By Dillon Kennedy
If you had told the quiet awkward boy I was growing up that one day I would stand in front of decision makers speak for thousands of people and be called a leader I would have laughed in your face.
Back then life felt like a constant battle just to keep up. Born with physical challenges that made walking balancing and even simple tasks feel like climbing a mountain. I lost my birth mum when I was only a baby spent my early years in care and was adopted at four. At school I was the target. Called names pushed around made to feel small just for being different. For years I walked with my head down convinced that being different meant being broken.
That is the starting line of my story not privilege not confidence but survival
When I became a Member of the Scottish Youth Parliament people saw the title. They saw the meetings the speeches the columns in the newspaper. But what they did not see was the boy inside still fighting to believe he belonged. I thought leadership was about being tough never showing weakness and having all the answers. I was wrong so very wrong.
Leadership is not about never falling it is about how you get back up
I put forward a motion to ban legal highs. I worked for months spoke from the heart and believed it would pass. It was voted down. I felt crushed. I thought I had failed. But later when the ban came into force across the whole country I learned a brutal but important lesson progress does not always happen on your timeline. Sometimes you plant the seed and someone else waters it. True leadership means standing up even when you know you might lose.
But the hardest lessons did not come from politics or school. They came from life hitting me with everything it had.
In 2019 I lost my mum to Motor Neurone Disease. She was my rock my biggest believer the one person who always saw the best in me. When she was gone everything fell apart. Grief swallowed me whole. Then came the pandemic losing my job and being trapped alone with my thoughts. I made mistakes bad ones. I lied I begged for help I let people take advantage of me because I was lonely and hurting. I felt ashamed like I had thrown away every bit of progress I had ever made.
At 28 years old I finally got my autism diagnosis. Suddenly so much of my life made sense why I struggled why I felt things deeper why I saw the world differently. But it did not fix everything overnight. It just gave me the truth I had been missing.
Here is the hard hitting reality Leadership is not just about leading others when times are good. It is about leading yourself through the darkest days
It is easy to stand tall when everything is going right. The real test comes when you have nothing left when you feel like you have failed when you are grieving confused and broken. That is when you find out what you are truly made of.
I learned that strength is not the absence of pain. It is feeling all that pain carrying it and still choosing to keep moving forward. I learned that you do not have to be perfect to be strong. You just have to be honest honest about your struggles honest about your mistakes and honest about what you need to heal.
This is what my book This Is My Fight is all about. It is not a story of a hero. It is the story of a boy who had every reason to give up but found reasons to keep going anyway.
And here is the message I want you to take away. No matter how hard your start no matter what diagnosis you carry no matter how deep your grief or how many mistakes you have made none of that defines your future. The battles you go through do not exist to break you. They exist to build you into someone stronger wiser and more compassionate than you ever thought possible.
You have already survived every hard day you have faced so far. That means you are stronger than you realise. Your fight is not over it is just shaping you into the person you were always meant to become.
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