That may be the hidden biography of many men from my generation. We were taught to perform usefulness long before we were taught to discuss pain. So we built sheds, businesses, families, committees, reputations, and routines, hoping one of them might answer the private question. Sometimes they helped. None of them solved it completely.
There is a dangerous thing that can happen when a man lives long enough inside his own story. He begins to suspect he might be the lead character. Not in the arrogant sense, although there has been enough of that over the years to keep psychologists mildly interested, but in the quieter sense that the events of a life start to arrange themselves into narrative. The victories become chapters. The losses become turning points. The mistakes are edited for dramatic effect. The moments of courage are replayed with improved lighting.
If I am honest, I have been a legend in my own mind for years.
It is one of the safer places to be a legend. There are fewer fact-checkers there, and the crowd is generally supportive. The standing ovations are immediate, the critics underfunded, and every comeback line lands exactly as intended. It is a marvellous internal stadium, though not always an accurate one. Still, when a man has spent a lifetime trying to make sense of chaos, there are worse coping mechanisms than occasionally imagining himself as something larger than he felt.
The public version of me was easier to explain. Accountant. Adviser. Speaker. Fixer of messes other people swore they had not created. The man behind the sign that declared Not Your Ordinary Accountant, which was either bold branding or an accidental confession depending on who was reading it. I built a practice around the idea that clients deserved more than forms lodged late and jargon dressed up as wisdom. I wanted people spoken to in their own language. I wanted consequences explained before disaster arrived. I wanted the profession to mean something more than receipts in folders and panic in June.
There was a missionary element to it, I can see that now. Some men find religion, some politics, some golf handicaps. I found structure and service. I believed things could be done properly, and more dangerously, I believed I might be one of the people to help do them properly. That belief can fuel a life. It can also exhaust one.
The office became a theatre of human behaviour. People rarely came in carrying only tax returns. They brought marriages under strain, businesses held together by optimism and duct tape, brothers not speaking to brothers, adult children who wanted inheritance before the parents had finished breathing, and entrepreneurs convinced turnover was profit because both numbers looked large. They came seeking deductions and left, sometimes unwillingly, with perspective.
I was never interested in being a silent partner. Silence is overrated in professions where people pay for warnings. I preferred plain speech. If a structure was foolish, I said so. If a plan would end badly, I said so. If a person was about to confuse luck with genius, I said so with enthusiasm. This won me loyal clients, grateful clients, offended clients, former clients, and a long list of people who appreciated honesty only in theory.
That was the contradiction of much of my life. I wanted to be liked, but I was more interested in being useful. Those two ambitions are not natural allies.
Outside the office, I had the instincts of a competitor born in the wrong body too late for professional sport. I was the classic small-town all-rounder. The sort of man who would turn up to anything involving a scoreboard, a horse, a bat, a ball, a raffle, a card draw, or a loosely defined challenge and quietly decide he meant to win it. There are towns all over Australia built on men like that: capable enough at many things to be dangerous, specialised in none, and sustained entirely by stubbornness.
The horse work was different. That was not bluff or enthusiasm. That was real. There are some things a person can do that bypass language altogether, and for me horses were one of them. The understanding was instinctive. Timing, pressure, trust, nerve. A good horse will expose vanity quickly and reward calmness reluctantly. They are excellent judges of character and merciless on frauds. I had enough feel to win often, enough edge to be noticed, and enough success that some preferred not to compete when I appeared.
That sounds boastful. It probably is. But memory deserves some honest vanity now and then.
Winning, however, has side effects people rarely discuss. It creates expectation in others and identity in yourself. You stop merely doing a thing and begin needing to remain the sort of person who does that thing well. The local race day, the golf comp, the business deal, the argument at a barbecue—suddenly every arena becomes another place where the self must be defended. It is tiring carrying your own statue around.
And while the outside world was often seeing energy, humour, certainty, or drive, another world was operating underneath. The black dog, as the phrase goes, though I have always thought that makes it sound too noble. Dogs can be loyal. This thing was more like weather. It could sit on the horizon for weeks, then arrive uninvited and turn colourless everything it touched.
Depression is often misunderstood by those lucky enough to confuse it with sadness. Sadness has an object. It points somewhere. It responds to comfort. Depression can exist in a room full of blessings and still whisper ruin. It can visit on the back of success, in the middle of family laughter, during holidays, after victories, while people tell you how well you seem to be doing. Particularly then.
That creates a strange shame. If life appears full, what right have you to feel empty?
So you compensate. You become busy. You become useful. You become funny. You become the one who solves problems because solving external problems briefly silences internal ones. You create businesses, plans, speeches, projects, gardens, committees, improvements, strategies, and distractions. You help everybody because helping yourself feels vague and suspicious.
Some of the best years of my life were powered by engines built to outrun shadows.
Family sees this more clearly than the public ever can. They know the difference between the man on stage and the man at the sink staring too long at nothing. They know that competence can coexist with collapse. They know the mood entering a room before a word is spoken. They also know, to their credit, when to ignore your nonsense and when to drag you back toward yourself.
No family gets only the polished version of a man. They get the impatience, the overreaction, the withdrawal, the overthinking, the strange certainty about trivial matters, the sudden silence after grand plans, the way exhaustion can masquerade as anger. If this chapter is to be honest, then that must sit beside the achievements.
I was not always easy to live with. Men who believe they are carrying everything often fail to notice who else is lifting.
Yet families are also where redemption hides. A child says something funny and punctures a week of darkness. A partner continues doing ordinary acts of loyalty that no biography ever records. A sibling remembers you before you became complicated. A grandchild treats you as present tense rather than accumulated history. These are not dramatic rescues. They are better than that. They are repeated reminders.
Over time I learned that the mythology of being exceptional is far less useful than the discipline of being available. Showing up matters more than shining. Listening matters more than winning arguments. Being kind on an ordinary Tuesday outranks many public triumphs. It took me longer than it should have to learn those truths, but late wisdom is still wisdom.
As for the accountant with the slogan, he was real enough. He wanted to do things properly. He believed advice should save people pain, not simply invoice it afterward. He liked plain language, disliked pretension, and had limited patience for fools unless they were entertaining. He could be generous, sharp, exhausting, loyal, funny, overcommitted, wounded, proud, perceptive, and occasionally right in a manner that made others wish he were not.
He was also, beneath the noise, trying to be enough.
That may be the hidden biography of many men from my generation. We were taught to perform usefulness long before we were taught to discuss pain. So we built sheds, businesses, families, committees, reputations, and routines, hoping one of them might answer the private question. Sometimes they helped. None of them solved it completely.
If I am a legend in my own mind, age has at least improved the script. The hero is less interested in applause now. He knows the crowd goes home. He knows trophies gather dust, signs fade, and even the sharpest reputation eventually becomes a story told badly by someone who was barely there.
What remains are the people who knew the full version and stayed anyway.
That, in the end, is the only hall of fame worth entering.
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