Four Loud Voices and One Becoming: Act V

A Reflection on Identity, Inheritance, and the Quiet Work of Reclaiming a Life

By Troy Lowndes - Pushed for time? Listen to it here.

There's something oddly comforting in beginning with Ozzy Osbourne - a man the world thinks it can summarise in a headline. Chaos, bats, bedlam. A carnival of caricature. And yet behind that noise sits a much quieter truth: Ozzy, like all of us, began as a child. A small human handed a name, a gender, a story he didn't write.

Maybe that's why I keep circling back to him.

Because whether "Ozzy" was escape, reinvention, or rebellion, what he became was unmistakably his. A contradiction made flesh: feral onstage, tender off it. Some never forgave his chaos; some never saw past the myth. But many recognised the softness beneath the spectacle, and loved him for it.

Most of us don't get to become a myth as a way of outrunning the labels placed on us.

My beginning was far more ordinary, but just as scripted. A name at birth. A gender. A set of expectations. Then the classroom labels, layered like varnish I never agreed to:

disruptive, rude, interruptive, too much, always in trouble.

I wore them like a second skin.

Some kids seemed to glide through childhood untouched. Kids like me ricocheted off every rule, every shouted instruction, every unspoken expectation. I was the kid who would've burned down Take That before the first album: too messy for the formation, too loud for the harmony, always half a beat behind or three beats ahead.

Identity wasn’t discovered; it was assigned.

Which brings me to Bono, who named himself after a bloody hearing-aid shop in Dublin. Absurd on the surface, profound underneath. Because what is a name change if not a small rebellion against who you were told to be?

Sometimes I wonder if Bono was one of the kids like me: a kid who heard, but differently. One who was told to “listen properly,” when the real issue was never the child’s hearing but the adult’s certainty.

A hearing-aid store as namesake becomes, in that light, a beautifully subtle retort:

You misheard me. I never misheard myself.

It loops us back to Ozzy.

Back to the question of who we might have become if we weren’t shaped by the labels placed on us before we even knew ourselves.

And then there’s Kurt Cobain - a mind so porous it absorbed the world’s cruelty like water. He had that x-ray lyricism: he could look straight into the brutal corners of humanity and tell the truth of it in three chords and a cracked voice. Horror, empathy, exhaustion - all there in the grain of his sound.

But here’s the tragedy: Cobain was trapped in a storm of his own visibility. Too successful to seek help, even as the words he shared were pleading for it. The world heard performance where there was confession. Entertainment where there was emergency.

Artists like Cobain rarely come from ease.

They come from margins, from silences, from strange childhoods, from scripts they never fit.

Their art isn’t the beginning; it’s the release.

The megaphone changes form - a guitar, a stadium, a poem, a whispered confession - but the instinct is the same:

when someone who has carried too many labels finally gets to speak, the world feels the tremor.

And so the constellation forms:

Ozzy.

Bono.

Cobain.

Each rejecting the borders drawn for them.

Each becoming something uncategorisable.

Each a reminder that identity isn’t assigned; it’s reclaimed.

And then the story comes home - into my own bloodline.

My grandfather was born Kevin Francis O’Brien, though almost no one ever knew him that way. At some point, under pressure, under fear, under shadows I’ll never fully name, he shed that identity and became Daniel Ryan. He fled Victoria with my mother and built a life in Western Australia as a different man entirely.

For him, the name change wasn’t art.

It was survival.

Erasure and rebirth woven together.

My mother, Helen O’Brien, had no vote in the transformation. A child swept into a new identity by the tidal force of her father’s choices. She didn’t choose a name; a name happened to her.

And the pattern didn’t end there.

Others in our lineage changed their names too: some to escape, some to transform, some to reclaim. Others did the opposite - they held tightly to the names life placed upon them, even long after the original context had dissolved. A strange alchemy of belonging:

I didn't choose this name.

But it fits better than the one I began with.

Our family tree reads like a study in identity physics:

One branch sheds names like old skins.

