Making of an Unordinary Accountant

If this book offers anything, it is permission to sit with the questions rather than rush to answer them, and to accept that sometimes the value of a life is not found in what it returned, but in what it willingly gave.

But that was the world I grew up in. You didn’t need reasons to be smacked, or worse, only timing. A version of Cat Stevens Father & Son delivered long before the song became a hit where “from the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen” became the path.

And in the middle of that simplicity came the first real acknowledgment of my “value”: my grandfather pressing eleven dollars, actual paper notes, ones and twos, into my hand as payment for mustering and shed-hand work during shearing. Eleven dollars. It might as well have been a fortune.

Every improvement felt like a step closer. Every miss felt like a personal failing.

Every perfectly placed round felt like an affirmation, proof that I could control something, even if it was only a piece of lead flying through the air at three thousand feet per second.

But when you’re young, emotionally feral, and living on a farm where tempers simmered like a drought about to break, the horse becomes something else entirely. Not a pastime, an anchor. A pressure valve. A way out.

This was the first nudge away from academic idealism. The first moment where the plan, the unspoken promise that I’d thrive, met Steinbeck’s truth: the best laid plans of mice and men often do go awry.

I sat up, rubbed sleep out of my eyes, and started flicking through the classifieds out of sheer novelty. I’d never held a city paper before. The thing was enormous, like an atlas. The job ads alone could have been used to wall-paper a modest house.

We weren’t poor, but we weren’t thriving either. Every step forward cost something, money, time, energy, opportunity. I was juggling: a growing family, a fledgling accounting career, night classes, sport, debt, ambition, fear, and a relationship stretched thin by the pressure of all of the above

It became hard to separate the illness from the depression that had already wrapped itself around me. They fed each other, one dragging me down physically, the other mentally, until the difference between tired and defeated blurred completely.

The tagline, Not Your Ordinary Accountant, didn’t even arrive until much later. When it did, it wasn’t crafted; it was observed. It was someone else holding up a mirror and saying, “This is who you’ve been all along.”

Five heads beat two.

Every time.

People stayed back. Not for selfies. For conversations. Not “how much do you change?” But “can you help me unwind this?”