded that I needed some of the anonymity I had treasured so much in my previous surroundings. I desperately needed to go back to my roots. In the city, it’s possible to hide out in plain sight.

I’m back in the city now with all the sense of déjà vu that comes with it. If Dublin keeps spreading outwards soon there will be no countryside left and this particular conversation will be redundant. It took me time to ease back into the nuances of suburban life. It felt as if I was squeezing myself back into a battered old shoe. Building a new existence in the same house I had left behind over ten years ago wasn’t easy. There’s a certain sense of defeat in returning to where you’ve already been. A definite feeling of failure when it comes to a broken marriage. Never go back they say. Well, here I am picking up the pieces where I’d left off all those years ago. Surely life was meant to continue on a forward trajectory, but here I am pressing the rewind button to access a new part of my life. I did my best to make the house look different by ripping up the carpets and putting down wood floors and it worked, even if the old ghosts still haunt the night. I made it bright. White floors. Fresh paint touched up with the regret of starting all over again. By going back to the past I have somehow managed to locate myself again in the present.

I made the decision to leave my old job in Dublin behind when I moved to the country. Driving up and down for the first three years took its toll. I was always tired, but to tell you the truth I had been leaving that job in my head for years anyway. I just hadn’t got around to it. I had wonderful colleagues and friends, but I was restless for the excitement of something different.

Nineteen years working in one place is a long time. What I hadn’t factored in was the shock and sense of grief that would follow. Leaving is never easy. It knocked me sideways and left me wondering what to do next. My anchor was gone and I was the one who had yanked it out of the water. It took me a while to find a new direction on a road that took me to Bulgaria, Bavaria, Northern Finland, and Morocco to tutor on the film sets. The highlight was a couple of months spent living in Berlin, a city I fell head over heels in love with. I’d move there tomorrow if circumstances allowed. I loved the seedy undercurrent of freedom running through its veins, with its main artery cut in two by a knocked-down wall of huge historical inconvenience. I loved the names. Alexanderplatz. Wilhelmstrasse. Karl Marx Alle. I loved the menace that is always to be found in any big city. The edginess waiting to explode at any time reflected the restlessness I have always carried inside. After that, I spent four-and-a-half years in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia before I was gradually able to begin the process of finding my way back home again.

I had abandoned myself to fate and it wasn’t an easy ride. I’m so glad it’s over. I was lucky to meet a lot of special people along the way who will be in my heart forever. In the desert, I stumbled upon parts of myself that I never knew existed. The aim from day one was to get back home to Samuel. That’s probably why I cried tears of sadness mixed with joy on Hill 16 immediately after Dublin had beaten Kerry in the 2015 All-Ireland Football Final, a day when the heavy rain falling from the grey sky sequenced perfectly with my mood. My heart was heavy with the thought that in two days’ time I would once again be boarding the plane for Riyadh. Saying goodbye to Samuel every time I went back was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. There I was on Hill 16, surrounded by my tribe, a haunting rendition of Dublin in the Rare Auld Times rising out of the mist drifting off a soaked Hill, and yet it’s probably the loneliest I have ever felt in my whole life. The fog was so thick back then that the only way seemed to be through. For better or worse I took the long road home.

Looking back now I can see there were other options, but often it’s only when the darkness finally lifts that you can see the light. What got me through was a resilience I failed to recognize and never knew I had. There was something deep inside that demanded that I never gave up. Every morning my eyes opened it told me to keep going. Call it spirit, call it a flickering flame, call it pain, whatever it was that kept the fire burning when it threatened to extinguish completely. Somewhere deep within, there existed a trust that things would get better, that I would make it back home.

I learned the hard way that the only person you can ultimately rely on is yourself. Having said that, I experienced a whole lot of kindness and support along the way. You all know who you are. I made wonderful new friends and reconnected with old guides who were there when I needed them most. But there was also a terrible silence that was the hardest thing to accept and bear.

I was silent too. I had to be because it was in the silence that my anger and sadness found the reason to breathe and allowed for, eventually, some semblance of peace and forgiveness. It allowed me to make gradual sense of what happened and to begin to move on. It’s a process that continues to this day. I know now that sometimes people say nothing because they don’t know what to say. It’s also important to understand that everyone is busy fighting their own battles. More often than not the silence of some is nothing personal.

Studying to be a psychotherapist has helped me to confront the parts of me I needed to face up to by reaching back into the past. It made me do the hard yards necessary to find out the reasons why I am who I am and why I do the things I do. I still don’t have all the answers. I never will, but I know so much more about myself now than I ever did before, and therein lies a fresh spirit built on stronger foundations, along with the hope of a better future.

One of the most important influences that brought me home was my writing and funnily enough right from the very beginning I knew it would. It was just a matter of when. The writing was the voice inside my head that made me sit down at the table in my Riyadh apartment after school and at the weekends with Kevin. He’d edit his photography and I would write. It was our creative space and we trusted in each other. The words began to flow like a river in flood. The voice I had denied for so many years was finally heard. Through it, I began to make sense of confusion.

Returning to college at DBS in Dublin was a continuum of the rebirth of spirit. I understand now that what I lost helped me to stumble across what I was so desperately searching for. During the search, a lot of the joy went out of me, but slowly it returned. I began to reconnect with music as I walked the streets of Riyadh with my headphones on when the sun went down and the heat became bearable. For whatever reason, I never lost my ability to laugh and joke, even when things were shit. That was crucial to my survival. Like the written word, laughter helped me to stay afloat when the storm was at its fiercest and the nights were darker than they’d ever been.

They say home is where the heart is.

For me, it was Samuel.

And the empty page.

It still is.