Glasgow as Home

settling into a place

On a corner in Partick, Glasgow at 10 pm on a Tuesday in the middle of March, my friend Eli and I pause before parting ways. It is 10 degrees celsius — feels like my first Scottish summer — and the tenement flats around us, in this posh bit where we have stopped, fall away from us in every direction. The hills are lined, four stories up, with bay windows and doors that open into hallways (closes). The streets are a mosaic of lights on and off in the big windows as people live their lives on top of each other and next to each other. In Partick, every person is separated each by their own flat, but connected in a sort of spatial way: people — whether you know them or not — are always above, next to, and below you.

Sometimes in the past, when I have felt lonely, this has been a sort of solace for me: to ponder how I am not alone at all, but rather surrounded by tens, maybe hundreds, of people on my block. That doesn’t mean they’d come to rescue me, or that I’d like them, or that even that they would make my life better if I did meet them. But the thought that other people were out there at all was a thought I would use this to get through the panic that sometimes arose when I would sit still long enough to let myself realize how far I was from home, how much had changed in my life, and how much still would change, inevitably. Perhaps you could say that I was grasping for security where security I could find, and something about Partick and those tenement flats always reminds me of those early days in Glasgow when I was still building friendships and a life and an idea of what this all might look like.

But now, I am over a year in. A year and three months. This is the longest I have lived anywhere since I was 22 years old, and I also know that I have at least 2 more years in the same post — a PhD — and 3 more years after that on a graduate visa. I have, in many ways, the stability I have been looking for.

I also, with the surprise life change of moving to a beautiful one bedroom apartment in North Kelvin, have the space for family to visit more often and as I write I know my mother is getting on a plane to come to Glasgow for three weeks. She left only six weeks ago after staying for six weeks, and each time she comes, we figure out more and more how she might fit into my life here and how my family might fit more into life here.

I also have met someone who is secure and steady and lovely and everything I need.

I also have a group of friends who are fun and interesting and who always want to do nice things.

I also have written the first chapter of my PhD and felt, I am doing this. I can do this.

I also am learning how to drive a manual car on the left side of the road — a move that will further solidify that I live here.

I also, when I walk down the street, sometimes forget that I am in Scotland at all which is to say… it feels normal now.

I also ……..

Things are shifting. My life is changing. It is settling! I can feel that.

After three long years filled with upheaval and uncertainty and whiplash and adventure, there is something happening inside of me and within my life that I thought maybe I’d lost forever: I have found myself being able to see safety and ease on the horizon.

I feel the beginnings of home again.

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I say all of this to Eli on the corner in Partick, 10 pm on a Tuesday. I tell her all this and I also say: everything is settling and it is a strange feeling and I am so happy but I am different than who I used to be and I never expected this. I always thought Scotland would be my adventure and home would be the midwest and I would have to wait until I returned home to feel myself settling, but I can feel myself settling here. And I don’t know, sometimes, what to make of that. I don’t always know how to make meaning out of the fact that life always inevitably turns out different than you had thought.

At the corner, underneath the mosaic of tenement flat lights, Eli says: it sounds like you need to write.

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So, this morning, sitting on a windowsill with light pouring in and sun finally here, I opened my laptop to work on my PhD but instead opened this substack.

I begin to write, and I write here: perhaps there is no meaning to make. Perhaps this is just what living life in one place feels like: feeling things shift in bigger ways inside of you instead of outside of you.

I have been wondering for the last three years what staying in one place would feel like, and as I move into my second year in Glasgow (and my first time being in a place for more than a year in my true adult life), I am in wonder of how even when I don’t move, life moves through me.

I feel so grateful to be here, to be experiencing all of this. To be settling down.

To be returning, in many ways, back home.