Out of Voice Reach

In the end, being too young for the chair was never about age alone. It was about the long apprenticeship in believing I had the right to sit where my work had taken me. It was about learning that client perception could not be allowed to define professional truth, and that deception, whether deliberate or convenient, had to be met with something steadier than my need to be approved of.

The river kept moving. It moved on the days I thought I could not, and it moved on the days I did. It carried no message for me, not really, but perhaps that was the message: keep going, not because everything is fixed, not because the wounds have closed neatly, not because belonging has finally arrived, but because life is still moving and you are still in it.

Maybe the deeper wound was not that the practice was discarded, but that I had hoped it would carry some part of me forward. I had wanted the care, the standards, the memory and the way of working to survive as evidence that I had not merely passed through. I had wanted, in some small and perhaps unreasonable way, to remain within voice reach.

Perhaps in twenty years someone will still call me a blow-in. By then I may be too old to care, or more likely I will care and pretend not to, because growth has its limits and I remain recognisably myself. Either way, I hope I will have learnt that belonging is not granted only by those who got there first.

It may begin when you stop asking a place to heal every old wound and simply allow it to hold you for a while. It may begin when you stop proving you deserve to be there and start noticing that you are there, breathing, watching the light move across the trees, hearing voices closer than they used to be.

I do not have the answer, not properly. I know only that the question matters more to me now than it once did, perhaps because I no longer have enough years to waste earning entrance to rooms where I was never at ease. There is still part of me that wants to be chosen, and there is still part of me that would rather pretend not to care. Between those two, perhaps, is the quieter possibility of simply being here, neither proving nor hiding, and seeing who remains within hearing.