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I would like to say I rose above it all, but that would be too neat and not entirely true. I absorbed it, worked around it, used it, hid from it, and sometimes let it drive me harder than was healthy. That is less noble, perhaps, but far more honest.

I can see now that the ordinary childhood I missed was not empty of value simply because it did not come with ribbons or representative jumpers. It may have been the very thing I needed most, though I doubt I would have recognised it at the time. I wanted proof that I was worth noticing, and the world kept offering me ways to prove it. What I needed, perhaps, was a place where proof was not required.

That is not a complaint so much as a reckoning. We all come from somewhere, and we all carry the logic of that place with us until we finally stop long enough to question it. I came from distance, from roads, from effort, from the belief that being better might help me cross the gap. It did help, in some ways, but it also taught me to keep reaching long after my arms were tired.

Sydney did not give me a map. It gave me another version of the old lesson, which was that belonging cannot always be earned by being better, braver, quieter, tougher or more useful. Sometimes you can do everything expected of you and still feel outside the circle. Sometimes the world you enter belongs so completely to other people that your first task is not to conquer it, but simply to stand there long enough to stop disappearing.

Belief and belonging may never sit neatly together in my story. They may remain uneasy companions, like two blokes forced to share a ute on a long trip when neither is quite willing to admit the other may have a point.

That, in its own odd way, feels honest. I have lived much of my life nearby but outside, accepted but not always known, useful but not always held, and if there is peace to be found now, perhaps it begins with no longer pretending that those things are the same.

In the end, night school did not bring me fully inside the circle. Nothing has ever done that as cleanly as I once hoped. But it moved me closer to my own voice, even if I could not hear that at the time. It taught me that effort could repair some things, though not all things, and that a life can be rebuilt from disappointment without pretending disappointment never happened.

In the end, night school did not bring me fully inside the circle. Nothing has ever done that as cleanly as I once hoped. But it moved me closer to my own voice, even if I could not hear that at the time. It taught me that effort could repair some things, though not all things, and that a life can be rebuilt from disappointment without pretending disappointment never happened.

Maybe the great mistake was thinking that belonging would arrive as a place. Maybe I expected too much from houses, suburbs and the property ladder, as though timber, brick, land and debt could settle what began much earlier. They gave shelter, and sometimes comfort, and occasionally pride, but they could not by themselves make the boy from the long road feel fully called in.

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.