Call it a post-pandemic wake-up call, or parenthood, or maybe even the simple fact of growing up, but this past year has made me understand that a job, no matter how much passion you have for it, is only ever that. A job. And a job will never love you back. I know I’m not the only one to have realised this. I’ve been part of The Great Resignation too! Figuring out what works for me in my career, and what doesn’t, precisely because if I don’t look after myself nobody else will. That’s capitalism, baby. (And, dare I say, the patriarchy.)

The biggest trick pulled on us is that our job should be our purpose, and it means we commodify the most precious thing we have – our time – to make other people rich. I’ve radicalised my thinking, and now my job isn’t my purpose, but rather the thing that finances the rest of my actual life. It feels like freedom. I suppose that’s why I’m telling you about it.

This has been a time of professional reckoning for me, supported by a personal life stuffed to overflowing with people kind enough, patient enough, and wholehearted enough to have weathered a necessary and incredibly painful evolution. (Seriously, I can’t overestimate how hard I’ve cried, how many sleepless nights I’ve tossed and turned, how many emotional outbursts I’ve had to apologise for – not to mention my very first, very scary, panic attack.) Friends, your names here are in no particular order, and should by rights all appear on the same line because you’ve all been so amazing. You’ve listened and you’ve counselled, long after even I was bored of the whole ‘WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH MY LIFE! WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN!!’ monologues – and I was the one giving them! Quite literally, I could not have done this without you:

Daniel Draper, Charlotte Jacklin, Lucy Sheridan, Sarah Powell, Sabah Khan, Meg Fee, Katie Loughnane, Calum McSwiggan, Claire Baker, Lucy Smithson, Jessica Stones, Shirley Argyle, Lucy Vine, Gillian McAllister, Beth O’Leary, Ella Kahn, Mum, Dad, Jack.

And My Darling. It’s all for you, by which I mean: not the work that puts food on our table, but the boundaries that mean the work doesn’t get any more time than it needs to. That would be time away from you, after all, and defeats the point of everything.