Doing My Bit Chapter 1 - See a Need, Fill a Need

DOING MY BIT

Chapter 1 – See a Need, Fill a Need

Sometimes people go out of their way to volunteer for a purpose. There are other times when people get “voluntold”. 

There are moments, somewhere between obligation and instinct, where action stops being a choice and starts becoming a reflex. I have spent a lifetime convincing myself that I operate in that space because it is the right thing to do, because the situation demands it, because someone has to step forward when others hesitate. But if I am honest, and this book demands that I be, there is another truth sitting quietly underneath all of that justification. It is not always about service. It is not always about generosity. Sometimes, it is about survival.

“See a need, fill a need.” A simple line from Robots (2005 – 20th Century Fox), delivered with optimism and mechanical certainty, as though the world could be fixed one small act at a time. It sounds noble. It sounds clean. It sounds like the sort of philosophy that fits neatly into speeches, into mission statements, into the kind of tidy frameworks we like to build around messy human behaviour. What it does not capture is the weight that comes with constantly seeing the need in the first place.

Because once you start noticing, it becomes very difficult to stop.

The conversation begins, as it often does, in my own head.

Why you?

It is not an accusatory question. It is quieter than that. More curious. Why is it that you are the one who steps forward? Why is it that you take the call, answer the question, volunteer the time, offer the advice, put your hand up when everyone else suddenly finds something else to do?

Because I can. Because someone asked me to, and it’s the right thing to do. 

That has always been the answer. Or at least the one I have been most comfortable giving. Because I can. Because I know how. Because someone asked. Because if I do not, it may not get done properly, or at all. It is an answer that carries just enough truth to feel legitimate, and just enough ego to feel justified.

But there is another layer beneath that.

Because you don’t know how to say no.

And there it is. Not said out loud very often, but present all the same. The inability to say no is not a heroic trait. It is not a badge of honour. It is, more often than not, a coping mechanism dressed up as generosity. A way of avoiding the discomfort of refusal. A way of maintaining relevance. A way of ensuring that, in a world that often feels unpredictable, you remain necessary.

That word, necessary, has a pull to it that is hard to describe to anyone who has not felt it. To be needed is to have purpose. To be asked is to be valued. To be relied upon is to matter. And when the alternative feels like drifting, like irrelevance, like being on the outside looking in, the temptation to say yes becomes almost overwhelming.

This is not a book about volunteering. At least, not in the way the word is usually understood. There will be no neat summaries of hours contributed or funds raised, although amongst these pages you will find significant amounts of what seems to be, charity work. No tally of good deeds performed and outcomes achieved. That is not the story I am interested in telling, because that is not the story I lived.

This is a book about something far less tidy.

It is about the moments where stepping forward felt less like a choice and more like an inevitability. It is about leadership that was never sought but somehow found its way onto my shoulders anyway. It is about the quiet pressure that builds when you are the one people turn to, not because you asked for it, but because you happened to be standing there when the question was asked.

And it is about the cost.

Not the cost that appears on an invoice, or the hours that can be tallied and justified, but the quieter cost that accumulates in places that are harder to measure. The kind that does not announce itself in dramatic fashion, but settles in over time, almost imperceptibly, until one day it is simply there, woven into the fabric of how you think, how you respond, how you carry yourself through the day.

The profession I chose, or perhaps the one that chose me, does not come with a narrow job description. Being an accountant, particularly in the world I have inhabited, has very little to do with simply preparing numbers. It is a role that expands to fill whatever space the client happens to need at the time. One moment you are discussing tax legislation, the next you are navigating Centrelink entitlements, and before long you find yourself fielding questions about business structures, family disputes, lending arrangements, and occasionally matters that sit well outside anything that could reasonably be described as accounting.

What is rarely acknowledged in that expansion is what it demands in return. Because each of those conversations carries more than information. They carry weight. Someone else’s uncertainty, their anxiety, their fear of getting it wrong, their hope that you will somehow make sense of something that feels beyond them. And in taking that on, even in a professional sense, you are not simply providing answers. You are absorbing a portion of that uncertainty yourself.

At first, it feels manageable. Even energising. There is a sense of purpose in being able to step into that space, to bring clarity where there was confusion, to offer direction where there was hesitation. It reinforces the idea that you are useful, that you are contributing, that you are, in some small way, making things better.

But over time, the lines begin to blur.

