BARELY HOLDING ON

Chapter 10 – The Rebuild

The first bell of morning comes with a weight I’ve learned to recognise: not heavy, exactly, but heavy enough to slow a breath. Its time to start again, as if I haven’t really stopped, but in a formal sense rebuild the accounting practice. Build that, that was stunted by the error that brought the bankruptcy. Prove to everyone that it was a calculated gamble, all that was wrong was it failed due to someone else’s whim, and I had to suffer the consequences.

The new start, a room, really only an alcove off a larger room, if the truth be known, has the smell of the house here in Balmain, a scent that clings to the wrists like a memory you can’t quite shake. The dust sits in the corners, suspended for a moment by a shaft of light that slips through blinds that never quite behave. The computer, an old luggable rather than portable, is the centre piece of operations, its orange screen reflecting my image with menus written by me in DOS, a fallback to the times in Potts Point where I managed a much larger but ostensibly similar computer operation.

The air feels cooler here, the way a future can feel when you’ve learned to measure it by temperature rather than promise. The Dog, always lingers at the door, almost opaque for now, and not with menace so much as a patient, stubborn steadiness. It is not a demon so much as a gravity, a weight I carry with me into rooms that used to belong to other people.

I’m rebuilding, I tell myself, with a calm I’ve learned to cultivate in machines, in ledgers, in the careful pace of a day that starts with coffee and ends with a ledger balanced to a decimal point, and with a partner ready to stand with me no matter what.

The alcove is small, but it is the shape of a future I can reach toward. The ideas forming into ideals, my ideals of what an accounting practice should look like, become the four pillars of the firm: Pillar 1, Language; Pillar 2, Compliance; Pillar 3, Gutter Technology for tax outcomes; Pillar 4, Leadership beyond a silent partner, arrive not as slogans but as steady tasks. They become the scaffolding that will carry us from a single desk to something bigger, something that can hold more people, more responsibility, more life.

Pillar 1 is not a creed; it’s a practice. We will talk in your language. The sentence is simple, but not soft, the kind of simplicity that requires listening more than speaking. It is not about being multilingual in the busy way that markets can be; it is about understanding, the core of any contract, any relationship. When a client says they feel left behind by numbers and jargon, we answer with a language that invites, that clarifies, never condescends, never shames. The office has women in it who have learned to read the room the way a good auditor reads a balance sheet: with attention to both what is said and what is not said, with a respect for nuance as strong as the respect we give to a rule.

Pillar 2 comes in with the clang of a deadline. We will drag you kicking and screaming to compliance, as if a force of gravity is what keeps a firm honest. It’s a pledge to ensure deadlines are met, not just at our level but at a client level as well. A rhythm forms: we track, we check, we remind, we correct. The weight of a due date lands in the chest like a small stone dropped into a quiet pool. You can feel the ripples, the way they push the water outward, a careful pressure that keeps the surface level. It is not harsh; it is necessary. The discipline of compliance becomes a kind of armour, not a cudgel.

Pillar 3: We will reduce your tax bill, reads like a calculation, but it is more like a craft. It is the Degree in Gutter Technology, a tongue-in-cheek term we use to remind ourselves that the law is not an oracle you worship; it’s a tool you shape. We interpret the law in the best possible manner to secure outcomes that are fair, legal, and transparent. The room hums with the low engine of the computer, the weight of ledgers, the careful testing of a deduction that might otherwise vanish into the dust of ambiguity. It is not glamour; it is method. It is the quiet art of turning complex lines into something honest and practical for a client who needs to see their numbers, feel their path, feel held.

Pillar 4: We will be more than a silent partner in your business. Leadership outside a practice; a client outcome as a measure of our worth. The firm becomes an extension of the people who walk in with all the weight of a small business and all the hope of a future that doesn’t hinge on a single decision or a single person. I stand in the room where Robyn listens first, speaks last, and perhaps speaks best. She is the ballast and the beacon, the person who can read a wind and tell you which way to steer. Our leadership needs to be visible, accountable, and kind, never punitive, never brittle, even as the world’s pressure makes us feel thin, nearly glass in the sunlight.

