DUMBING IT DOWN

Chapter 32

Writing – What I Use to Soften

The cursor blinked at me from the small table inside the caravan while the last light settled across whatever part of Australia we had reached that day. I had opened the computer to record the road behind us before the details blurred, as they have a habit of doing when one day of travel begins to merge with the next. There had been changes in the colour of the paddocks, the shape of the country, the width of the road and the ambitions of the occasional town that appeared ahead of us and disappeared in the mirrors soon afterwards. I could describe the river beside the campsite, the dust hanging behind a road train or the evening light catching the gums without needing to explain anything beyond what I had seen. The day had happened outside the caravan window, and my task was simply to put enough of it into words that I might recognise it again later.

Those first entries did not ask much of me emotionally. The country supplied the subject, the caravan supplied the desk and the day supplied a beginning, middle and end without requiring any great feat of imagination. Before long, however, the view from the window began sharing the page with the work that had followed us around Australia. There had been telephone calls, emails, a problem requiring an answer, another problem that probably did not require my involvement but had found me anyway, and the usual collection of interruptions that gathers around a person who has spent too long being available. I knew what had happened because that part was easy, and I could have listed it all without raising a sweat, complete with names, times and the action required. What became harder was moving beyond the road travelled and the work completed to ask how either of them had made me feel.

For more than forty years, most working days had been reduced to outcomes. A client rang, I responded, a decision was made, a document was prepared and something moved from the pending pile to the completed pile, at least until the next piece of information arrived and moved it back again. Feelings did not have their own column in the spreadsheet, mainly because nobody knew what tax treatment to give them and I had never been inclined to volunteer for the test case. Frustration might have qualified as an operating expense, while depression had certainly produced a few carried-forward losses, but neither was likely to survive an audit. The professional record showed the work completed, the advice provided and the problem resolved, not the part of me consumed in making those things happen.

I began writing for reasons far more practical than any late-life search for emotional truth. On that first trip around Australia, I wanted to document where we went, what we saw, who we met and which mechanical object had chosen the least convenient place to stop doing what the manufacturer had promised. Travel lends itself to record keeping because movement provides a natural structure without the writer having to manufacture one. You leave somewhere, travel through somewhere else and arrive at another place, while in between there are roads, meals, arguments with navigation systems, caravan parks of varying ambition and the occasional magnificent sunset that almost justifies the fuel bill. It was accounting with scenery, and I was well qualified for the accounting part. At that stage, I was not trying to uncover anything hidden inside myself because I was still occupied with finding somewhere level enough to park the caravan.

We even created a travel diary website, theozjeffbanks.com.au, and developed the persona of the Oz Jeff Banks. The additional description was partly a celebration of travelling around the country and partly an act of surrender to an English fashion designer who shared my name and had an irritating habit of stealing my Google rankings. Apparently designing clothes in London carried more search-engine authority than towing a caravan across Australia, which seemed unfair without being especially surprising. We posted the travel stories, added photographs and, because I have never been particularly good at leaving anything as a simple pastime, offered some of the images for sale as part of yet another business venture. Even our attempt to record an escape from work soon acquired a website, a brand, stock for sale and the vague expectation that it might eventually pay for itself.

The earliest travel blogs were safely descriptive because the subject sat outside me. I wrote about red dirt, coastal stretches, long roads, roadside stops, caravan parks and the daily discussion about how far we intended to travel before common sense or fatigue intervened. The country changed beyond the windscreen and gave me something new to record each night, although Australia occasionally tests a writer by providing several hundred kilometres of scenery that appears determined not to change at all. I could note the town, the campsite, the weather and the distance travelled, then close the computer with the satisfaction of having preserved the day. The writing did not need to explain why a place mattered because, on that first journey, seeing it had seemed enough.

