A question of relativity I think, any help appreciated

If the light from the early universe, the light that has taken 13-14bn years to get here and thus efectively allowing us to peer back in time, wouldn't our starting distance have had to have been 13-14bn light years away, at the time this light was emanating? Why if we can see the universe as it was at the near beginning, why can't we see ourselves, our planet, our galaxy in the past?

In order for us to see ourselves, we would have to travel faster than light in order to get from there to here before the light arrived so that we could see it.

You apparently don't understand much about light or sound. If thunder (or an explosion) occurs 10 miles away and I hear the noise from it then I have "effectively allowed us to" hear "back in time".
So if you can hear something that happened 46 seconds in the past why can't you hear something 10 seconds in the past? Well you already did - or at least the sound waves already passed you by.
Its not like you can dial to a specific date and time (7 - 8 billion years ago) and watch the day unfold and then fast forward by a 1000 years. The light that reaches us from different distances takes different times to get here. As you get further and further from the source of light you need to wait longer and longer to see it.
By the way we think the Universe started at a point and is 13.7 billion years old AND is about 45 billion light years in diameter. And ther is no contradiction there!

Because we are here, not over there.

The galaxies we see 13 billion years away are no longer there, they are somewhere else because they have been moving for the last 13 billion years