I think of the building’s growth in terms of rooms and doors. The alcove gives way to a garage, then to a larger garage, and then a factory unit conversion that houses several staff, all women, thriving under Robyn’s steady hand. The four pillars are not slogans woven into a brochure; they are the architecture of a life we are constructing together. The work becomes a daily ritual of restraint and alignment, restraint in how we speak, how we decide, how we pace the day; alignment in how we move with the facts and with each other. The road becomes a more honest road, the engine a metronome that steadies the nerves even when the mind hesitates.

The months and then years pass with a rhythm I’ve learned to trust, yes, but beneath the rhythm lies something denser, heavier, and almost tactile. Meetings still arrive like quiet percussion, hands on keyboards, the clock’s soft ticking, the exhale that follows a decision reached after a long slide of numbers and words. Checks pop up just ahead of need, the kind you don’t notice until they land in the inbox with a definitive stamp. The soft click of a door closing behind a client who has chosen to stay becomes a hinge on which the day pivots, and with it the room’s air shifts ever so slightly. The office’s walls accumulate evidence of life: children’s drawings pinned in a kitchen corner, a calendar with sticky notes in an array of colours, a whiteboard where figures flow in neat cursive. There are days when the weight on the chest tightens, days when the heart forgets to beat in time with the clock and then remembers, as if waking from a mild sleep. The dust remains, a reminder that we are always in the process of becoming, never finished.

What changes, though, is the texture of the pressure. The room is not merely a space for numbers and plans; it is a stage where leadership, argument, care, and fear all converge. The tension I first noticed in the early days has grown into something more complex: a climate born not from malice but from the very human effort to lead a firm through change when the voices guiding that change are all women. Robyn’s steadiness is a buoy, but the air around us grows thick with expectation: if a decision is not perfectly aligned with every value held by the team, it will be interpreted not as a misstep but as a fault in leadership itself. The women in the room, each with her own history of training, risk, and care, speak with a force that must be heard, and I hear myself trying to adapt by tightening, by defending, by retreating into a pose that feels safer than engagement.

Support staff were the quiet ballast at first, the hands that kept schedules ticking, the notes that kept clients calm. But as the practice swelled, the load began to rest more heavily on professional staff, who bring their own interpretations of the Pillars and their own thresholds for risk, and the room started to feel the strain of competing meanings. The tension does not arrive as a single bolt of lightning; it slips in like the season’s damp, a pressure that presses inward through the walls. A senior staff member questions a projection; another cuts in with a plan that spikes the numbers higher than prudent; Robyn tries to mediate with a calm that can feel both generous and scarce at times.

The rooms fill with the sound of voices, measured, urgent, hopeful, and the weight of those tones grows heavier when every decision sits under the watchful gaze of a board, of clients, of a city that expects results. The four pillars become not merely words but burdens and buoyants: the language we use to connect with clients becomes a test of trust; the deadlines we enforce become a measure of integrity; the tax work, our attempt to interpret the law with care, becomes a lens for fairness; leadership, visible and accountable, becomes a constant reminder that we cannot hide behind a ledger. The growth is real, and so is the discipline required to keep it humane.

As the tension deepens, the Black Dog, finds a channel to re-enter. Not with a roar, but with a dull ache that widens into a fog: a breath shortens, sleep fragments, decisions that once felt straightforward now feel like cliffs. The weeks pile into a shiver of mornings when I wake with a weight in my chest that defies the logic of the day’s plan. The memory of the walls’ evidence, the drawings, the calendar, the whiteboard, loses its comfort; what once signified growth now confirms how much I have to lose if I shrink away from fear. I notice how I start to read the room not with curiosity and care but with a suspicion that I am under siege, a suspicion that places Robyn and the team in the crosshairs of a threat I cannot quite identify.

