The Version of Me Who Never Left Scotland

There is a version of me who never left Scotland.

I think about him sometimes.

He was born in Glasgow in 1981, just like I was.

But nobody put him on a plane to Canada the following year.

He stayed.

Maybe he grew up hearing the same voices every day instead of learning that accents can disappear.

Maybe Scotland was never something he had to imagine because it was simply outside his window.

Maybe he supported Celtic because everybody around him did.

Or Rangers.

Or neither.

Maybe he couldn't have cared less.

Maybe Ireland was something in the family rather than something he eventually had to excavate.

Maybe Catholicism was ordinary enough to rebel against properly instead of becoming something lost and recovered.

Maybe he knew his grandparents differently.

Maybe he learned the streets of Glasgow before he learned Toronto.

Maybe he knew which jokes required no explanation.

Which words belonged where.

Which parts of himself never needed translating.

It is tempting to imagine him as more authentic than me.

The original version.

David before immigration.

David before Canada softened the accent, rearranged the family story and gave him a different set of possibilities.

The Scottish David who somehow remained untouched while the rest of us went away.

But he doesn't exist.

He never did.

There was a baby born in Glasgow.

Then there was a child raised in Canada.

Everything after that happened there.

My schools were Canadian.

My friends were Canadian.

My first loves were Canadian.

My failures were Canadian.

I became a father there.

I became a priest there.

I stopped being a priest there.

I wrote my first book there.

I broke things there.

I built things there.

I became addicted there.

I recovered there.

I hurt people there.

People loved me there.

Whatever Scotland gave me by inheritance, Canada gave me by experience.

Those things are not competitors.

They are both mine.

That has taken me a while to understand.

Because returning somewhere can produce a strange hunger for purity.

You start looking for the person you might have been before everything became complicated.

You find an old family name.

A photograph.

A grave.

A football club.

A church.

A street your grandparents walked.

Something inside you responds and you think:

There you are.

That's me.

And maybe it is.

But only partly.

There is no archaeological dig deep enough to uncover an original, untouched self.

Identity doesn't work like that.

We are not fossils.

We are accumulated.

The boy I might have become in Scotland would have been shaped by things I never experienced.

Different teachers.

Different friends.

Different cruelties.

Different opportunities.

Different mistakes.

Maybe he would have been happier.

Maybe not.

Maybe he would have stayed close to his family.

Maybe he would have spent his adult life trying to leave Glasgow.

Maybe he would have become a priest.

Maybe he would never have entered a church after childhood.

The fantasy only works if I get to write him from here.

And that is cheating.

I get to give the imaginary David everything I wish had been different while protecting him from every terrible thing that might have happened instead.

Real lives don't get that luxury.

There are no control groups.

I will never know who I would have been.

What I know is who I became.

And Canada is written through almost every line of him.

I still hear myself using Canadian words here.

I still misjudge distances because forty minutes feels close.

I still carry assumptions formed on the other side of the Atlantic.

There are things Scots recognize immediately that I am still learning.

And there are things about Canada I didn't understand until I left it.

That is what distance does.

It reveals the water you were swimming in.

Coming back has made Scotland more real.

It has also made Canada more visible.

For most of my life, I treated Scotland as inheritance and Canada as circumstance.

I am beginning to think the distinction was wrong.

Both became inheritance.

Both became circumstance.

Both made me.

That complicates the word home.

But perhaps home was always going to be complicated for somebody who left his birthplace before he could remember leaving it.

I can belong here without pretending I was formed entirely here.

I can love Scotland without turning Canada into forty-four wasted years.

I can recover parts of my inheritance without pretending they were stolen intact from me.

And I can mourn what I never had without inventing a better version of myself who supposedly had it.

There is no Scottish David waiting somewhere in 1982 for me to come back and finish his life.

There is only this one.

Canadian and Scottish.

Catholic and formerly Anglican.

Father.

Writer.

A man shaped by what he has done, what has been done to him and almost everybody he has ever loved.

A man who has crossed the Atlantic in both directions and belongs entirely to neither side of it in quite the way he once imagined.

Perhaps that is not a deficiency.

Perhaps that is simply the truth.

Coming home does not mean becoming the person I would have been if I had never left.

It means bringing home the person who did.