OUT OF VOICE REACH

A life spent trying to belong

Chapter 16 — Do I Still Need to Fit?

There comes a point, somewhere between finishing work and pretending you are enjoying the freedom of not working, when a bloke has to ask himself a question he has avoided most of his life. Do I still need to fit, or have I just spent so long trying that I have mistaken the effort for the answer?

It sounds like the sort of question you might ask while sitting under a tree with a notebook and too much time on your hands, which is fairly close to retirement if nobody has given you a useful job that morning. But for me it does not feel like a new question at all. It feels like an old one, only dressed up in older skin, with less hair, more tablets, and the faintly irritating knowledge that there are fewer years ahead in which to sort it out.

For most of my life, fitting in seemed to come with conditions attached. You could belong if you were useful enough, clever enough, quick enough, tough enough, available enough, or prepared enough to keep proving that you deserved your place. Nobody necessarily said it like that, of course, because people rarely hand you the rule book when they are quietly measuring you. You simply learn it by watching who gets included, who gets ignored, who gets laughed at, and who has to work twice as hard for the same nod.

I learnt it early, out on the farm, where distance was part of the furniture. Seven miles from the nearest settlement was not far on a map if you had a car, a full tank and somewhere to go, but it was a fair way when you were a kid trying to understand where he belonged. We were out of voice reach of the nearest neighbour, and that phrase has stayed with me because it describes more than the paddocks between houses. It describes the feeling of being close enough to know other people existed, but not close enough to call out and be answered.

The funny thing is that I was not exactly raised in silence. There were animals, engines, weather, gates, work, family, and all the usual noises of a grazing property going about its business. But there is a difference between noise and belonging, just as there is a difference between being present and being included. I could be in the middle of things and still feel somehow to the side of them, as though the real conversation was happening just beyond where my voice could carry.

School should have solved that, I suppose, because that is what adults tend to believe school does. You put children together in one place and somehow expect friendship, confidence and belonging to sort themselves out between spelling tests and lunch orders. But the bus ride in was its own lesson, with changing routes, shifting groups, and children who seemed to know each other in ways I could not quite enter. Some were related, some had known each other all their lives, and some simply had the natural gift of walking into a group as though the gate had been left open for them.

I was not without ability, which helped and hurt in almost equal measure. Schoolwork came easily enough, and that should have been an advantage, but cleverness in a small place can be a poor substitute for ease. It can get you noticed without getting you known, and there is a loneliness in that which is hard to explain without sounding ungrateful. You learn to take the marks, the praise and the occasional raised eyebrow, while quietly wondering why none of it makes the playground feel any safer.

Sport offered a different doorway, or at least I thought it did. On a field, a court, a horse, or a pitch, there was less need to explain yourself if you could do the job in front of you. You could run, tackle, catch, ride, compete, and for a little while the question of who you were seemed less important than whether you were good enough. That suited me because being good enough felt clearer than being liked, and it gave me something to do with the ache I did not know how to name.

But even sport had its price. The better you became, the further you were asked to go, and the further you went, the more you found yourself among people who already seemed to belong somewhere else. Representative honours sound grand when listed on a page, and I do not pretend I was not proud of them. Yet behind the jumper, the selection, the trip away or the game played at a higher level, there was often the same boy from the outlying place, wondering whether he had been invited in or merely tested again.

That is the trick of achievement. It can look like belonging from the outside, especially to people who see the certificate, the team photo, the trophy, the title, or the role. But achievement can also become a kind of passport that has to be stamped at every border, and the trouble is that the borders keep moving. You get through one gate and find another waiting, with someone standing there asking for fresh proof that you should be allowed in.

I carried that into adult life more than I understood at the time. Work suited me because work had rules, deadlines, obligations and measurable outcomes, even when the people involved were anything but measurable. Accounting, business, clients, committees, responsibilities and community roles all gave me ways to be necessary. Being necessary is not the same as belonging, but it can feel close enough when you are busy and nobody has yet asked what happens when the work stops.