Because those questions do not stay neatly contained within office hours. They follow you. Not always in a conscious way, but in the background, in the quiet moments when the mind is not otherwise occupied. A conversation replayed. A decision second-guessed. A scenario considered from another angle, just in case something was missed. The responsibility does not switch off simply because the interaction has ended.

And when you are already carrying your own internal landscape, one that is not always stable, that additional weight does not just sit alongside it. It interacts with it.

There is an expectation, both external and internal, that you will know. Not everything, perhaps, but enough. Enough to guide, enough to reassure, enough to provide direction when others feel uncertain. It is a form of caritas, though rarely labelled as such. A giving of knowledge, of time, of attention, that becomes embedded in the role itself.

The difficulty is that the expectation does not distinguish between what is known and what is simply assumed to be known. Clients rarely see the edges of your understanding. They see the confidence, the ability to respond, the calmness in the face of their concerns. What they do not see is the process that sits behind that response. The mental checking, the weighing of possibilities, the quiet acknowledgment that sometimes the answer is not as clear as it is being presented.

For someone prone to depression, that gap between perception and reality can become a point of tension.

Because the role requires certainty, or at least the appearance of it, at times when internally there may be anything but. There are days where the act of getting up and engaging feels like an achievement in itself, where the mind is slower, heavier, less willing to engage with complexity. And yet, the expectation does not shift. The questions still come. The need still presents itself. The requirement to respond remains.

So you do.

You draw on habit. On experience. On the well-worn pathways that have been built over years of doing the same thing, often successfully. You provide the answer. You offer the guidance. From the outside, nothing appears amiss. The machine continues to function.

But internally, something is being spent.

It is not dramatic. It is not the kind of exhaustion that demands immediate rest. It is subtler than that. A quiet draining of reserves that were never particularly full to begin with. And because it is quiet, it is easy to ignore. Easy to push aside in favour of the next task, the next question, the next situation that requires attention.

There is also the matter of responsibility.

Advice, by its nature, carries consequences. Decisions are made based on what you say. Actions are taken, sometimes significant ones, because of the direction you provide. Most of the time, those outcomes are positive, or at least acceptable. But not always. And even when things go well, there is an underlying awareness that they could have gone differently.

That awareness does not disappear once the file is closed.

It lingers in the background, a reminder that the margin for error is not always large, and that the impact of being wrong can extend far beyond the immediate interaction. For someone already inclined toward self-reflection, toward questioning, toward replaying scenarios in search of certainty, that can become a fertile ground for doubt.

Did I miss something? Could that have been handled differently? What happens if this does not turn out the way it was expected to?

These are not questions that are asked once and resolved. They circle. They return at inconvenient times. They attach themselves to quiet moments and expand to fill the available space.

And then there is the emotional crossover.

Because when you are dealing with matters that extend beyond numbers, you inevitably step into the personal. Financial stress is rarely just financial. It is tied to relationships, to identity, to self-worth. When a business struggles, it is not just a set of accounts that are under pressure. It is the person behind it, their sense of competence, their ability to provide, their view of themselves.

In those moments, the role shifts again.

You are no longer just an advisor. You are a sounding board. A confidant. Sometimes, an unwilling participant in conversations that sit well outside your training but squarely within your line of sight. And because you have already established yourself as someone who responds, someone who steps forward, the expectation is that you will continue to do so.

There is a cost to that, particularly when your own internal state is not neutral.

Absorbing other people’s concerns requires a degree of emotional capacity. When that capacity is already compromised, even slightly, the impact is magnified. What might otherwise be manageable becomes heavier. What might otherwise be transient becomes something that lingers.

It is not uncommon to find that the problems you are helping others navigate begin to echo in your own thinking. Not in a direct sense, but in the way they shape your perspective. The risks feel more pronounced. The uncertainties more significant. The potential for things to go wrong more apparent.

And for someone with a predisposition toward depressive thinking, that amplification can be subtle but persistent.

The world becomes a little heavier. The margin for optimism narrows. The sense of responsibility, already present, deepens further. And because the external behaviour remains unchanged—still showing up, still responding, still filling the need—there is little external indication that anything is shifting internally.

Which brings the conversation back to the beginning.

It is about the cost.

Not because the acts themselves are inherently damaging, but because of the cumulative effect of performing them without sufficient regard for what they require in return. The giving of knowledge, of time, of attention, sounds generous, and it is. But generosity, when left unchecked, has a way of becoming depletion.