One evolves into new ones.

One returns to the beginning.

One clings to the unexpected.

Identity doesn’t travel in a straight line. It spirals.

And somewhere in that spiral, I arrived - born into a lineage of shapeshifting, reinvention, and survival strategies disguised as paperwork.

Which brings me to the early labels: the ones that shaped everything before I understood anything.

Before I knew what “identity” meant, I knew what failure felt like.

I was the child who “never listened,”

who “talked too much,”

who “couldn’t sit still,”

who “should know better.”

These weren’t observations; they were verdicts.

Tiny sentences passed down in corridors.

Tiny misunderstandings that became lifelong narratives.

School teaches more than reading and maths.

It teaches who you are allowed to be.

And neurodivergent kids are told who they are long before they ever get the chance to find out.

“Too loud.”

“Too sensitive.”

“Too distracted.”

By what?

The electrified crackle in the fluorescent lights above?

The voices drifting from the class next door?

A nervous system taking in everything at equal volume?

“Too emotional.”

“Too much.”

Too much for whom?

Nobody ever says.

And so, while other kids grow into themselves, kids like us grow into self-surveillance.

Then comes the generational echo: the quiet inheritance of those who ran from identities, or were forced into new ones, or lived inside the wrong story because they had no map out.

My grandfather hid.

My mother was carried.

I masked.

Different strategies, same frequency:

Become who you must to survive.

You don’t see this pattern until midlife.

It’s invisible until it’s everywhere.

And then my son’s diagnosis - delivered on my 48th birthday - split the world open.

Every moment of my life snapped into place like magnetic filings aligning.

Not a eureka moment, but a rupture.

A clearing.

A reclamation.

The labels stopped being gospel.

They became artefacts -

evidence of misinterpretation, not deficiency.

Reclamation is quiet work:

meeting the child who reached for the guitar,

the teen who questioned everything,

the man who folded himself into shapes that weren’t his,

the builder who had to create his own framework for emotional resonance because the existing ones kept mistranslating his frequency,

the lineage of people who reinvented themselves because survival demanded it.

It’s saying:

I choose my labels now.

I return the rest.

This is my name, my shape, my truth.

And suddenly, the constellation makes sense:

Ozzy, Bono, Cobain - mirrors for misunderstood identity.

Not because of their fame, but because of their defiance.

Ozzy built a persona large enough to hold all his contradictions.

Bono turned a hearing-aid shop into a global signal flare.

Cobain exposed his inner world without armour, even as the world mistook his emergency for entertainment.

Their lives are not mine, but their trajectories hum at the same frequency:

misunderstood children

learning to speak in their own dialect

after a lifetime of being mistranslated.

And so here I stand at 51 ... finally meeting myself without the static of the old scripts.

Not the boy who “never listened.”

Not the kid stripped of his guitar.

Not the student who was “too much.”

Not the adult carrying someone else’s story.

Just me: unmasked, reclaimed, newly legible.

I come from a family of shapeshifters:

a grandfather who fled,

a mother who adapted,

ancestors who renamed or reclaimed,

and now me - rewriting the lineage from the inside.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

Identity isn’t what you’re handed.

It’s what remains when the noise subsides.

It’s the name you whisper to yourself when no one is listening.

It’s the shape you grow into when you finally stop shrinking.

This is my evolution:

not becoming someone new,

but becoming someone true.

This is my declaration:

I was never broken.

I was never too much.

I was simply waiting for the moment I could inhabit my own life.

And this is the settling:

I choose the names that fit.

I release the ones that don’t.

I reclaim the parts taken too soon.

I build the tools that help others do the same.

I honour the people who came before me,

and the self I’ve journeyed so far to return to.

Maybe we’re all a little bit Ozzy, a little Bono, a little Cobain -

misunderstood at first glance,

reborn through resistance,

and finally shaped by the courage to say:

This is who I am.

This is who I always was.

This is the one I often dreamt of meeting.

This is now - me.

................

Enter the Resonance Layer - here