For years I mistook usefulness for connection. If someone needed a form lodged, a problem solved, a set of accounts untangled, a meeting attended, a letter written, a plan made, a crisis steadied or a favour done, I knew where I stood. I was the bloke who could help, or at least the bloke who would have a go, which is often more dangerous because people learn to keep asking. I do not say that with bitterness entirely, because I gained pride and purpose from being useful, but pride and purpose can still leave a hollow behind them when they are the only currency being traded.

It is not that people were cruel all the time, because that would be too simple and not especially true. There were good people, kind moments, shared laughs, genuine friendships, family bonds, and times when I felt warmly held by the life around me. The difficulty is that belonging never seemed to arrive without a question mark beside it. I could be included and still wonder how long the invitation lasted, or whether it depended on me continuing to perform whatever version of myself had been accepted that day.

Retirement has a way of stripping some of that back. It takes away the ready-made answers, the business hours, the professional title, the urgency, the excuses, and the phone calls that once proved you were still required. At first you might call it freedom, because that is the approved word, and nobody wants to be the miserable bugger who receives freedom as though it were a suspicious parcel. But freedom can feel strangely empty when you have spent most of your life earning your place through obligation.

There are mornings when the absence of pressure is peaceful, and there are mornings when it feels like being forgotten. That is not easy to admit, because retirement is supposed to be a reward, and I know plenty of people would be glad to have the choice. Still, a reward can ask hard questions if you have not worked out who you are without the struggle. When the old demands fall quiet, you can find yourself listening for a voice that was always there underneath, though not always easy to hear.

Depression does not help with any of this, though it is not polite enough to arrive with a name tag and a clear list of symptoms. It comes more like weather moving over the hills, changing the light before you realise the day has turned. Some mornings it is heaviness, some days it is irritation, and sometimes it is that old inward suspicion that perhaps you were never as necessary as you hoped. I have learnt to keep moving through it most of the time, because movement has always been my fallback, but movement is not the same as peace.

There is a temptation, when looking back, to tidy the story into causes and lessons. The farm made me distant, school made me wary, sport made me competitive, work made me useful, and retirement made me reflective. That would be neat enough for a back cover, but life does not arrange itself so conveniently. The truth is more tangled, because I wanted belonging while also mistrusting it, wanted recognition while resenting what it demanded, and wanted to be seen while fearing that being seen would expose too much.

I think that is why the question of fitting in has never had a simple answer for me. Part of me still wants the comfort of a group where no proof is required, where I can walk in without checking the room for signs of welcome or judgement. Another part of me has grown used to the edge, to watching from just outside the circle, to knowing the exit, to keeping a little distance even when nobody has asked me to leave. The edge can be lonely, but it can also feel safer than the middle.

There is an old stubbornness in me that says fitting in is overrated anyway. It says that most groups come with nonsense, politics, little hierarchies, half-truths and people who take themselves far too seriously. It tells me I am better off not needing any of it, and on certain days I almost believe that. But stubbornness can be a coat you wear against the cold, and sometimes you only realise how cold it has been when you take it off.

I have also wondered whether my lifelong effort to fit was really an effort to be accepted, or whether it was an effort to stop feeling ashamed of being outside. That is a harder thought because it shifts the problem from other people to the story I carried about myself. A child from out past the edge of town can grow into a man who still imagines everyone else received instructions he missed. He can become competent, respected and even admired in places, while privately suspecting that he is still bluffing his way through the gate.

The odd thing is that I can see now how much of my life disproves that suspicion. I was not without friends, not without family, not without teams, roles, communities, clients, colleagues, and people who trusted me. There were circles I did enter, and some of them I helped build, whether I gave myself credit for that or not. Yet emotional truth is not always obedient to evidence, and the boy on the long road to school does not vanish simply because the older man has a better argument.

That boy still turns up in unexpected places. He appears when a room goes quiet in a way I cannot read, when someone leaves me out of a decision, when a message is not returned, when a group forms easily around others but not around me. He appears when I am praised too, which is more annoying, because praise can set off the old fear that now I will have to keep earning it. I have spent a fair bit of life being good at things while wondering whether I would still matter if I stopped.