As the years passed and the journeys became shorter or returned us to country we had already crossed, the writing began to carry more than the view. I could write about the road into Condobolin, the colours of the canola, the flatness of the Hay Plains, the gums lining the Murray and the apparently endless supply of European carp waiting beneath the water for my bait. I could also write about towing the caravan, losing internet reception, finding it again and then wishing I had not because the emails immediately began arriving. The scenery remained, but work had begun to intrude more openly into the story because it was intruding more openly into the trip. What had started as a record of where we went was becoming a record of the difficulty I had leaving behind the person everybody expected to answer.

Much later, on a houseboat holiday on the Murray, half the dining table was colonised by laptops, screens, cords and business equipment. The other business people on board were doing exactly what we were doing, which made the arrangement seem normal even while the river passed quietly beyond the windows and suggested otherwise. I wrote about the fish, the weather, the gums, the stillness and the BAS that had to be completed despite the absence of anything resembling an office. Moorings were sometimes selected by the strength of the internet signal rather than the view, a decision that tells its own story about the kind of holiday we had created. We were supposedly escaping work, although small business owners understand that escape is generally a word used by people whose employers continue paying them while they are away.

That was funny because it was true, but like most things that are funny because they are true, there was something less amusing underneath it. Retirement had begun to appear in conversation as a reasonable possibility, yet there we were beside one of the great rivers of Australia arranging our lives around bandwidth and approaching deadlines. I could laugh at the absurdity of answering business questions from a houseboat because laughter made the contradiction easier to carry. What I did not write with the same confidence was the resentment, obligation and strange pride bound together inside the fact that people still needed me. Even our attempts to slow down had to be fitted between tasks, and I was not yet sure whether that was because the work would not release me or because I would not release the work.

The writing began as a way of remembering the trips, but memory has a habit of refusing to stay within the itinerary. A town would bring back an earlier holiday, a riverbank would remind me of taking the boys fishing, and an old road would carry the echo of people who had once travelled it with us. Lake Cargelligo was no longer merely a place on the way to somewhere else once I began to write about it. It became the wet Easter when the tents had to be dried at my parents’ place, the boys learned to water-ski between showers and a large carp managed to slap one of them across the face after being hauled triumphantly up the bank. The road had not changed, but the act of recording it returned people, incidents and earlier versions of us to the landscape.

I did not properly notice that change when it began. I thought I was documenting distance, but I was gradually documenting what the distance disturbed. Places were not simply destinations because they came loaded with the lives we had lived there, or the lives we had carried through them on the way to somewhere else. A river was never only water once somebody had taught a child to fish beside it, argued beside it, laughed beside it or sat quietly enough to remember someone who was gone. The travel story began to creep beyond where we had been and towards why the place mattered, bringing feelings onto the page before I had made any conscious decision to invite them. I had moved from recording the country to recording what the country carried.

Little Prairie accelerated that movement because it had become the spiritual home of my mother’s side of the family. It had never been my home in the ordinary sense, yet repeated visits gave it the feeling of a place to which part of us returned, even when everyone arrived from different directions and brought different versions of the family with them. The farm held animals, machinery, timber, meals, conversations and the constant movement of Aunty Kerre attending to whatever needed attending to. It also held stories that had been told so often nobody considered them history, along with other stories that had barely been told at all. I arrived looking for fish, wood and perhaps some space inside my own head, then found myself surrounded by a heritage that had been quietly waiting for somebody to take notice.

Aunty Kerre did not see herself as the subject of a book because she had never considered the things she did to be especially remarkable. She had lived her life, raised her family, supported other people, looked after animals, handled whatever arrived at the gate and regarded most of it as no more than doing what needed to be done. That view is common among people whose lives are genuinely worth recording, while those who have achieved rather less can sometimes produce several volumes about themselves before lunch. It took time, questions and a fair amount of persistence to convince her that the ordinary things were where the story lived. Her reluctance also reminded me how much of a life disappears when nobody thinks the everyday details are important enough to preserve.

