The song always sounded rebellious when I was younger. A bit of swagger. A bit of attitude. The sort of decision a man makes with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and no real consequences attached to it. Somewhere along the line, the lyrics stopped sounding rebellious and started sounding like the conversation you have with yourself at three o’clock in the morning when the house is quiet, and sleep will not come.

Should I stay or should I go now?

Everyone knows the words. If I go, there will be trouble, and if I stay, it will be double. The older I get, the less dramatic those words sound and the more accurate they become, because there comes a point in your working life when the question stops being about jobs and starts being about something harder to name.

It is not really about whether I should stay or go.

It feels more like “Am I still capable of becoming something else?”

That is the question that sits in my head at times these days. I was off work with an injury — a shoulder that decided, after I had tried to unlatch the defibrillator after nearly two decades of lifting people off bathroom floors and out of the bottoms of stairwells, that it had enough of its opinions ignored. Frontline work runs on momentum. Shift patterns. Radio calls. Hospital corridors. Gallows humour in station kitchens. When all of that stops suddenly, the silence leaves room for thinking, and too much thinking is rarely the friend it pretends to be.

So I had been thinking.

Recently, I tried for something else. A door I wanted, the kind where the years on the road might have meant something to somebody just starting out. I genuinely wanted it. I did not get it. The most recent one I could feel closing before the email landed, the way you can after enough of them — and the email, when it came, only confirmed a thing I had already started telling myself.

It is not the first time. There have been others. A door, then another, then another.

And each one quietly rearranges the furniture in your head.

You start asking yourself questions you usually keep buried under routine and busyness. The unglamorous ones. The ones nobody wants to admit out loud. Maybe I am simply not smart enough for what comes next. Maybe twenty years on the road taught me how to do this job, but it did not equip me for the next one. Maybe the ceiling I keep walking into is not the system. Maybe it is me.

My head is full of information. Some of it is useful. Most of it is not. I can tell you the lyrics to songs I have not heard in twenty years. I can recite lines from a film made in the early sixties, word for word, in a way that quietly amazes my wife and faintly worries her at the same time. I can imagine standing inside my great-grandparents’ house in County Cavan more than fifty years ago, my grandparents in the room with me, the light coming in a particular way through a particular window, and walking through it room by room as if I had been there yesterday. Random shit. Useless shit. The wrong shit.

Then I sit down to the aptitude test for a job in the same service I have given nearly twenty years of my life to, and I look at a question I should be able to answer without thinking, and the answer is not there.

A question about something I do every shift. Something I have done a thousand times. Something the version of me sitting in the back of an ambulance at three in the morning would answer correctly without breaking off the conversation. But here, sitting at a desk with a multiple-choice paper in front of me, four options on the page and one of them right, my mind goes quiet in the wrong way. Not blank. Worse than blank. Crowded with everything that does not matter, while the thing that does matter sits just out of reach.

That is the part that frightens me.

Not the rejection itself. Not the email, or the next one, or the one after that. The fact that knowledge I rely on every working day, knowledge that has kept people alive, can apparently disappear the moment somebody asks me to prove I have it. The fact that the song lyrics stay, but the drug doses go missing. The fact that the version of me on the road and the version of me in the exam room do not seem to be the same person, and I cannot tell which one is real.

And every paper I do not pass quietly confirms a thing I am already half-afraid of. Maybe I cannot retain the information I should already know. That may be the failures are not bad luck or close calls. That may be evidence.

That is the hard part to write down.

You spend your working life believing that effort and competence are the currency, that if you keep showing up and doing the work properly, the door will eventually open. Then somewhere along the way, the doors keep not opening, and you start running out of explanations that protect your own sense of yourself.

This is not the first career I have had. People sometimes assume you arrive in the ambulance service straight from school with a lifelong calling and a neat little plan. My life never worked like that. Mine has always felt more like moving through different versions of myself, trying to find where I fit best.

At sixteen, I went to work in my uncle’s fruit and vegetable shop on the Lisburn Road while most of my friends stayed on for A-Levels. Long days. Cash handling. Boxes heavier than I should have been lifting at that age. Minimum wage had not even been brought in yet, but when you are sixteen with a few quid in your pocket every Friday, you have the confidence of a millionaire. What I really had was the start of a work ethic that would follow me for life.

After that came the Youth Training Programme (YTP) scheme in the Housing Executive, then the Ulster Historical Foundation, then a full-time job in a solicitor’s office in Belfast, where I handled legal documents for court. Then sixteen years in the Civil Service.

I was truly happy in the various departments and buildings while in the Civil Service. Everyone says that a job in the Civil Service is for life, and to an extent, it is. Different uniforms. Different systems, but that soon started to change. When Churchill House was demolished to make way for Victoria Square, I was again on the move. I can honestly say that if that had not happened, I would have still been there.