Then comes a moment I cannot ignore: the stress isn’t only about the work or the people; it is about my own ability to bear the responsibility of leadership while feeling the roil of pain inside. The delta between what I should be and what I am becomes an ache that grows louder as days pass. In the dimness of a quiet afternoon, the doctor’s notes arrive, the calm, careful language that maps what I have been running from for months: clinically depressed. The doctor proposes hospitalisation as a boundary, not a punishment, a place for rest and a way to return to work with more of myself intact than the shattering pace would ever permit. Robyn sits with me in the exam room, the soft rasp of fabric and the quiet slope of her voice a lifeline. She does not pretend the road will be easy; she speaks in terms of care and steadiness, of a plan that keeps the firm’s life alive while protecting the one who builds it.

I have learned to talk to them as one speaks to a friend who sits with a cup of tea at the edge of a quiet street. They are not alone. The phrase lands with a soft, almost practical weight. It is not a sermon; it is a map. If you have ever watched a room fill with the soft tremor of fear as a deadline approaches, you will recognise the feeling I carry when I tell you I have stood there, counted the breaths, and kept moving. If you have ever asked a loved one to sit beside you while you listen to a doctor’s numbers, you know why Robyn’s presence matters here, because the way a person stands when you are fragile can be the only thing that keeps you upright.

The day the doctor delivers the numbers is not cinematic. It does not arrive with a thunderclap. It comes in a quiet room, the light unusual for a late afternoon, slanting through blinds, turning the dust motes into small, suspended stars. The doctor’s voice is careful, as if the words themselves have to be weighed and weighed again to avoid harming what remains. I listen, and the words rearrange the room’s shapes in my memory: clinically depressed. The suggestion of hospitalisation hovers like a note tacked to the doorframe. Robyn sits across from me, hands folded in her lap, the soft rasp of fabric a tiny metronome to the press of my thoughts. The idea of treatment, medication, perhaps, arrives with a separate fear, but I am learning to name fear, not to surrender to it.

What follows is a sequence of days the way a river follows a familiar bend: small currents of routine, then a sudden shift that changes how you measure the distance between you and your next breath. The workplace becomes both a sanctuary and a frame for struggle. The “alcove” is still here, albeit the size of a split level townhouse in its present form, but its boundaries have shifted; it is not a cage, but a shelter, one that requires careful maintenance. The four pillars begin to function as more than guidelines; they become a philosophy for living. Language keeps the room clear; compliance keeps it honest; tax craft keeps our footprints respectful of the law; leadership keeps the risk from hardening into cruelty or indifference.

Robyn’s leadership is a practical meditation on presence. She does not pretend to know what depression looks like from the inside; she knows what it feels like from the outside, form what I am willing to let on: the way a day can tilt toward grey with the weight of a single decision, exploding at times a the smallest annoyance, the way a room’s light can feel too bright or too dull, the way a person can forget to eat because the mind refuses to rest and the body follows that refusal with fatigue that coughs in the throat. She does not seek to fix me with a single act of will. Instead, she offers a steady map: small tasks, clear boundaries, honest conversations, a timetable that respects the rhythms of illness without worshipping them. The business begins to run on a different track, a track that keeps room for the human to wobble without falling.

The four pillars remain the backbone of the narrative, not as a pedagogy but as a lived practice. Pillar 1’s language becomes a daily habit: when a client’s question lands on the desk, we answer with plain, direct words that can be understood in the first breath and grown into a second, third, and fourth reading. Pillar 2’s deadlines are not mere compliance; they’re a promise to the client that we will not vanish under the pressure of fear or fatigue. Pillar 3’s tax reductions are not tricks; they are proof that careful reading of the law can yield fairness, that the gutter of complexity can be walked with steady steps. Pillar 4’s leadership manifests in the way decisions are made: not by a single voice, but through the alignment of several voices that hold the room, hold the risk, hold the possibility of a mistake, without letting the possibility of harm go unaddressed.

Its easy to hide behind them. Its easy to hide when you seem to be delivering. Its easy to hide when the expectation is you are the embodiment of the pillars and are a pillar yourself.

The turning point, the memory I keep returning to, like a shoreline I cannot quite leave behind, comes not with a moment of triumph but with a moment of clarity. The Dog’s hand on my chest loosens slightly when Robyn’s presence is not merely a presence but a reminder that I am seen, that my fear is legible, that my pain is not a secret I must keep alone. The doctor’s words, once a potential sentence, become a sentence that describes a condition and does not define a life. I am depressed, yes, but I am not broken beyond repair. The pain is real, the fear is real, the path forward is real too. It is a decision to stay in the ring, to take a breath, to let the air move through me rather than press into me with a suffocating weight.