The more we talked, the further the writing moved into heritage. Stories of family, places, names, work, separations, deaths and rediscovered identity began to sit beside the travel notes, and soon they were no longer prepared to remain in the smaller space. The Ferguson connection was not merely an interesting branch on a family tree because heritage does not arrive as a neat chart with boxes, lines and an explanation attached. It arrives with questions about who knew what, who was told what, what had been hidden, what had been misunderstood and what belonging might mean after decades of accepting a simpler account of the past. Once those questions entered the writing, they did not behave like obedient historical facts because they carried pride, confusion, loss and uncertainty with them. Even when nobody could place a precise name on the feeling, the feeling was there.

I had spent most of my professional life treating words in much the same way I treated numbers. Their job was to establish what had happened, identify what mattered and make the result understandable to the person who needed to act on it. In accounting, the numbers are never the whole story, but they are where the evidence eventually lands after people have made decisions, avoided decisions, justified decisions, forgotten decisions or denied making them at all. My work was to pick through the result, identify the pattern and translate the chaos into something the client could use. The translation was rarely the full thought because the full thought had branches, warnings, alternatives and consequences extending well beyond the question the client believed had been asked. Professional usefulness depended on knowing which parts to bring into the room and which parts to carry out again without mentioning them.

I learned to reduce those thoughts before presenting them. I slowed the explanation, removed the possibilities that were not immediately relevant, softened the warning and delivered a conclusion that had some chance of surviving the room. Sometimes I could see the wall well before the person in front of me could, but there was little value in producing a detailed architectural assessment when the client only wanted to know whether to turn left or right. I had to avoid sounding superior, impatient or alarmist, even when experience suggested alarm was a perfectly reasonable response. That did not always make me easy to deal with because the shortened explanation sometimes concealed how I had reached the conclusion, leaving the other person with an answer that sounded abrupt or more definite than they were ready to accept. Being able to see further down the road did not automatically give me the patience to walk somebody else along every metre of it.

There was a skill in making an idea small enough to be accepted, and I do not dismiss that skill merely because I can now see its cost. Translation is not surrender when it allows another person to understand something they might otherwise reject. The difficulty was that the adjustment usually travelled in one direction. I adapted to their tolerance level, speed, knowledge and willingness to hear what I was saying, while the original thought remained inside me with its unfinished branches still attached. Nobody asked what happened to those branches after the meeting because the invoice covered the advice delivered, not the mental vegetation left behind. I was paid for clarity, even when the clarity had been created by cutting away much of what made the issue clear to me.

After enough years, that softening became automatic. I could hear myself reducing an explanation while I was still forming it, removing the parts most likely to create resistance and substituting language that sounded less definite than the conclusion inside my head. I became good at saying, “You might like to consider,” when what I meant was, “For God’s sake, do not do that.” I could turn “This will end badly” into “There may be some issues worth discussing,” which is the professional equivalent of seeing smoke pouring from a building and suggesting somebody check whether the toaster is playing up. Clients often valued me for the clarity of the final answer without knowing how much thought had been discarded to produce it. I sometimes resented them for not seeing what I had chosen not to show, which was hardly fair but remained true.

When I began writing, I carried the same habit onto the page. I softened the anger, shortened the explanation and moved quickly from the feeling to the lesson because lessons are easier to justify. A lesson sounds constructive, while a feeling can sit there taking up room without offering anybody a return on their investment. Writing also gave me the unusual ability to talk without necessarily being heard. The words were out there for anybody to read, yet unless someone arrived with a particular interest in the place, the subject or the person involved, they could pass unnoticed among the endless supply of other words competing for attention. Anonymity became a friend because it allowed me to say more than I might have said aloud while preserving the comfort of believing that nobody of consequence was really listening.

That protection suited me for a long time. I could write about a difficult event, give it structure, add enough humour to make it readable and arrive at a conclusion without allowing the reader close to what had made it difficult. The story appeared honest because the facts were there, but the emotion remained behind the curtain doing most of the heavy lifting. There was no face across the table changing expression, no interruption to redirect the thought and no need to defend the meaning before I had finished developing it. The page let me speak, while the size of the internet allowed me to believe I was speaking into a crowd too large to notice. That arrangement lasted until the sheer volume of the writing began to create its own kind of visibility and people started noticing not only the stories, but the voice behind them.

