Books

Perhaps that is what speaking in my own voice finally means. It is not the discovery of a completely original vocabulary untouched by everything I have read, heard or performed. It is the ability to use what remained without disappearing inside it. The poems can still echo, the songs can still arrive before dawn and the old characters can still wander onto the page, but they no longer have to speak for me. They have become part of the language through which I speak.

The two Jeffs are not enemies, despite the tone of some internal meetings. The analytical one protects me from being swept away by every emotion, promise or fashionable certainty that wanders past with a confident brochure. The human one protects me from becoming a machine that values only what can be measured, reconciled or entered in the correct column. Each has rescued the other from a different form of stupidity. Their quarrel is not evidence that I am divided beyond repair; it may be evidence that I have refused the easier comfort of becoming only one thing.

I cannot claim that the words have finished forming me. Retirement did not close the library, and age has not persuaded the radio station to adopt a limited playlist suitable for mature audiences. There will be more songs, more remembered lines and more moments when something heard fifty years earlier suddenly explains what happened last Tuesday. The voice will change because I will change, assuming tomorrow continues to offer the opportunity. What remains constant is the willingness to listen for what the words recognise next.

Perhaps that is the only understanding I need. I may never be completely understood, and the analytical Jeff would point out that the evidence accumulated so far does not make complete understanding the most likely outcome. It may be enough that somebody hears the broadcast, steps outside their usual place in the world and briefly looks back at themselves as a logical bystander. They may question why they accepted something, why they reduced themselves to fit a room or why they mistook conformity for safety. My voice does not need to tell them what to think if it can help them notice that they are still entitled to think.