Maybe the deeper wound was not that the practice was discarded, but that I had hoped it would carry some part of me forward. I had wanted the care, the standards, the memory and the way of working to survive as evidence that I had not merely passed through. I had wanted, in some small and perhaps unreasonable way, to remain within voice reach.
There is a particular sound a private practice makes when you are the last one left in the office. It is not dramatic, which is a pity, because if you are going to spend that many years of your life staring at bank statements, tax returns, working papers, ATO portals, client files and computer screens that seem to update at the least convenient moment possible, you would think there might be a decent soundtrack to mark the occasion.
Mostly, though, it is the hum of equipment, the soft complaint of a chair that has seen better days, and the small taps of a keyboard as you try to bring order to somebody else’s chaos. It is the silence after the phone stops ringing, the half-finished notes beside you, and the strange feeling that even though nobody is there, you are still surrounded by people who need something from you.
That was private practice for me. Not mahogany desks, big glass windows or some glossy brochure version of professional life, but the daily work of being useful to people who were often anxious, confused, behind, embarrassed, hopeful, angry, ambitious or all of those things before morning tea. They came with businesses, farms, rental properties, family trusts, company problems, superannuation questions, tax debts, half-kept records, and the occasional shoebox that looked as though it had spent the year under the passenger seat of a ute.
I do not say that with contempt, because there was a kind of honesty in it. Most people did not come to an accountant because life was tidy; they came because life had become too tangled to manage on their own, and they needed someone to help sort the knots without making them feel like fools. In that sense, private practice was not only about tax or numbers, even though both had to be done properly and preferably before the Tax Office started sharpening its pencils.
It was about competence. That word does not sound emotional, but for me it carried more weight than most of the softer words people use when they are trying to explain a life. Competence was the thing I could rely on when charm failed, when easy belonging was not available, and when I did not quite know how to walk into a room and simply be one of the group.
I had learnt that pattern early, long before I had clients or software or professional letters after my name. If you were good enough at school, you could earn a place at the front of the classroom, even if it did not mean you belonged in the yard. If you were good enough at sport, you could wear the jumper, even if the acceptance only lasted until the next selection trial or the next game where you had to prove yourself again.
Private practice became another version of the same bargain. If I knew enough, worked hard enough, solved enough problems and carried enough responsibility, perhaps I would not have to ask whether I belonged. I could make myself necessary, and necessity can look a lot like belonging when you are tired enough not to examine the difference too closely.
There is pride in that, and I do not want to pretend otherwise. I built something from knowledge, effort, stubbornness and more hours than were probably sensible, which is a polite way of saying there were times when work took more than its fair share of me. A practice does not appear because you put a sign on a door; it grows through trust, repetition, judgement, mistakes corrected, questions answered, calls returned, and years of showing up even when you would rather disappear.
That is the part people do not always see from the outside. They see the client list, the fees, the turnover, the software, the systems and the eventual sale value, but they do not see the thousand small acts of responsibility that sit underneath. They do not see the late-night checking, the awkward conversations, the worry about whether advice has landed properly, the mental list of people who are relying on you, or the way client problems can walk out of the office with you and sit quietly in the passenger seat all the way home.
A private practice is a strange thing to build because, at its heart, it depends on you while also needing to become something that can survive without you. That is the contradiction nobody tells you about at the start, probably because if they did, half of us would find something more sensible to do, like digging post holes in summer. You spend years making yourself central to the work, then, if you are responsible and realistic, you start the process of making yourself less central so the thing can one day be sold.
That sounds practical enough. In business terms it is even sensible, because no buyer wants to purchase a practice that collapses the moment the old accountant walks out with his favourite pen and a slightly suspicious knowledge of every client’s personal history. To make a practice saleable, you need systems, procedures, reliable income, documented work, proper engagement, managed risk and a client base that belongs to the practice rather than being tied only to the personality of the person who built it.
The problem is that personality is never quite absent from a small practice. No matter how professional you are, no matter how carefully you document the work, clients do not only buy technical knowledge; they buy the reassurance of a person they believe will not let them fall through the cracks. In my case, that reassurance was built from competence, but also from memory, tone, history, forgiveness, bluntness when required, and the kind of practical understanding that comes from having lived long enough to know that most financial messes have a human story hiding behind them.
That is where the meaning crept in. I did not wake each morning filled with noble purpose and a desire to improve the nation one tax return at a time, because I am not that easily fooled and neither is anyone who has wrestled with depreciation schedules in June. But beneath the irritation, pressure and endless compliance, there was meaning in being trusted.
Trust is a quiet sort of currency. It does not arrive with applause, and it is rarely recorded properly in the accounts, but it is there in the way a client rings before making a decision, or admits they have made a mistake, or asks a question they would be too embarrassed to ask someone else. For a man who had spent much of his life feeling just outside the circle, being trusted was no small thing.
That does not mean I always understood it while I was in the middle of it. Often I mistook being needed for being known, and sometimes I used the demands of practice as a convenient excuse not to ask harder questions about myself. Work gave me a structure, and structure is a blessing when the inside of your head is not always a well-governed place.
