I found myself standing in a ruin of my own making—Glasgow’s streets felt wrong, and yet I wouldn’t leave. The night everything fell apart, I watched my dreams flicker into black ash. That moment—when the headlines screamed “fraud” and “failure”—felt like being nailed to a wall, every piece of me exposed and burning.
In the days that followed, I did the only thing I could: I let the ash settle. I sat on my kitchen floor, tea gone cold, and stared at the whirlwind of old emails, angry messages, and scathing comments. It was too much. I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. So I closed my eyes and let my heart slow down.
There, in that quiet, I found fragments of myself. The part that still cared about other people. The part that felt guilty for letting them down. The part that refused to hide. I started talking to that version of me—the scared, stubborn bloke who wanted to run but stayed instead. I told him I saw him. He trembled, but he answered back.
Rebuilding isn’t a grand ceremony. It’s getting out of bed one more time when you’d rather stay under the covers. It’s saying to a friend you owe them an apology. It’s walking without music, letting your thoughts loose, and scribbling down the ugly ones in a notebook no one else will ever read.
Some days I still taste ash in my mouth. I catch a whiff of old shame when I least expect it—a passing car, a snatch of a news headline, the way my hands shake before I send an email. But then I remind myself: the fire didn’t end me. It stripped away everything false. What’s left is the real, battered me.
So I keep gathering these scraps—honesty, humility, small acts of kindness—and I piece them together. It’s not perfect. It’s jagged and raw. But it’s mine. And right now, that feels like enough to breathe into.