The word count mounted at a rate that became difficult to dismiss as casual diary keeping. A few travel blogs became collections of memories, observations and reflections, while the subjects widened from roads and rivers into retirement, depression, family, business, murder, grief, ageing and the peculiar accumulation of events gathered during a life spent noticing more than was always convenient. The total passed one million words and then, almost without ceremony, passed two million, yet not one book had been published. I had produced enough material to occupy several shelves, but most of it remained stored on computers, websites and backup drives, talking into the world without any real expectation that the world would answer. There were mornings when thousands of words arrived with a speed that suggested something important must be escaping, although when I stopped typing and stood up from the desk, I often felt exactly as I had before I sat down.

Dale Beaumont caused me to look at those words differently when he suggested a strategy that gave them a purpose beyond personal notation. The experiences I had been documenting, particularly those involving depression, work, identity and the appearance of coping, might allow somebody in a similar mental state to recognise that they were not alone. Until then, I had treated the diaries as a place to put what had happened, without properly considering what another person might take from finding their own thoughts reflected there. The possibility of helping somebody did not require me to pretend I had solved depression or reached a neat understanding of myself. It required enough honesty for another person, perhaps functioning behind the same competent disguise, to recognise the effort involved and realise that the struggle was not uniquely theirs.

That suggestion changed the task because diary notation and book writing ask different things of the same material. A diary can follow the day, preserve the feeling and stop when the writer has run out of either, but a book has to carry another person through the experience. It needs shape without forcing a false conclusion, context without burying the emotion and enough openness for the reader to enter. I had spent years writing what happened to me, while Dale’s suggestion made me consider what the account might do for someone else. The words were no longer merely evidence that I had endured another day or noticed another contradiction. They could become a hand extended towards someone who had been hiding behind usefulness and humour in much the same way.

The idea appealed to the part of me that had spent a lifetime trying to make thought useful, but it also carried a danger I recognised only gradually. If writing became another method of helping other people, I could continue avoiding the question of what it was doing for me. I knew how to turn experience into an explanation, a lesson or a warning because that was close to the work I had always done. The harder task was allowing the experience to remain emotionally untidy when tidying it might make the chapter more helpful. Even in writing about depression, I could find myself translating the feeling into something the reader could tolerate, repeating the old professional habit in a different room. The subject had changed, but I had not entirely changed with it.

That was confusing because writing was supposed to provide release. I had absorbed the general idea that putting emotions into words allowed those emotions to leave, or at least reduced their tenancy within the body. My experience was less straightforward because the words left my fingers, filled pages and sat obediently in files, while the feeling did not necessarily follow them. I could produce ten thousand words about the internal dull roar and still hear it after the computer was shut down. Sometimes I had described the emotion accurately without moving it at all, as though I had completed a careful inventory of everything in a room and then locked the door again.

Depression has always been capable of disguising itself as productivity. It can answer emails, prepare accounts, solve problems and write several chapters before anybody notices that the person doing all of it is not particularly well. Writing therefore carried the same risk as accounting because it could become another form of useful activity placed between me and the need to sit still. The growing manuscripts might have been evidence that I was finally expressing myself, or they might have been a more sophisticated way of remaining too busy to feel anything properly. A large word count is impressive until you realise it may simply be a very long hiding place. I could not always tell whether the words were opening the door or helping me build a more elaborate one.

The change did not come simply from producing more words, because I had already demonstrated that volume alone could leave the emotion untouched. It came when I began showing the writing to other people and discovered that being read was different from merely writing. I expected comments about grammar, spelling, structure or whether I had been too hard on somebody because those were manageable questions with answers that could be acted upon. Instead, people became interested in the voice, and my sister was among those who laughed at parts I had almost removed, recognised people from a few lines of description and asked what happened next. Some saw their own experience inside events that had happened to me, which surprised me because I had assumed much of what went on inside my head was too specific, tangled or difficult to explain.