That may be the real question underneath this chapter. Not whether I still need to fit, but whether I believe I am allowed to belong without earning it. Even writing those words feels a little uncomfortable, as though I have wandered into territory better suited to people with softer voices and more cushions. Still, there it is. If belonging has always been tied to performance, then retirement is not just the end of work; it is the collapse of an old bargaining system.

I do not know yet what replaces it. I would like to say that I have reached some fine conclusion and now accept myself fully, preferably while standing on a headland at sunset with the wind doing something symbolic. But that would be rubbish, and not even convincing rubbish. Most days I am still working it out in ordinary ways, through small conversations, family visits, unfinished jobs, memories that arrive without asking, and the slow business of learning not to measure every day by what I achieved.

There are moments, though, when the question softens. It might happen while sitting quietly with Robyn nearby, or hearing from one of the kids, or laughing at some small absurdity that would not interest anyone else. It might happen in a shed, on a road, around a table, or in the middle of doing something that has no grand purpose beyond being part of the day. In those moments I do not feel as though I have fitted in by winning my place, but as though the place was already there and I had simply stopped pushing against it.

Perhaps belonging is less like being selected and more like being received. That is not how I learnt it, and it is not how much of life seemed to operate, but maybe the learning was incomplete. A team selects you because you can play, a workplace keeps you because you can perform, and a community often values you because you can contribute. But the deeper kind of belonging, the kind I have spent years circling, may not begin with usefulness at all.

That does not mean usefulness is bad. I still believe in pulling your weight, helping where you can, doing the job properly, and not becoming one of those people who mistakes self-care for leaving everyone else to carry the load. I am too old and too Australian, probably, to become entirely comfortable with the idea that I owe nothing to anyone. But there must be some middle ground between being selfish and being permanently on call, some place where a person can contribute without handing over his whole identity as payment.

The farm boy in me still understands distance better than ease. He knows the road, the paddocks, the silence, the bus ride, and the feeling of arriving from somewhere just outside the accepted map. He knows that being noticed is not the same as being known, and that being better at something can sometimes make you lonelier rather than safer. I do not want to lose him entirely, because he is part of what made me observant, persistent and reluctant to take belonging for granted.

But I also do not want him running the whole show. He has had a fair innings, and like many country-bred survivors he is not always the best judge of when the danger has passed. He still thinks he has to prove himself at every gate, and he still suspects that acceptance is temporary unless maintained by effort. I can respect him without giving him the keys to the rest of my life.

So do I still need to fit? I suppose the honest answer is yes and no, which is untidy but probably closer to the truth than anything more polished. I still need connection, affection, recognition, conversation and the quiet comfort of knowing there are people with whom I do not have to explain every silence. But I may not need to fit in the old sense, the anxious sense, the sense of bending myself into whatever shape might earn approval.

Maybe the task now is not to force my way into the circle, or to stand outside it proving I never cared. Maybe it is to stop treating the circle as the only measure of a life. There are other shapes a person can inhabit, and some of them may be kinder than the ones we chased when we were young. A life can be lived beside others, near others, sometimes among them, without every moment becoming a test of worth.

I have spent many years trying to be the sort of person who could not be easily dismissed. That brought achievements, responsibilities, some respect, and a fair amount of exhaustion. It also left me with the old habit of scanning for where I stood, as though every room contained a hidden scoreboard. Retirement has not removed that habit, but it has made it more visible, which is a nuisance and possibly a gift.

Out of voice reach began as a fact of geography. It was the distance from our place to the next, the space across which a call would fall short and disappear into the air. But over time it became a way of understanding myself, rightly or wrongly, as someone often close enough to see belonging but not always close enough to feel heard. Now, at this end of working life, I am left wondering whether my voice was always weaker than others, or whether I had simply learnt too early to stop calling.

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.

That may not sound like resolution, and it is not meant to. Some chapters in a life end with a door closing, while others end with a person standing in the doorway, unsure whether he is leaving or arriving. This feels more like the second kind. I am not finished with the question of belonging, but I am beginning to wonder whether belonging was ever meant to be earned by a lifetime of striving, or whether it was waiting somewhere simpler, just beyond the habit of trying so hard.