It's more than football that's (not) coming home
Everyone's singing it again this summer. Football's coming home. And every time I hear it I find myself smiling for a different reason, because for me, something else has just come home too.
Four and a half years ago I started training as a Transactional Analysis Psychotherapist. One weekend a month in Edinburgh. Three assessments a year. Mandatory conferences, CPD hours, peer group hours, placement hours, supervision, and a WhatsApp group chat that has seen many versions of myself.
And now it's finished.
I keep thinking about that feeling you get when you're a school pupil counting down the days until you can hang up your tie for the last time. I've looked forward to this moment for so long. But now it's here, I'm finding it's not quite as simple as relief. It's more layered than that.
A friend on my course once said that the training had been the best of times and the worst of times, and she wasn't wrong.
The Worst of Times
The worst of times was looking at my own relational patterns. Sitting with my shadow side. Gently, and sometimes not so gently, trying to coax my most vulnerable parts out into the light and convince them it was safe to be seen. It was exhausting. The almost five years was financially difficult. It stretched me academically and personally further than I thought I could go.
But the thing about ‘the worst of times’ is how it felt to me, in the moment, through my own subjective lens. It was my story about what was happening, not necessarily the whole truth of it.
In Transactional Anaysis we talk a lot about ego states, and how the Child ego state can show up as Adaptive, Rebellious or as Free. During the hardest stretches of this training, I made friends with my Rebellious Child. She kicked off, she resisted, she didn't want to look at things. And through that friction, I was slowly introduced to my Free Child too, the part of me that could play, that could be curious, that didn't need to have it all figured out.
Without the worst of times, that meeting would never have happened. Being stretched to notice, to observe, to grow, has genuinely been one of the most liberating experiences of my life. Growth rarely feels good while it's happening. That doesn't mean it isn't growth.
The Best of Times
People probably assume the best of times were the assessments I passed, the two essays that got published, the diploma exam I finally sat and passed. And yes, those moments mattered.
But if I'm honest, my best of times happened away from all of that. In the quiet, unglamorous, unwitnessed moments.
It was the moment I turned to my husband and told him I needed to organise an Autism assessment for myself. It was the moment I sat across from my boss and said I wanted to go part time, because I needed to prioritise myself, my mental health, and a future I hadn't fully mapped out yet but knew I needed to move towards.
Those moments took more courage than any exam ever did.
A Home Coming
This past stretch of years has thrown a fair amount at me. Perimenopause. Family illness. Caring for elderly parents. Walking away from a career I had worked so hard to get into, and honestly, had fought hard just to survive within.
And somehow, through all of it, this has felt like a home coming. I have never felt so aligned, so content, so genuinely myself.
I always used to say that the house I live in is the only place I've ever felt properly safe. I'm starting to realise now that home was never really about four walls. My safe space was always inside me, waiting patiently, quietly believing, knowing all along that I was coming home to myself.
So What About You?
I'd love for this to be more than just my story. So here's my invitation to you.
What would you need to happen to come home to yourself?
What would that actually look like, in the small, unwitnessed moments rather than the big public ones?
And what might you gain, if you let yourself find out?
Football won't be coming home this summer. But for me, it was always going to be something else that got there first.