Three ingredients

After sharing my angst with you last weekend, quite a bit has happened. For a start I uncurled myself, dug my head out from the sand and experienced an unprecedented burst of energy to tackle the administrative tasks I'd long avoided. My denial finally made way for reality.

Flights home are now booked, our belongings are packed in boxes ready to be collected for shipping tomorrow, farewell drinks have been tentatively arranged and best of all, it seems, I have a job. The job I had and loved looks to be mine to have and love once again. At least for a while.

This is my dream scenario made even more dreamy for hearing the news while roaming about Rome. Immediately I felt an enormous wave of relief. Cathartic doesn't begin to describe it. As I explained to you at length – which, incidentally, is how I explain everything – leaving my job to move here was more difficult than I'd envisioned. On hearing, the worries and fears I've harboured dissolved. After what feels like a long time in the wilderness, I will enjoy employment once again. And for me, this is as good as it gets.

From the outside this might not seem particularly revelatory. I'm not unqualified, I have good degrees and I've held good jobs before so why has employment felt so out of reach? Probably in part because of the way I am but I also don't think I'm alone in finding my prolonged period of time out of a workplace scary.

For better or worse, a job is an anchor. There are times when it's liberating to be freed from one – annual leave in particular – but being out of work, even voluntarily, presents difficulties.

Many of the friends we've made here are doing post-graduate study. Unlike some they're not pursuing academic careers.(Such is the novelty of an employment history to some long-term students here, one good friend who worked in Sydney as a Federal judge's associate and in a law firm for several years, was even approached by fellow students in her course "So we heard you've had a job! Tell us about that?")

They're here to gain credentials to boost their professional lives, however they unfold. They were inevitably well-qualified people before they got here and will leave eminently more so, but even they worry about employment. Not in a indulgent, woe-is-me fashion but sincerely because it matters.

For all their work and drive, for the sacrifices in choosing to come here, for the career decisions they've deliberated over, the energy they've expended in earning their qualifications - will they find a satisfying professional outlet? Is there a job on their horizon that matches their skills, motivation and desires? Of course there are and they will find them but the limbo period in between is still complicated.

A few years ago my dad read a book that our family has subsequently adopted as a quasi mantra. The author, an American psychiatrist, concluded from decades of clinical experience that "happiness" is best attained with three essential ingredients: something to do, something to love and something to look forward to.

Obviously this is not a precise science – happiness is too subjective and fluid to be contained in any single box – but I think his theory is sufficiently flexible to reflect that. Something to do need not be a paid job. It's as simple as having a task or purpose upon waking. Looking after a child, taking care of a pet, writing an assignment, helping a friend move house – literally – something to do.

Certainly my many months without that reinforced the magnitude of the first pillar. Without it, the other two are not nearly as pleasing. I'm rarely resolute but on this I am. It seems incontrovertible that we all need something to do to be happy. However you choose to define that. See, even when I'm resolute, I'm not.

But, content, I now am, because I'm returning to a job that I know goes a long way to completing the trinity of my happiness.