The sky is pink as we drive back from Peebles, gently racing the sunset to avoid navigating country roads in the crisp twilight of the first of January.

“That’s definitely snow, isn’t it?” Anisa observes from the passenger seat. She reaches back to point this out to the kids but notices everyone else is asleep. She chuckles and goes back to staring happily out of the window, wondering aloud what it means when sheep lie down in the fields.

“Probably that they wanted to lie down” I muse, a smile on my face.

2026 is off to a good start. We’re full of steak pie and fresh air after a brisk family walk in the chill of the Tweed valley with Anisa’s mum, heading home now to settle in to a warm winter evening in front of the fire, working steadily through the small mountain of chocolate we’ve accumulated over the festive period.

We round a bend into my favourite stretch of road out of the borders: the long straight just before the approach to Penicuik, where the country opens out to wide skies, surrounded by hills but with enough space to truly feel “empty”.

Big sky country, a space to breathe.

This whole year just gone was “space to breathe”, but not always in a comfortable way. First, space came from being signed off, unable to do much but sit and reflect thanks to my illness. Then, space came from being laid off, privileged to find myself in the opposite situation: free to do whatever I wanted for a spell, fortunate enough to have runway to really think about what to do next.

Both were ultimately terrifying, and could easily have resulted in my being written off due to a case of mistaken identity.

The road cuts left now, narrowing, then veers right into a bend that I usually underestimate and take a little too fast without meaning to. Not this time, though: I have a van close behind me so have been keeping my speed down, to encourage the driver either to pass or to back off. It seems to be working as we come to the junction and I slow, dropping a gear before the turnoff to the right, and feeling the satisfying bite as I put on the power to take us up the hill. The van behind shoots off along the main road to Penicuik, as happy to part ways with me as I am with them.

The road ahead climbs into the hills and will pass through a few villages before rejoining the main road in about twenty minutes, a mix of fast stretches and slower residential patches. It’s a pleasant drive, with an undulating aspect that keeps things interesting without being too hairy. I know the road well enough that it’s easy to have fun along it without taking risks.

I return to my thoughts about mistaken identity as I let the road lead us home. The identity I had mistaken was my own, and I must have been making the mistake for decades. It took a conversation with a career coach (part of my redundancy package) to bring this into sharp focus. We were digging into my values, in order to try to “make the most” of this career break while I still had a bit of time to do so.

“I want to make an observation” she said, after I’d rattled off a list of things I enjoy, things I’m good at, things that give me energy and all those usual things that get brought up during any sort of personal growth conversation. “Every time you mention something you’re good at, you qualify it by saying that you’ve been told you’re good at it. Everything you say you enjoy is something that gives value to others. You take energy from how you make others feel.

“What do you do for you?”

I feel like she has asked me what the colour green sounds like. The words make sense, the question is clear and easily parsed, and I have no idea how to even begin to answer it. A huge, empty space opens inside me as I take the tissue she’s handed me. I notice I’m crying.

What do I do for me? I… doomscroll? Watch shitty YouTube videos? Drink coffee? These are suddenly seen for what they are: things that I do to avoid doing anything for me.

I meditate… does that count? It feels close, but incomplete. Meditating is like filling the car with fuel, or taking it to the wash. It keeps the car in good order, but it doesn’t tell you where to drive it.

What do I do for me?

The emptiness rears up again and I find myself not crying this time but panicking. My coach explains, reassuringly, that this is quite common, and that it’s often referred to as a void, but the reality is that there’s always something there. It’s just something I’m not seeing, something I’ve forgotten about, or I’m dismissing because it seems too obvious or trite.

The panic subsides a little and I find myself staring no longer into the void, but into a cave: a dark recess but one which has dimension, echo, signifiers of an interior world that is currently obscured by darkness, but to which I can feel my eyes adjusting.

I agree to see my coach again in a week, and to gently, kindly, explore this cave a little more in the meantime. I find myself wondering who’s in there, waiting for me to discover them.

The sky is still bright but the road is starting to blend in with the surrounding hills and fields. I bump the car’s headlamps on as we leave the last village, approaching the dual carriageway and final roundabout before we hit the ring road around Edinburgh. Oncoming cars blind with their own lights but we’re just coming back to street lights and so the dazzle is only temporary. I stop at a red light and notice that I’ve been leaning forward in my seat, peering, holding my breath. I take my hands off the wheel, stretch them one at a time, and sit back, exhaling and inhaling slow and steady.

It’s only a matter of hours into my week of exploration before I figure out who’s sitting in that cave. Recounting the coaching session to Anisa, I’m suddenly hit by a clear picture, like someone has found the light switch to the cave and thrown it. It takes a moment for the shock to die down, but there he is. Sitting at a typewriter, a stack of books to one side of him, a pile of articles, strategies, pitches, reports, journal entries, short stories, and notes to the other. Every single thing he’s ever read or written. A storyteller. He looks up and smiles.

The rest of the road home is pretty plain sailing. The snow comes to nothing, and the sky continues to churn through various hues of red and purple before settling down to an even dark blue from horizon to horizon. Once we cross the bypass it’s a straight shot back to our front door, and our snoozing passengers wake up just as we turn into our road. I ask Anisa if she can take everyone up to the house while I sit for a moment to decompress. She smiles and retrieves the family from the back.

The car is empty, quiet. I sit with myself, happy to have let 2025 tell me its story, and glad to have captured it for myself. 2026 brings a new job, new challenges, new stories, but for right now I just sit in my cave, watching the new year’s first light fade from the sky, truly content with my own company for the first time in years.