What I Got Wrong Holding Myself Accountable

I've been uneven about accountability lately. It's there, and then for stretches it isn't. Between school and work and everything else, I forget things and fall short in places I don't want to.

What caught my attention wasn't the forgetting. When accountability is being asked of me when I'd actually have to account for something — I leave. Not the room. Myself. Something steps back from behind my own eyes and starts observing the conversation instead of having it, and what's left in the pit of my stomach is a lit torch, burning steady in a body I'm no longer fully occupying.

It arrives before any thought I could name. I've started treating it as a signal not that I need to be regulated all the time, but that it tells me to stop and come back before I respond.

I went looking for an explanation, mostly for myself.

The first thing I had to give up was the frame I'd been using without noticing: that accountability is self-discipline, a reserve that runs down over a hard week until there's nothing left.

That model is shakier than I assumed. In his review of the neuroscience of behavior change, Elliot Berkman describes how the ego-depletion effect the idea that self-control draws on a finite store failed a large, preregistered replication, and how the broader literature shows signs that positive findings were far likelier to be published than null ones. One detail stuck: the effect can be reversed by a short break or something pleasant. Nothing genuinely depleted refills that way.

His alternative is that effortful work runs serially, one thing at a time, and the feeling of effort is the brain tracking what you're neglecting to do it. Depletion is the point where that cost outweighs the benefit of continuing.

If that's right, my accountability isn't fading because something ran empty. It's fading because a one-at-a-time system is running against demands happening all at once, and it's reporting the cost. That doesn't make it easier. It makes it information rather than evidence of deficiency.

The second thing I gave up was the idea that this is solo work.

In a paper on accountability as a virtue, Peteet, Witvliet, and Evans describe it as relational by definition there’s a party who is accountable and a party they're accountable to, and the relationship is what creates the obligation. Holding yourself accountable in private, with no one on the other end, is running a two-person arrangement alone.

Aiko Bethea arrives at the same place from a different direction: the path to accountable leadership requires community and connection. That two such different sources converge there made me take it more seriously than either would have alone.

So I hadn't run out of anything. I'd been occupying both roles the one answering and the one asking in a period when I had less capacity to hold either.

The third thing was harder, because it went after something I'd been proud of.

Holding someone accountable faces backward, toward what's already done. But accountability as a personal quality faces forward the person who has it welcomes it, because they expect something to come of it. Peteet and colleagues also describe how it distorts: too little regard for your effect on others slides toward narcissism, while too much preoccupation with responsibility, run through a harsh inner critic, becomes closer to perfectionism. That's a distortion, not an abundance.

Bethea puts it plainly. The moments we mess up offer a choice: shrink away with a halfhearted apology and no change, or actually do something different. The shrinking doesn't feel like shrinking from the inside. It feels like taking it seriously.

That's what I'd been doing. Sitting in disappointment with myself has weight, and I mistook the weight for the virtue.

There's a line of hers I keep returning to that being anchored means moving toward the person you want to be rather than toward being liked. When I'm honest, the leaving isn't about the thing I dropped. It's about what dropping it might say about me. And the more of myself I've staked on being someone who doesn't drop things, the further I must go to get away from the moment when I do.

Which brings me back to the leaving.

Berkman notes that social rejection recruits’ networks overlapping with those involved in physical pain, and that it can set off a stress response narrowing attention onto the threat. He also notes that the network tied to interoception your sense of your own internal state includes regions implicated in emotional distress.

The apparatus that reads my inside and the apparatus that registers threat are close neighbors. Which might mean that when the threat signal gets loud enough, access to myself is one of the first things to go not a failure of nerve, a consequence of the wiring. The torch stays lit. I'm just not standing close enough to feel it.

I want to be careful here, because when you go looking for an explanation of something you already feel, you tend to find one. But the shape matches. Whatever explanation I assemble afterward arrives from a body I've already partly stepped out of. It's fluent. It's reasonable. It doesn't sound like me.

And it doesn't sort by category. I've described this in work terms because accountability is most visible there. But the leaving doesn't check what kind of room it's in. It happens at a desk and it happens at a kitchen table.

I haven't solved this, and I'd rather say so than write something tidier than what's true.

What's changed is smaller. I notice the leaving earlier sometimes while it's happening rather than an hour after. I've stopped reading the fade as evidence of who I am and started reading it as evidence of what I'm carrying. 

Accountability is hard. Not because we're weak at it and not because it drains a reserve, but because it asks for a relationship and a forward-facing posture at exactly the moment a body is least inclined to offer either.

If you've been uneven about this too, I don't think you're failing at something everyone else finds simple. It's a hard thing, and we're doing it in bodies that have opinions about it.

Kelechi Olandu is a coach and co-founder of Empathy Coaching LLC. She holds a Wellness Counseling Certification from Cornell University, training in somatic embodiment and regulation, and is pursuing an M.A. in Clinical Psychology at Pepperdine University. This is a personal reflection informed by research, not clinical advice.

References

Berkman, E. T. (2018). The neuroscience of goals and behavior change. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 70(1), 28–44. https://doi.org/10.1037/cpb0000094

Bethea, A. (2026). Anchored, aligned, accountable: A framework for transcending bullsh*t and transforming our lives and work. [Publisher].

Peteet, J. R., Witvliet, C. V. O., & Evans, C. S. (2021). Accountability as a key virtue in mental health and human flourishing. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 28(1), 49–60. https://doi.org/10.1353/ppp.2021.0009