Fifty eight, divorced, and saying this out loud for the first time

I have known this about myself since I was in my twenties and I have never once said it to another living person. Not to my wife of twenty six years, not to a doctor, not to a friend. It went in a box, the box went on a shelf, and I got on with a perfectly good life in front of it.

We separated two years ago for reasons that had nothing to do with any of this, and were amicable, and are nobody's business. I now live alone out beyond the motorway in a house that is far too big, and I have spent a year reading and eight months working up to a paragraph.

Fifty eight. No experience whatsoever. I have never knelt for anybody, never negotiated anything, and I am aware that having read a great deal is not the same as knowing what to do at seven on a Tuesday evening.

What I am asking for is patience and a fair amount of instruction. Somebody content to go slowly and to explain what she is doing and why. I would also like, at some point, to be told I have done a thing properly, which I recognise is an odd request to put in writing.

I am not fragile. I ran a business for thirty years and buried both my parents. I am simply new, and I would rather say so than perform a confidence I have not earned.