The Words That Formed Me

That does not make the anger false, but it does make it mine to examine. There were times when I reduced myself to fit the room and then blamed the room for accepting the smaller version I had offered. There were also times when I delivered the full-colour explanation with such force that the people listening may have heard only the force. Being right about the existence of more colours does not guarantee that I have made anybody want to look at them.

The younger man may have imagined wealth as escape from the choices poverty removed. The professional man learned that money also purchases time, status and the presumption that a person is worth hearing. The older man has begun to suspect that the richest use of money would be to return choice, time and voice to other people. That may be what the song has been waiting for me to understand.

The words that formed me worked that way. They arrived through songs, poems, performances, films and the internal radio without submitting an explanation of their future purpose. If I Had a Hammer did not need me to understand political folk music when I first heard it. It only needed to leave the tool behind. The rest of my life gradually supplied the timber, the damage, the anger and the uncertainty about where the next blow should fall.

The system was not always right, and neither was I. Some warnings should have been heard, some institutions deserved the criticism and some of the stupidity I encountered was every bit as damaging as I have described it. Yet anger becomes dishonest when it edits out my pride, my impatience, my need to be recognised or the possibility that another person saw a cost I had not included. The losing side of a dispute is not automatically the noble side simply because it contains me.

After the bands stop playing, we discover what the gratitude was worth. If the veteran is left to fight another department, another night without sleep or another day without secure shelter, the music was not honour but accompaniment. If Indigenous service can be celebrated while Indigenous imprisonment continues at an obscene rate, commemoration has been separated from conscience. If we speak of heroes while refusing to look at the systems that manufacture need, the word has become a substitute for action.

I have done that with responsibility. I found Bigweld, service above self, pay it forward and every story in which the useful outsider arrives when official structures have failed. I placed them around the table and asked whether I should help, knowing perfectly well how the vote would go. The dissenting voice suggesting rest, boundaries or the possibility that another adult might carry his own parcel was frequently ruled out of order.

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.