The continuation of the question of whether to hospitalise is not answered by a single line of reasoning. It is a negotiation, although “no” is a firm place to remain, among many factors: the body’s signal, the mind’s weather, the business’s needs, and the people who need me to keep the lines open and the doors ready to welcome them. There is relief in the suggestion, and there is fear in the idea of leaving the work or losing the balance I’ve built. But in the same breath, there is a recognition: there is no surrender. There may be a recalibration, a moment to pull back from the cliff edge so that the road ahead can be mapped with more precise intentions than before.

The memory intensifies a truth I’ve learned over the years: whilst you are not alone, there is a heavy loneliness at the top. Robyn understands that, she understands why, why we must simply go on.

The phrase becomes a thread that binds the memory to the present and the present to the future. It is not a sentimental platitude; it is a practised stance. When Robyn is with me, I feel the room grow larger, the air warmer, the weight of the Dog easing just enough to allow a small, almost ridiculous hope to rise. When I speak to clients, even when I am uncertain, I hear the sound of their relief in their voices as they hear a human voice that acknowledges limits and still believes in solutions. The road, the physical road outside the large windows that line the office’s northern wall, becomes a symbol: it is long; it is straight in some places, winding in others, and it always moves forward, even as I tilt toward a moment of stillness.

The decision to move forward with care, treating the depression with careful medical support and continuing the business with a new sense of restraint, feels less like a victory and more like a balance achieved. It is not only about keeping the ledger upright; it is about keeping faith with the people who rely on us: the staff who carry the firm’s rhythm in their hands, the clients who crave steadiness when markets tilt, and the family at home whose quiet logistics depend on a predictable day’s finish. The pull to provide runs from within, a stubborn, internal current that won’t yield to fear, a hint of heat behind the chest that compels me to keep trying even when the mind wants to retreat.

I want to ensure there is shelter for everyone who depends on us: a safe job for the women, those who lead a team through a dozen audits, a clear paths for the younger colleagues who are counting on mentorship, a home life that doesn’t fracture when the cash-flow line tightens, a future for the partner who believes in this work as much as I do. The air in the room shifts the moment the plan to sell surfaces in conversation, an actual gust against the blinds, the soft rattle of a whiteboard marker, the clock’s second hand ticking with a patient, domestic rhythm that makes time feel available, not urgent. There is no melodrama here, only a quiet assessment that a life built on the four pillars may take its next shape away from the day-to-day of a single practice.

Robyn’s voice, low, even, assured, says gently, “We’ll walk this path with you. We’ll prepare for what comes next, not with fear, but with the same care that built what we have.” I hear the truth of that. It does not erase the fear, but it reframes it as a necessary companion rather than a shadow that must be outrun. I say to you, reader, that the impulse to protect is real and constant; not a display of strength masking vulnerability, but a discipline that keeps us honest about what we owe, to clients who trust us to keep their lives legible on paper, to staff who rely on steady routines, to a family that deserves a predictable, humane pace. The outside can look calm and unshaken while the interior keeps turning, and that is exactly how I intend to move: restrained, present, and relentlessly practical.

Reading this, you might recognise the tremor in your own chest, the way a word forms in the throat and does not quite become speech, the message I learned, sometimes the hard way, is this: do not rush to pretend you are fine in the face of what you know to be true. Do not pretend the Dog is not there, but do not bow to it as if it owns you. You are not alone. In the presence of Robyn and the shared work of the four pillars, there is a path through fear that does not demand that fear disappear instantly but demands we act with care, one day at a time. The rebuild of the accounting practice is not a single event but a practice, an everyday choosing to stay, to listen, to adjust, to hold. The practice grows with the staff, with the clients, with the community that believes in a business built not only by numbers but by relationships, by honesty, by leadership that remains when the room grows crowded and the air grows thin.