I woke up on New Year’s Day with the flu.

I lay in the bath and felt exhausted by another year of chasing some external idea of what I should be doing. The tireless ambition of my twenties had given way to a searing suspicion that there was something else I wanted, but I refused to interrogate it as I was sick of wanting stuff: another role, true love, acceptance, admiration. I lay pruning in the bath, looking out over the deep Somerset countryside, feeling overwhelmingly sad, and longing for the sham of resolutions (particularly having to tell people what mine were) to be outlawed.

Every year, my whole life, I had dutifully intoned my desires for the coming year on New Year’s Day – desire being the secular cousin, who doesn’t wear knickers to church, to resolution’s fire and brimstone – and they had always acted like a placeholder for the nirvana I would reach if I could just fulfil them. The heady, sacred paradise of “there” always dangling ahead of me, like a utopian carrot. All I had to do was scale the whole heap of shit of my own making, plus the wild card of circumstance, and I would arrive.

In the bath, there could have been a eureka moment of clarity, a soulful call to acknowledge the journey instead of fixating on the destination, but I only felt the existential dread I’d woken up with – that coquettish desire and Bible-thumping resolution were gone. I’d banished them in the ticking over from last year to this and finally burned through my long-held idea about success – that if I worked really hard and found ways through and around the obstacles, I’d arrive at the place I most wanted to be. I would know it when I got there. My fever dream then further incinerated all the tributary thoughts around this, until all that was left was the one hot truth, that beyond the horizon there’s just more horizon.

There is no THERE there.

My sister found me sobbing in a bathrobe staring out the win-dow at sheep and a group of naked men and women charging towards the lake and a New Year’s Day polar dip. They were shrieking their intentions with breasts cartwheeling wildly, singing their intentions like a song, the attending penises slapping along, completely out of time.

“I think it’s really positive. You’re not harassing yourself to reach some goal that you’ve hung all your happiness on when there isn’t any such goal. You make it all up in your head, Min. All the fears I’ve ever heard you be fearful of are things you made up in your head. Leave your head alone. Just come and have breakfast and start the year there. Then let’s see.”

I felt so nauseous and hot I told her I’d just stay in bed till the Advil kicked in. All I wanted was some direction, I loved taking direction. I wanted to know what I was supposed to want.

Later, lolling in a window seat, retching now and then into a wastepaper basket, my sister came back into my room and sat down in a chair next to me.

“Are you throwing up?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a temperature?”

“A small one.”

“Are you massively tired?”

“Yes.”

“Do your boobs hurt a lot?”

I clutched them and they felt like giant bruises.

“Yes.”

She smiled the way she did when we were children and knew we were both in trouble but whatever infraction we’d been part of had been totally worth it.