Depression did not announce itself by shutting the office door and declaring a public holiday. It was more subtle than that, more like a heaviness under the ribs, a reluctance to begin, a flatness that made even familiar tasks feel as though they had been moved further away overnight. I could still function, because functioning was one of the things I had trained myself to do, but there is a difference between functioning and feeling alive.
Private practice rewarded functioning. The work did not particularly care whether I felt bright, hopeful, lonely, anxious or worn thin; it simply waited, and if I did not deal with it today, it would be waiting tomorrow with interest. In that sense, the practice was both a refuge and a trap, because it gave me purpose while also making it very easy to hide inside obligation.
When you are good at carrying things, people tend to keep handing you more. That is not always cruelty, and in most cases it is not even thoughtlessness; it is simply how the world works when it finds someone who appears capable. I had spent a lifetime presenting as capable, so I should not have been surprised when the load kept increasing.
There were times when I liked that. Competence can give a man a shape, and there is comfort in knowing that when a problem arrives, you have the skill to break it down, understand it, and move it towards an answer. There were clients who made me laugh, clients who made me mutter under my breath, clients who tested the limits of Christian charity despite not necessarily believing in either Christianity or charity, and clients whose loyalty reminded me that the years had not been wasted.
Still, building something saleable meant admitting I would not always be there to hold it together. That admission had a strange sting, because it asked me to separate the practice from myself, and I had not always been careful about where one ended and the other began. If the practice had value without me, then I had succeeded, but if it could go on without me, then perhaps I had to face the possibility that I was not as essential as I had needed to believe.
That is a hard thing to say plainly. Men of my generation were not always trained to sit around discussing identity and usefulness, particularly if there was a lawn to mow, a bill to pay, a client to ring or a problem that could be fixed with a spreadsheet and a bit of bad temper. We found meaning by doing, and when doing began to fade, we were left standing there like someone had taken the tools away before we had finished the job.
The sale of a practice should have felt like vindication. In one sense it did, because you cannot sell fresh air, no matter how confidently some people seem to try these days. There had to be something real there: clients, systems, income, goodwill, reputation and a body of work that someone else thought was worth paying for.
I should have been able to look at that and say, with some satisfaction, that I had built something from scratch and made it valuable. I did say it at times, but never without an asterisk hovering somewhere nearby. Pride came, but it brought grief with it, and grief has a habit of sitting in the corner without being invited.
Part of the grief was simple enough. Selling a practice meant stepping away from the daily evidence that I was still useful, still needed, still the person people rang when they did not know what to do next. It was not only the work I was selling; it was the role, the rhythm, the familiar pressure and the identity I had spent years constructing around being the one who could sort things out.
Another part of the grief was more difficult, because it came after the sale. I had imagined, perhaps foolishly, that what I had built would be respected as more than a bundle of recurring fees and file notes. I knew things would change, because new owners always make changes, and only an idiot expects to sell something and still control it from the verandah like a retired cocky telling the new bloke where to put the troughs.
Even so, there is a difference between change and disregard. To see something you have built treated carelessly, simplified beyond recognition, or stripped of the parts that gave it meaning is a peculiar kind of pain. It is not the dramatic pain of catastrophe, but the duller hurt of watching years of effort reduced to something less than you knew it had been.
That may sound like ego, and perhaps there is some ego in it. I am old enough to know that wounded pride often dresses itself in more respectable clothes, and I am not exempt from that simply because I can name it. But it was not only ego, because what hurt most was not that my name was no longer at the centre; it was that the care seemed easier to discard than I had expected.
Care is expensive, though not always in dollars. It takes time to understand a client’s history, to remember the family complications, to know which question needs to be asked gently and which one needs to be asked directly. It takes time to build systems that protect people from mistakes, and it takes time to carry the invisible burden of being responsible for advice that may affect a business, a marriage, a retirement plan or a family’s sense of security.
When that care is removed, the thing can still look like a practice. The files may still exist, the fees may still be billed, the software may still open, and the letters may still go out on a letterhead that gives an impression of order. But to me, something had been hollowed out, and I found that harder to watch than I expected.
It took me back, in an odd way, to the old feeling of being outside the circle. I had been useful while I was building it, necessary while I was carrying it, and valuable while there was something to sell. Once it moved beyond me, my voice seemed to travel less distance than I thought it might.
That is not a comfortable connection to make. Nobody wants to admit that an adult business transaction can stir the same old hurt as a schoolyard, a bus route, a representative team or a room full of people who know your name but not quite who you are. Yet the pattern was there, and ignoring it would not make me more sensible.
I had built the practice partly to prove competence, partly to earn a living, partly to serve clients, and partly because work had become the most reliable way I knew to claim a place in the world. When the thing I had built was sold and then altered in ways that felt dismissive, it was not only a business disappointment. It was another reminder that being useful does not guarantee being understood.
