Midlife crisis? What do you really want to do now you’re grown up?

The session with the career change psychologist started pretty well. Her home office was piled with laundry, she was wearing leopard skin, there was a glowing heater. Respect at first sight.

We got down to business. She listened to my personal and professional history, nodded, thought my recent redundancy could be a great reinvention springboard: “What’s holding you back from doing what you want?”

My post-divorce mortgage, of course. Ruinously high. How high? She stood up fast: “The session’s over. I can’t help you with a mortgage that big. You’re making all decisions based on fear. Sell your house, then come back.”

Stop. What? Everyone has big mortgages. I needed somewhere to put children. And I was rapt in myself, living in a rockstar 1930s former shoe factory in Collingwood. But she wasn’t budging.

“How old are you and your husband?” she asked. “Right, you have about 10 really good years left before parts start to fall off. Don’t waste them doing something you don’t love just to keep up with the Joneses.”

I went home, ignored the sound expert advice. That was 2016. I got another job which was fabulous, then another which nearly drove me actually mad with frustration and grief over trashing my carefully-built career for money.

Think being forced to dance five times a day like a performing bear, being told your eyes are dead, having to work around the fact you’re forbidden to talk to the woman whose communications director you are.

Not great. So I belatedly did what I was told, sold our city place and moved to the Bellarine. We converted half our garage to my work hangout. There’s books, a bar fridge, monstera plant, olive velvet sofa, giant print of a sexy Cuban grandma smoking a cigar and holding a cat.