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1/ My heart is full today and I thought it timely to share some feelings and experiences. I am an American immigrant to Scotland. A new Scot for 7.5 years now. We left the US fresh off our rebound, recovering our lives after losing everything, jobs, house in 2008.
2/ Getting to Scotland took years of planning and saving. We sold everything we had and moved here in suitcases. Scotland was such a dream from day one and we set out building our lives with greater resiliency. We felt the culture in Scotland fit us and our values immediately.
3/ We love this gorgeous country and I still pinch myself often that we get to live here. I began studying Gaelic language policy at the Univ of Edinburgh and learning Gaelic. During my studies I did some digging and found Scottish Gaelic speakers in my ancestry
4/ they had left Auchterarder around 1855 to take up a farm in Grey county, Ontario in Canada, an area that was settled by many Gaels from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and where there was a Gaelic church service for some 75 years.
5/ My partner’s G Grandmother is from Ayrshire as well so we have felt it a great honour to return our family to Scotland and carry on the immigrant story and to try and contribute to a better Scotland. We have immense gratitude for our lives in Scotland.
6/ We struggled in the US. I am a US Army veteran and felt it an honour to serve. That experience changed me to feel even more protective and supportive of human rights and the great promise that the US Constitution can offer. We swear an oath...
7/ ...to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign or domestic when you serve in the US military. This document has the potential to give equality to all in the US. It has yet to be interpreted to realise this fully.
8/ We started our lives in Scotland in 2013, 3 years before the current president was elected. There is a mixed sort of heart break bag of feelings watching the country you left change utterly whilst trying to build a new life elsewhere.
9/ The duality of an identity that comes from being an immigrant is a very teaching experience. You aren’t really of the place you left anymore as it has changed and so have you, but you will always be an immigrant not fully of the new place either.
10/ Our accents in Edinburgh mean we are always asked by strangers like cab drivers how long we are on holiday for. But I won’t miss the many many questions about what is wrong the US? And be drilled on Trump and guns by strangers. I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020.
11/ But I have family members who did. Real people I love, arrested by fear, whipped up by manufactured scandals and addicted to the cult of Fox News. The divisions in American families are real. The changes have been hard to watch and experience.
12/ On this election eve, I want it known that I voted for Joe Biden. I am optimistic and hopeful that America is ready to stand up and say no more of the Constitution of the US being interpreted to disenfranchise or leave anyone behind.
13/ I was a 21 year old soldier still in my AIT job training to be a diesel mechanic at Edgewood, MD when 911 happened. We stood in silence watching the TV in the dayroom of the news on repeat knowing that for most of us, it meant going to war and changed lives.
14/ I’ll never forget that feeling of disaster, duty to get to work and helplessness at the scale of the destruction and loss of lives. But the last 4 years has felt like a slow moving version of that day on repeat.
15/ I weep for America yet hope that the collective is ready to assert their will and be stronger than hate, stronger than facism and stronger than division. If I can ask, please, pray for the US today if you can or hold a thought for a better US. We all need this in the world. X
16/ For context from what seems like a lifetime ago, me changing out tyres, or beginning to as they are quite large, on a diesel deuce and a 1/2 in 2001.
