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.
Chapter 8 — Belief and Belonging
There is a particular loneliness in living inside a system you do not quite believe in, especially when everyone around you appears to accept it as the natural order of things. It is not always open rebellion, because rebellion requires a confidence I did not always possess, and in my case it was more often a quiet internal resistance, the sort that sits behind the ribs and says nothing much because saying too much would only confirm that you did not belong there in the first place.
I had known distance before I knew doctrine, and that may have shaped everything that followed. When you begin life seven miles from the nearest settlement and out of voice reach of the nearest farm, you learn early that belonging is not guaranteed by proximity, and that being placed among people does not necessarily mean being gathered in by them.
By the time I found myself inside a regime of rules, expectations, loyalties and beliefs that did not match my own, I already had plenty of practice at standing slightly apart. I had done it on the bus, in the schoolyard, in classrooms where being good at something made me useful but not necessarily liked, and on sporting fields where a jumper could give the illusion of belonging for the length of a match.
The difficulty with regimes is that they rarely announce themselves as regimes. They arrive dressed as tradition, discipline, standards, loyalty, faith, good manners, proper thinking, or simply the way things are done around here, which is a very Australian way of saying that nobody is particularly interested in hearing whether you agree with it.
I was not always brave enough to argue with it, and I am not sure the argument would have helped anyway. A boy from the outside, already carrying the small stigma of distance and difference, does not always improve his standing by telling the room that he finds the room itself a bit doubtful.
So I learnt to live with the split. There was the outward version of me, the one who turned up, did the work, played the game, kept moving, achieved what could be achieved, and tried not to make too much fuss about the parts that did not fit.
Then there was the inward version, watching closely and asking questions that did not have safe places to land. That version of me could see that belief, in many settings, was less about truth than membership, and that to question the belief was often to question your right to stand among the believers.
It was not only religion, though religion may have been one of the clearer examples of it. It was also the belief in hierarchy, the belief in the right sort of background, the belief that some people arrived already marked as central while others had to earn temporary admission by performance.
That was the harder doctrine to swallow, because it was never written on a board or recited at assembly. It was carried in glances, nicknames, assumptions, old friendships, surnames, inherited confidence, and the easy way some people moved through a place as though the doors had been built with them in mind.
I was often starting over just as others were moving on. They had histories with one another, small alliances formed before I arrived, stories I had not been present for, and a natural ease that comes when you do not have to explain your beginning every time you enter a room.
Starting over sounds clean when it is spoken from a distance. In life, it is often grubby and awkward, full of small humiliations, uncertain entrances, wrong guesses, and the exhausting business of working out where to stand without looking as though you are trying too hard.
I always felt I was trying too hard, even when I was trying not to. That may be one of the curses of the outsider, because indifference has to be performed with the same energy as ambition, and I was never quite sure which one I was supposed to be showing.
When others moved through the years with the same group beside them, I often felt as though I had been given a fresh map after the town had already been built. Everyone else seemed to know where things were, who mattered, what jokes were safe, what loyalties were expected, and which opinions could be expressed without losing ground.
I learnt the map, of course, because I was good at learning maps. That was one of my advantages and one of my traps, because competence can disguise discomfort so well that people stop asking whether you are comfortable at all.
If I did well, the regime tolerated me. If I did better than expected, it noticed me, although being noticed was not always the same as being welcomed, and sometimes it simply placed me in another category of difference.
There is a strange punishment in being good enough to be used but not familiar enough to be loved. You become handy, reliable, selected, called upon, written down on the team sheet, listed among the achievers, but still not quite included in the quieter circle where people are known rather than measured.
I can see now how much of my young life was spent trying to turn usefulness into belonging. I thought if I could contribute enough, win enough, score enough, answer enough, carry enough, endure enough, then eventually the door would stay open without me having to keep my foot jammed in it.
But belonging earned that way is always conditional. It lasts only as long as the usefulness lasts, and the moment you are tired, injured, uncertain, quiet, grieving, depressed, or simply not performing at the level expected, the old fear returns that perhaps there was never a place for you at all.
That fear followed me into adulthood more faithfully than many people did. It sat beside me in offices, meetings, businesses, committees, clubs and family obligations, whispering that I could not afford to become unnecessary because unnecessary people are easily left out.
Living inside a regime that does not match your personal belief teaches you many skills, and not all of them are healthy. You learn to read rooms, to hear what is not said, to measure risk before speaking, to carry a second set of thoughts under the first, and to keep your real doubts tucked away where they cannot be used against you.
Some might call that maturity, but I am not sure it always is. Sometimes it is only a more polished form of hiding, with better clothes and a diary full of obligations to make it look purposeful.
I have often wondered whether my later life in work suited this pattern too well. Accounting, business, governance, compliance, responsibilities, deadlines, clients, records, numbers and obligations all offered a kind of regime, and within that regime I could be useful, necessary and hard to replace, which is a dangerous form of comfort for someone who has spent a lifetime fearing replacement.
There were rules in that world too, though I understood those rules better than many of the older emotional ones. Numbers behaved with more honesty than people in some respects, because a figure either reconciled or it did not, and while that may sound dry, there is a peculiar mercy in a thing that does not ask you to guess whether it accepts you.
Yet even there, belief and belonging did not always line up. I could believe in service, competence, fairness, loyalty and doing the job properly, while also living inside systems that valued appearance, politics, hierarchy or convenience more than truth.
That mismatch has a cost. You can keep operating inside it for years, even decades, but some part of you is always making little withdrawals from the account, and eventually the balance tells the truth even if the face keeps smiling.
