on moving and moving on

This time a week from now I'll be in the air, a window seat to Fort Collins by way of Denver, to help my sister move.
The process will involve a large truck and an even larger expanse of nothingness along Rte. 80.
Thus continues a tradition of helping people move. Seems like I do that a lot. I'm useful for the heavy lifting in life, but for the day to day routines I'm more of an annoyance.
I had a conversation with someone the other day about work, and my time off this summer, and it contained this small revelation: I am always trying to save people, always trying to be helpful to the point where I leave myself no time to work on what I need to fix for myself. It's a disastrous pattern. When the situation doesn't call for me to do something useful, I don't know what to do. It's as if I had no purpose outside of the present need, and once the problem has been resolved, I cease to exist.
It's a mixed blessing type of trait. On the one hand, I can be very dependable, very useful, but on the other hand, in the interim I am a bit boring and generally uncomfortable with my surroundings.
I have no idea how I got this way.
Maybe it goes back all the way to junior high school, when the dumb but popular kids depended on me to save them during group projects or to pass along last night's homework to copy, and I would do it to stay in their good graces and somehow be included.
That seems kind of silly, though. I guess I just don't know.
I hope the truck has a CD player. I'm not anticipating a lot of good radio stations between Fort Collins and Green Bay.