The Volunteer Work That Rebuilt My Sense of Purpose

I had a good job, a comfortable life, and a persistent nagging feeling at 26 in Toronto that none of what I was doing in the working week connected to anything that seemed important beyond the immediate.

The feeling was not depression and it was not ingratitude - I was aware that my circumstances were genuinely good and I found the gap between that awareness and the dissatisfaction uncomfortable to acknowledge.

A friend who volunteered with a literacy programme suggested I try something similar, less as a prescription for what I was feeling and more because she had found it meaningful and thought I might.

I signed up with a programme that paired professionals with recent immigrants and refugees who were developing English language skills for employment contexts. The first session I attended I was prepared to feel useful in a vague and satisfying way.

What I actually felt was considerably more specific: I was in a room with eight people who had left things I could barely imagine leaving, who were working harder than almost anyone I knew in professional contexts simply to acquire the language tools that would allow them to begin competing for opportunities I had always taken for granted, and whose engagement and dignity in that situation was one of the more humbling things I had witnessed.

I went back the following week and the week after. Over the following year the work produced things I had not predicted: a consistent and reliable sense of purpose that required no narrative justification because it was directly visible in each session, a set of relationships that were genuinely unlike any I had in my professional or social life, and a recalibration of my own circumstances that was not guilt-induced but perspective-based.

I also discovered, through the specific work of helping someone learn something, that I was much better at patient, attentive, individualised communication than I had known - a skill I started applying in my professional work with results that were quickly visible.

I still volunteer, six years on, with a different programme but the same general orientation. The purpose it provides is not a supplement to the rest of my life. At this point it is one of the primary things that makes the rest of it make sense.