Their interest created a form of therapy that the writing alone had not supplied. It was not only praise that mattered, although I am no more immune to praise than anybody else who has spent years pretending not to need it. What mattered was that somebody had stayed with the thought instead of requiring it to be shortened before they would listen. I had allowed more of it onto the page than I would normally have allowed into conversation, and the reader had not laughed at me, become defensive or looked for a polite way to leave the room. The words had travelled from my head into somebody else’s understanding without being reduced to the smallest version they might tolerate. For once, the mind had not needed to apologise for the amount of space it occupied.

The response from members of the family to the heritage stories made that recognition stronger. The writing preserved more than names, dates and relationships because it captured the way people moved, spoke, worried, laughed and made decisions when nobody believed they were creating history. Someone could read about Aunty Kerre chasing turkeys in the ute, threatening consequences nobody believed she would ever carry out, and recognise the same woman who had quietly become the person everyone rang when something went wrong. The humour opened the door, but the interest in what sat beneath it gave the story weight. An ordinary incident could carry character, family and history in a way that everyday conversation had overlooked. What had begun as a record of country had become a way of returning people to the rooms they had once occupied.

I began to understand that writing offered a different kind of room from the ones in which I had spent most of my life explaining myself. A reader did not need the entire thought delivered in a single breath, and I did not have to watch their face for the first sign of resistance. I could establish the scene, follow the branches, return to an earlier memory and allow the meaning to arrive when it was ready. The reader could pause, reread, disagree, put the book down or come back later without requiring me to reduce what I meant before the next person spoke. Time, which had so often worked against me in conversation, worked in my favour on the page. The thought could remain intact long enough to be understood rather than merely heard.

Writing became the counterweight to accounting because it reversed the direction of the translation. Accounting demanded that thought be shortened, softened and made useful to the person who had asked the question, while writing allowed usefulness to become secondary to what felt true. A professional explanation had to end with something the client could do, but a chapter could end with uncertainty and still have done its work. I did not have to convert every frustration into advice, every hurt into a lesson or every contradiction into a recommendation. Sometimes the value lay in describing the wall, the approaching impact and the exhaustion of being the person who had seen it coming, while also admitting that my warning may not have been delivered in a form anybody was ready to accept. Writing gave me room to examine both the wall and the way I behaved while pointing at it.

That did not mean the softening stopped altogether, nor should it have. There are living people inside the stories, along with relationships that matter more than the satisfaction of saying everything exactly as I felt it at the worst moment. Memory is also an unreliable witness, particularly when anger has been cross-examining it for several decades and expects a conviction. I still remove the cruelty that can arrive in a first draft, question whether my judgement was fair and recognise that intelligence does not prevent a person from being wrong. The difference is that I now soften the writing by choice and responsibility, rather than because I automatically assume the room cannot cope with the full thought. Some editing protects other people, while the older form of editing had often been intended to protect me from their reaction.

There are also parts of myself I continue to edit because I do not yet know how to place them on the page. I can write around depression with observation, humour and enough self-awareness to make the darkness readable, but that does not mean I have put all of it into words. Some feelings resist language because naming them would make them too real, while others have been carried for so long they no longer feel separate from the person carrying them. Writing can point towards those places, circle them and describe the effect they have on everything nearby without necessarily entering them. A book may reveal more than a conversation while still concealing more than it admits. The fact that I now write more openly does not mean I have stopped deciding what the reader is allowed to see.

