This Is Not a Comeback Story

On my phone, the last three weeks look magnificent.

The Ayrshire coast. Arran from the ferry. Portencross Castle beside the water. Oban beneath McCaig’s Tower. Glasgow Cathedral. A full Scottish breakfast. Celtic Park rising above the East End.

There is even a photograph of me at Paradise holding a ticket a stranger gave me because, as he explained, Celtic takes care of its family.

Choose the right photographs, add the right music and cut the whole thing to sixty seconds, and it looks like a comeback.

I know how to make it look that way.

The phone in my hand is a camera, newsroom, editing suite and publishing house. Every day, I decide where the frame begins and where it ends. I remove the bins. I wait for someone to walk out of the shot. I turn towards the water just as the light changes.

None of that makes the image false.

But a frame can conceal without lying.

I have spent years trying to turn what happened to me into a coherent story.

In 2020, I called my book Redemptive Trauma. I wanted suffering to become something other than suffering. I ended it believing I had been redeemed.

Six years later, I admitted that the book had missed the mark. It was true as far as I could tell the truth then, but I had mistaken narration for liberation. I thought that if I arranged the events honestly enough, redemption would emerge from the final pages.

Life declined to follow the structure.

Way of the Giff came afterward. Then Giff on the Way Home. Even the names imply movement. A man sets out, survives what happens on the road and eventually returns carrying whatever the journey was meant to teach him.

It is a powerful story.

It can also become another performance.

There is a temptation now to present Scotland as the final act. The disgraced priest returns to the country of his birth. He walks through ruins, traces the lives of his grandparents, returns to the Catholic Church, reaches Paradise and finally becomes the person he was supposed to be.

Roll credits.

That is not what is happening.

I did not come to Scotland with a secure job, permanent home or carefully funded plan. I remain on medical leave. I am living in temporary accommodation. My future income and housing are unresolved. My son is in Canada. Some relationships cannot be restored by geography, good intentions or better writing.

Scotland has given me beauty, welcome and room to breathe.

It has not solved my life.

Nor should it have to.

A comeback means returning to a former position.

I do not want my former position.

I do not want the collar back. I do not want to rebuild the public identity that depended upon being needed, admired or able to hold every room together. I do not want to become the man who could explain grace to everyone except himself.

Some things are not coming back.

Some should not.

The work in front of me is less cinematic.

Recover.

Find somewhere stable to live.

Build honest work.

Keep promises.

Accept help without turning the help into evidence of my importance.

Learn how to contribute without making myself the centre of every room I enter.

Become ordinary enough that every difficult day does not need to become a resurrection story.

There is dignity in that kind of life, but not much of a trailer.

The reels will continue to show Scotland at its most beautiful because the beauty is real. The ticket was real. The welcome was real. The astonishment I feel when the coast opens beside the train is real.

The uncertainty beyond the frame is real too.

I will not use one to conceal the other.

This is not a victory lap through the country of my birth.

It is not the triumphant return of the man I used to be.

This is not a comeback story.

I am not back.

I am here.