There is a place you imagine you ought to be standing. And there is the place you are standing. These are rarely the same place, and the distance between them is where most returning quietly dies.
You spend your energy trying to teleport to the imagined spot — and arriving nowhere, because no road begins there.
Coming back to Torah? Start where you actually are.
The honest coordinates
Where are you actually? Perhaps you keep some things and not others. Perhaps you keep nothing yet but the wish. Perhaps you carry a childhood of half-remembered words and a long silence after. None of this disqualifies you. All of it is simply your coordinates.
Pirkei Avot speaks of acquiring a teacher and acquiring a friend, of the patient work of building a self over time. There is no version of that work that skips the starting point. A teacher cannot meet a person who refuses to say where he is. Neither can the Torah.
From the real spot, a real road
When you start from the actual place, something changes. The next step becomes findable, because it is the step in front of your feet rather than the step in front of someone else's.
And the road, once you are honestly on it, wants a guide. Find a rabbi who will ask where you are and believe your answer — not to grade it, but to walk from there. What is permitted, what is asked, what comes next in practice: these are his to teach in the particular, never mine to declare in the general. I can only help you stop lying about the starting line. He helps you run.