Everyone acts like it’s straightforwardly good news. And in many ways it is. No more alarm. No more commute. No more meetings that could have been emails. You’ve earned this, people say, beaming.

And then Monday arrives, and you’re standing in the kitchen at half past nine, and it’s completely quiet, and you realise you’ve forgotten what you do when there’s nothing you have to do.

What work was actually doing

Work wasn’t just work. It was structure, and routine, and a reason to get up and get dressed and be somewhere. It was a source of identity – the shorthand answer to “who are you?” that most of us rely on more than we realise until it’s gone. It was, often, community. People you saw every day whether you particularly wanted to or not, but who were there.

When all of that disappears at once – even willingly, even eagerly – the space left behind can feel unexpectedly large.

The feelings people don’t mention at the leaving do

Restlessness. A low-level purposelessness that coexists uncomfortably with genuine relief. Feeling oddly peripheral to a world that seems to be continuing without you. A marriage that worked well when both of you had your own lives and is now navigating considerably more togetherness than anyone discussed. An acute awareness of time that wasn’t there before.

None of this means anything is wrong with you, or that you’ve made a terrible mistake. It means you’re a person who built a life around certain things, and those things have changed, and that takes some working out.

This chapter is genuinely open

There isn’t a script for this one. Which is both the difficulty and, if you can get to it, the possibility. Working out what a good life actually looks like at this stage – not what it’s supposed to look like, not what you think you should want – is worth doing properly. Counselling is one place to do that, without an agenda and without time pressure.

It’s not too late for the question. It might be exactly the right moment for it.

If retirement has been more complicated than expected, I’d be glad to talk.