And depletion, particularly when layered over an already fragile mental landscape, does not always announce itself with clarity. It creeps in. It settles. It becomes normal.

Until, at some point, it isn’t.

And once again, the conversation returns.

You didn’t have to take that on.

No, I did not. There were countless moments where I could have drawn a line, where I could have said that this was beyond scope, beyond expertise, beyond responsibility. There were opportunities to step back, to limit the reach, to keep things contained within the neat boundaries of a profession that is, at its core, supposed to be about numbers.

So why didn’t you?

Because by that point, the pattern had already been set. The need had been seen. The response had become automatic. And perhaps most importantly, the act of stepping in had begun to serve a purpose that extended beyond the immediate situation.

It is difficult to sit with your own thoughts when they are not particularly friendly. Anyone who has spent time in the company of what we politely call “the black dog” understands that silence is not always peaceful. There are moments where doing nothing is the hardest thing of all, where stillness allows the mind to wander into places that are better avoided.

Action, in those moments, becomes a refuge.

Helping someone else, solving a problem, stepping into a situation that requires focus and attention, all of it provides a form of distraction that is both productive and socially acceptable. It looks like generosity from the outside. It feels like purpose on the inside. What it also becomes, over time, is a way of keeping the darker thoughts at bay.

And so the cycle continues.

A need presents itself. I see it. I step forward. The immediate problem is addressed. The internal noise quiets, at least for a while. The behaviour is reinforced, not because it is necessarily the best course of action, but because it works. It serves a function.

Until it doesn’t.

Because every yes carries a cost. Every commitment, every responsibility, every moment of stepping in adds another layer to a structure that is already under strain. The very thing that provides relief in the short term begins to create pressure in the long term. The expectations grow. The reliance deepens. The space to step back becomes smaller and smaller.

You built this.

That is the uncomfortable truth. It would be easier to frame this as something imposed, something that happened to me rather than something I participated in creating. But that would be disingenuous. The environment, the expectations, the roles I found myself in, all of it was shaped, at least in part, by my own responses.

I saw the need. I filled the need. And in doing so, I created more of them.

There is a concept I have come to think of as “voluntolding.” It sits somewhere between volunteering and obligation, a space where the line between choice and expectation becomes blurred. You are asked, but not really. You are given the opportunity, but declining does not feel like a genuine option. The decision is presented as voluntary, but the context makes the outcome almost predetermined.

It is in that space that much of this story unfolds.

This is not a tale of grand gestures or heroic sacrifice. It is, instead, a series of smaller moments, each one seemingly insignificant in isolation, but collectively forming a pattern that is both revealing and, at times, confronting. It is about the motivations that drove those decisions, the benefits that came from them, and the detriments that followed.

Because nothing in this space is one-dimensional.

For every instance of stepping forward, there is a reason. Sometimes that reason is noble. Sometimes it is practical. Sometimes it is self-serving. More often than not, it is a combination of all three. Understanding the “why” behind those actions is not about assigning blame or seeking validation. It is about recognising the forces at play, both external and internal.

The structure of this book will follow that line of thinking.

Each chapter will explore a situation through three lenses. The first is the motivation, the underlying driver that led me into the situation in the first place. The second is the benefit, what I gained from the experience, whether that be knowledge, connection, satisfaction, or something less tangible. The third is the detriment, the cost that accompanied the decision, not just in terms of time or energy, but in its impact on my state of mind.

It is, in many ways, a conversation with myself. An attempt to unpack the decisions that seemed obvious at the time and to understand them with the benefit of hindsight. There will be no neat conclusions, no simple lessons that can be applied universally. Human behaviour rarely lends itself to that kind of clarity.

What there will be, I hope, is honesty.

Because “see a need, fill a need” is not wrong. It is not a flawed philosophy. It is, in many contexts, exactly what is required. Communities function because people step forward. Organisations grow because individuals take on responsibility. Lives are improved because someone, somewhere, chooses to act.

But like any philosophy, it comes with limits, and it comes with a cost to provide the service. 

The question is not whether needs should be filled. The question is how many, and at what is the actual cost. And perhaps more importantly, whether the act of filling those needs is truly about the need itself, or about something else entirely.

That is the conversation I intend to have.

Not with an audience. Not with a profession. Not even with the people who were part of the journey. But with myself. Because if there is one thing I have learned along the way, it is that the most difficult questions are rarely the ones we are asked by others. They are the ones we avoid asking ourselves.

And this time, I am not avoiding them.