Depression, in that sense, was not always a thunderstorm for me. Often it was a slow inland drought, the sort where the paddocks still look passable from the road until you walk into them and see how little feed is actually left.
I could keep going, and I often did. I could answer the call, do the task, sort the problem, make the arrangement, prepare the papers, send the email, carry the worry, and then wonder privately why being needed still did not feel like being held.
That is one of the great tricks of usefulness. It gives the appearance of connection while sometimes leaving the deeper loneliness untouched, because people can rely on you without ever really seeing you.
There were times when I mistook being relied upon for being loved. I do not say that bitterly, because I have also relied on others and perhaps failed to see them fully, but it is a hard thing to recognise in yourself after years of carrying the load as though the load itself was proof of your place.
The boy on the farm could not have explained that. He would only have known the physical facts, the road, the distance, the settlement, the neighbouring farm beyond calling range, and the bus that took him into a world where he was close enough to be compared but not close enough to be claimed.
The older man can see the pattern more clearly, though clarity is not the same as repair. Looking back does not change the bus route or the schoolyard or the sideways glance, but it does allow me to stop pretending that these things were too small to matter.
They mattered because small exclusions accumulate. One boy being left out of one conversation may not be a tragedy, but a lifetime of arriving slightly late to other people’s circles can teach you to distrust the idea that any circle will hold.
And yet I do not want to make myself sound innocent in all this. I wanted belonging, but I also learnt to protect myself from it, and there were probably times when a hand was extended and I inspected it too long for hidden conditions.
That is what happens when acceptance has so often depended on performance. You begin to suspect kindness of being an advance payment on future usefulness, and you hold yourself back even while claiming that nobody has let you in.
This is the contradiction I have to live with now. I spent years wanting to be included, but I also became skilled at standing apart, and there is a strange pride in that distance even while it aches.
Belief and belonging were never simple companions for me. I could belong briefly to a team, a school, a workplace, a club, a family role or a community task, while still finding that the deeper beliefs operating underneath did not match the beliefs I carried privately.
I believed, perhaps stubbornly, that a person should be seen for more than where he came from, what he could produce, how useful he was, or how well he could hide discomfort. I believed that ability should not become a sentence, and that the reward for competence should not always be more of a burden.
I believed that belonging should not require the constant proof of worth. That belief was hard to maintain in a life where so many doors seemed to open only after a performance, a result, a favour, an achievement, or a willingness to carry what others were pleased to put down.
Retirement has brought this into sharper focus than I expected. When the old regimes begin to loosen, when the offices and deadlines and calls and obligations no longer provide the same structure, a man has to ask whether he ever truly belonged to the life he built or whether he simply became very good at operating inside it.
That is not an easy question to ask from the edge of full-time retirement. It is easier to polish the trophies, count the years, list the roles, mention the responsibilities, and pretend that achievement and identity are close enough to be considered family.
But they are not the same thing. Achievement can tell you what you did, while identity asks who you were when nobody needed anything from you.
That question unsettles me more than I care to admit. I know how to be useful, I know how to be responsible, I know how to push through, and I know how to make myself necessary in places where necessity passes for affection.
What I do not know, at least not with any great confidence, is how to belong without earning it first. That may be the work of the next part of life, though I am wary of making it sound too grand because most of my revelations arrive less like lightning and more like a man realising he has once again put the bins out on the wrong night.
Still, there is something in naming it. There is something in admitting that the regime did not always match the belief, and that I survived inside it by becoming capable, guarded, humorous, stubborn and occasionally a little too proud of needing no one.
Starting over when others moved on became one of the recurring movements of my life. I began again at schools, in teams, in towns, in work, in business, in roles, in responsibilities, and now I find myself beginning again in retirement, which is perhaps the most disorienting start of all because there is no timetable pinned to the wall telling me where to go next.
The old boy from the farm is still there, I think, standing somewhere between the road and the paddock, listening for a voice that may not carry that far. He is older now, and perhaps less desperate to run towards every sound, but he still wants to know whether someone has called his name because they need him or because they simply noticed he was missing.
That distinction matters. It may be the difference between usefulness and belonging, between being summoned and being wanted, between living inside a regime and finding a place where the beliefs underneath do not require you to split yourself in two.
I cannot say I have found that place completely. I am not sure many people do, and perhaps the best we manage is a few honest rooms, a few kind people, a few moments where the performance drops and nobody walks away.
But I can say this: I am less willing now to mistake compliance for peace. I have lived too long inside systems that rewarded the outward version while leaving the inward one to fend for himself, and retirement, frightening as it is, may offer the first real chance to ask what I believe when there is no regime left demanding an answer.
That does not mean I am suddenly free of the old habits. I still measure my worth too quickly, still reach for usefulness when silence arrives, still feel the tug to prove that I deserve a place at the table before anyone has even asked me to sit down.
But maybe the point is not to become someone entirely new. Maybe the point is to let the boy from out of voice reach know that he no longer has to shout across the paddocks to be real, and that being unheard by some does not mean he had nothing worth saying.
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.
The regime, whatever form it took at the time, asked me to fit. My own belief, quieter but more persistent, kept asking whether fitting was worth the cost of becoming less myself.
I do not have a final answer to that, and perhaps a final answer would be too neat for the life I have lived. What I have instead is the road, the memory, the ache, the humour that saves me from drowning in it, and the slow possibility that belonging may not have to be earned by being better, stronger, cleverer, tougher or more useful than I feel.
Perhaps belonging begins when the striving pauses long enough for a voice to be heard at its natural distance. Perhaps, after all these years, I am allowed to stop walking further out just to prove I can find my way back.
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