There is a harsh lesson in that, but I do not want to make it neat. I do not want to pretend I floated above it with wisdom and serenity, because there were days when I was angry, days when I was sad, and days when I told myself I was being ridiculous while continuing to feel exactly the same. Retirement was already asking enough questions without adding the spectacle of my old working life being rearranged by people who could not have known what each piece had cost.
The cost had not only been measured in hours. It had been measured in missed ease, interrupted rest, family patience, mental load, and the quiet habit of putting the needs of the practice ahead of whatever part of me was asking for attention. Some people might call that dedication, and on better days I might agree with them, but on darker days it looked more like another form of hiding.
I hid inside competence because competence worked. It gave me a language when belonging felt uncertain, and it gave me authority when confidence was not always available. It allowed me to walk into meetings, answer questions, guide decisions and appear steady, even when the old boy from the outlying school was still somewhere inside, waiting to be found out or left behind.
That boy had learnt that if he could not always be one of them, he could be good enough to make them notice. Later, as a man, I learnt that if I could not always feel secure in myself, I could build something solid enough to stand behind. The practice became one of those solid things, and perhaps that is why its sale and aftermath unsettled me so deeply.
I had wanted the practice to be saleable, and I had worked to make it so. That is the irony that sits at the centre of the chapter, whether I like it or not. I had deliberately built something that could be handed over, then found myself hurt when it was taken out of my hands.
There is no clean innocence in that. I cannot sell something and then complain that it is no longer mine, at least not without hearing the barrister for common sense clearing his throat in the background. But ownership and attachment are not the same thing, and a signature on a contract does not immediately untangle years of meaning.
Perhaps that is what retirement does, if we are unlucky or lucky enough to let it. It forces us to see how much of our identity has been tied to structures that were always more temporary than they appeared. The office, the clients, the files, the problems, the meetings and the endless lists all felt permanent while I was inside them, but they were only a stage of life, and stages end whether we have made peace with them or not.
The danger is that when the stage ends, we assume the performance was all we were. That is where the darkness can creep in, because if usefulness has been the main evidence of worth, then the loss of usefulness can feel like a personal disappearance. I do not think that is true, but I understand why it feels true, and some days the feeling is more persuasive than the theory.
I am trying, even now, to separate the two. I am trying to honour the practice without needing it to keep proving my value, and to accept that what was built mattered even if it was not preserved in the way I would have chosen. That is not easy work, because acceptance can sound suspiciously like surrender, and I have spent a fair part of my life being too stubborn for surrender.
Still, there is a quieter truth underneath the hurt. The fact that something can be discarded does not mean it was worthless. A crop can be eaten, a fence can be pulled down, a house can be renovated beyond recognition, and a practice can be changed until the builder hardly recognises it, but none of that erases the labour that brought it into being.
What I built mattered while it mattered. It mattered to the clients who were helped, to the businesses that made it through difficult years, to the families who needed guidance, and to the younger version of me who needed proof that he could make something solid from ability and effort. It mattered even if the ending was not as graceful as I might have hoped.
I do not want to romanticise private practice, because that would be dishonest and possibly evidence of early cognitive decline. There were days it was tedious, draining, absurd, frustrating and far too full of regulations written by people who appeared never to have met a small business owner in their natural habitat. There were clients who tested my patience, deadlines that tested my language, and government systems that could make a saint contemplate throwing a monitor through a window.
But there was also meaning there. There was the quiet satisfaction of a problem solved, the relief in a client’s voice, the order brought to confusion, and the knowledge that my competence had been used in the service of something more practical than self-protection. For all my doubts, that is not nothing.
Maybe the deeper wound was not that the practice was discarded, but that I had hoped it would carry some part of me forward. I had wanted the care, the standards, the memory and the way of working to survive as evidence that I had not merely passed through. I had wanted, in some small and perhaps unreasonable way, to remain within voice reach.
Instead, I had to learn again that belonging cannot be outsourced to a business, a role, a client list or a reputation. Those things can support a life, and they can give it shape for a while, but they cannot carry the whole weight of being human. If they are asked to do that, they eventually crack, or we do.
I look back now with mixed feelings, which is probably the most honest way to look back at anything that mattered. I am proud of building a practice that could be sold, and I am hurt by what happened to the spirit of it afterwards. I can see the achievement, and I can feel the grief, and neither one cancels the other.
That seems to be the pattern of this whole story. The farm was beautiful and isolating, school gave me achievement and exclusion, sport gave me belonging and pressure, work gave me identity and exhaustion, and private practice gave me meaning while teaching me how dangerous it can be to build a self entirely around being useful. Life, inconveniently, has refused to sort itself into tidy columns.
So I carry the practice with me, not as a possession anymore, but as evidence. It is evidence that I could build, serve, persist, solve, organise, earn trust and make something saleable out of years of thought and labour. It is also evidence that selling a thing does not always free you from it, especially when the thing was never only a business.
In the end, building something saleable was both a victory and a wound. It proved I had made something valuable, but it also exposed how much of my value I had quietly placed inside it. The task now, as retirement opens like unfamiliar country ahead of me, is to learn how to live when competence is still part of me, but no longer the only language I use to ask for a place in the world.
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