Learning to Live with the Music

The Inner Critic and The Song That Explains It All

Photo by Eduardo Soares

There’s a voice in my head. I’m guessing you have one too.

It’s the 3 a.m. reminder of something embarrassing you did a decade ago. The whisper on a good day: "Don't get too comfortable. You're not that special." It's the inner critic. The saboteur.

For years, I didn’t have a name for that voice. Then I found "Hi Ren," a staggering nine-minute music video by Welsh artist Ren Gill. It's a raw, painfully honest dialogue between the artist and his inner darkness, the chess match inside so many of us. It gave me a new language for my own life.

On the surface, my life isn't a battlefield. I run a ferry service. I write a Substack about sytems, leadership and kindness. Underneath it all, though, it’s the same tug-of-war. And Ren’s song is the most honest field report I’ve ever heard from that war.

The Performance of Competence

In "Hi Ren," there are two voices: a snarling critic, the voice of pure fear, and the artist, the creator who connects with the world.

For most of my career, I’ve built up that second voice. After nearly 12 years as a Royal Navy officer, I learned to project competence. In that world, hesitation has consequences, so I learned to be precise, to plan, to be resilient. I built a persona, the "Tactical Operative," as colleagues called it. This became the CEO, the public face of competence needed for massive projects, like the Port of Montreal's Contrecoeur expansion. Focus on the mission. Execute. Leave no room for the other voice.

But it’s always there. For me, writing is where I can finally take the armor off. When I write "Happiness, By Ferry," it’s not because I have it all figured out. It’s because I’m trying to. It's an attempt to reconcile the operator with the guy who is just as confused and searching as anyone else.

A Mission Born from Scars

Powerful art often comes from pain. "Hi Ren" is a testament to that. Ren Gill’s long battle with chronic illness is woven into every line. It's not theoretical; it’s brutally real.

I wouldn’t dare compare my journey to his, but my most meaningful work came from a similar place. My advocacy for veterans' mental health isn't abstract. It’s personal. As Veterans Affairs Canada noted, I’m a veteran who has experienced struggles firsthand. I saw people fall through the cracks, and it felt unacceptable. We had to do better.

So, I did the only thing I knew how: I treated it like a mission. I didn't have answers, but I knew how to ask questions. In 2018, I asked the University of Toronto's Department of Psychiatry what they were doing for veterans. That "eye-opener," as their chair called it, started a process. We funded a study. The finding: most clinicians lacked experience with military culture or trauma.

This wasn't about being a visionary; it was about applying a familiar process to a deep personal problem. We raised the funds for a permanent professorship in Veteran Mental Health, a small, structural fix for a big, systemic problem. It wasn't about ego. It was about building something to help others avoid the struggles I knew firsthand.

Learning to Live with the Music

The genius of "Hi Ren" is its ending. The dark voice isn't defeated. The artist isn't healed. Instead, they reach a truce. They realize they are two sides of the same whole. "I am you, you are me, we are one," they say together. A profound statement of acceptance, not victory.

That’s the lesson that sticks with me. It’s not about silencing the inner critic, but learning to live with it, understanding that the voices of fear and hope are part of the same messy, human experience.

That’s what this chapter of my life feels like. Running a ferry service is grounding. It’s real. There’s no room for the saboteur when you're focused on the tide, the weather, and the simple, tangible task of the journey. Writing is about exploring the journey itself. Neither is the whole picture, but together, they create a kind of balance.

I don’t have it all figured out. Not even close. But thanks to a musician in a wheelchair singing his heart out in a derelict room, I have a slightly better map of the territory inside. And I’m learning, slowly, to live with the music.