Writing books was never a retirement hobby, although it may have looked that way from the outside once manuscripts began appearing with unreasonable frequency. The move into books began at an inquest where I took pages of scrawled notes while trying to follow the evidence, the witnesses and the significance of what was being said. Those notes made sense to me at the time because I had written them, but they were hardly a readable account for anyone with a genuine interest in what had unfolded. I began turning them into something structured and coherent, preserving the proceedings while also capturing the atmosphere of the room and the weight carried into it. The result became a book in every practical sense, although the sensitivity of the material means it is not available for publication.

I then wrote a novel from inside the mind of the prime suspect. I used the known evidence, the gaps and the contradictions to construct a first-person narrative that explored what might have sat behind the public story without pretending fiction could supply the certainty that the evidence had not. That manuscript also became a complete book, but it remains unpublished for legal reasons, at least for now. Between them, those two works showed me that I might possess a gift I had never properly tested. Discovering a new capacity near retirement was inconvenient because it immediately gave the restless part of my mind another direction in which to run. Slowing down had again produced an activity requiring targets.

Over the period from Christmas and New Year to Australia Day, I dared myself to write six books. Part of the challenge was to test whether the first two manuscripts had been accidents produced by unusual subject matter, while another part was the familiar weakness I have for any goal that appears slightly unreasonable. When six had been completed, I did not interpret that as evidence that I should rest because my mind rarely responds to achievement with anything as sensible as satisfaction. I set a target of twenty books by the July Business Blueprint Conference in Sydney and began treating the number as though somebody else had imposed the deadline. With the publication of this book, that target will have been reached. What began as notes in an inquest has therefore become a body of work too deliberate, demanding and personally important to be dismissed as something I do to fill the spare hours left by accounting.

The speed of that production does not mean every book arrived easily or that quantity provided the release I was seeking. Some manuscripts drew on material that had already existed in diary form, while others required me to return to memories I had spent years containing within a more acceptable explanation. The challenge gave the writing direction, but it also suited the old habit of measuring progress by output. Six books by Australia Day and twenty by July were numbers I could understand, targets that could be ticked off without requiring a judgement about whether I felt any better. The accountant in me had found a way to supervise the writer. Even the recovery of the unsoftened mind had acquired a production schedule.

At my desk now, I can ask what the day made me feel and remain with the question longer than I could when the caravan entries first began. I might start with the call, the email, the conversation or the small absurdity that irritated me beyond its reasonable entitlement. From there, another memory may appear, followed by a connection I had not known was present until the words brought it forward. The feeling often arrives late, slipping into the chapter after I have stopped trying to drag it there and begun paying attention to the ordinary detail around it. That may be how a mind trained to conceal itself gradually learns to speak, not through a grand declaration, but through the accumulation of things it can no longer dismiss. I still find the event easier to record than its effect, but at least the question is now allowed to remain on the page.

I cannot claim that writing has provided the release I imagined when the diaries began turning into books. The words mount, the manuscripts accumulate and the stories now occupy shelves as well as files on my computer, giving physical form to thoughts that once existed only as internal noise. There is satisfaction when somebody reads them and understands something I had spent years trying to soften, and there is relief in knowing that parts of the mind have finally been allowed into a room without first being stripped for the comfort of others. Yet the screen still goes dark at the end of the day, leaving me at the desk with much the same body and many of the same thoughts I brought to it. The question remains whether I have released the emotion, moved it into a form I can examine or merely learned to describe it well.

Writing is unquestionably an outlet, but an outlet does not guarantee that everything inside will flow through it. Sometimes it offers understanding, sometimes recognition and sometimes nothing more than a better arrangement of the pain, although even that may be preferable to leaving it in an untidy heap. The interest of other people has made the work therapeutic in ways that two million private words never managed, because being read is different from merely talking into the anonymity of the page. I no longer have to soften every thought to the tolerance level of the room, but I am still learning which thoughts I soften out of care, which I soften from habit and which I have not yet found the courage to write. The cursor continues to blink, much as it did on the caravan table, waiting for the next account of where I have been and what the day has done to me. Whether that is the therapy I once contemplated or simply the first honest place I have found to ask the question remains something I am still writing to discover.