There were different versions of the same restless feeling — that I was standing beside my own life rather than properly inside it. Every job taught me something. None of them ever felt like the answer to a question I had not yet learned how to ask. Then the ambulance service appeared, and for the second time in my working life, I felt fully present. That was nearly twenty years ago.

The pace. The unpredictability. The fact that your decisions mattered immediately, not after a meeting next Thursday. Someone’s worst day arriving through a radio speaker at any second, and your entire job is to go towards it rather than away from it. None of it asks permission to become part of you. It just does. The radio tones. The smell of diesel at a garage forecourt at six in the morning. The fluorescent lighting in emergency departments. The friendships built in rooms most people will never see inside. It rewires you in ways you do not notice until someone else points them out.

The way you sleep. The way you startle. The way you eat.

My mother-in-law used to say to me about it. She would stand at her own cooker, plate in hand, watching me hoover up a dinner she had spent the afternoon making, and tell me I was eating like a lion devouring its prey. Standing at the counter. Not sitting. Not chewing properly. Always having the feeling that you were never fully off the clock, even at someone else’s table. She thought it was bad manners. It was not bad manners. It was twenty years of knowing a job can drop at any second and that the meal in front of you might be the only one you get for the next eight hours. Once that becomes part of you, it does not leave just because you have walked into somebody else’s kitchen.

I do not know where the line between work and the man begins or finishes anymore.

That is the difficulty of all of this.

Leaving feels frightening because the job has become part of who I am. But staying forever purely because you are afraid of losing that identity is its own kind of frightening. And the trying — the reaching for something that uses the same experience differently — keeps not working out, and the older the rejections get, the harder it becomes to convince myself the reason is anything other than the obvious one.

That is the part nobody warns you about. Not the staying or the going. The trying, the quiet accumulation of near-but-not-quites, and what those do to a man’s belief in himself over time.

Maybe this is just a midlife crisis. Not the Hollywood version with sports cars and leather jackets. The ordinary working-class version. The one where a man sits in his kitchen, wondering if he can still physically and mentally do the same job for another twenty years. The one where you start measuring your life in missed Christmases, sore shoulders, and the growing awareness that your body no longer recovers the way it once did.

The ambulance service gives you purpose. But purpose comes at a cost, and the bill arrives slowly, in instalments you do not always notice you are paying.

I should say the obvious thing here, because it is true, and it complicates everything. I returned to work this past weekend. The shoulder is not quite right, but it is right enough, and I put on the uniform for the first time in two months and went back to the road. I am still at the start of finding out what going back means. The intention to return has never seriously wavered. What that return actually feels like is a thing I am only just beginning to learn.

Because, alongside going back, there is a different thing, and it is the warmest thing I know about myself and the one I trust least. I want to learn. Sometimes I feel there is something to learn to escape the road. Not learning because a process requires it, or a competition demands it, or a form needs another box filled. Learn because there are things I am genuinely interested in and have been for years, and somewhere in the middle of two decades of someone else’s worst days, I quietly stopped allowing myself the ones that were only mine. The want is to study something because I want to, not because I have to. That is all. It sounds like a small thing to want. It does not feel like a small thing to admit.

And here is where it turns, the way these things always turn. Even if I do it — even if I take the time and the money and the evenings and learn the thing properly — it does not count unless they say it counts. Unless my employer has certified, accredited, or recognised it through the correct channel, it cannot follow me into the job. It stays a private thing. A hobby. Something I did. Knowledge that is real, but in the only place I would use it officially, it is not. That rule is true, and I understand why it exists, and I am not naïve about it.

But honesty is not the rule. The honest part is that I am no longer sure whether the rule is the obstacle or the thing I have started hiding behind. Whether the want goes nowhere because they will not let it, or because “they will not let it” is an easier sentence to live with than finding out what happens if I try and it comes to nothing, the way the other doors came to nothing. I cannot tell those two apart any more. That is the same problem as the exam room, but wearing different clothes. The constraint is real. My relationship to it is the part I cannot see clearly.

So here I am. Caught somewhere between gratitude and uncertainty. Between loyalty and exhaustion. Between the younger man desperate to join the service and the older man quietly wondering how much more of himself he can realistically keep giving to it. Between going back, which I have done, and wanting something for myself, which I have not yet found the nerve to do. Between believing the next door will eventually open and wondering whether the only person standing in front of it has been me all along.

I do not know yet which version of me is right.

But I have noticed something, sitting here, and it is the nearest thing to an answer I have. The fear is the same at every door. The same when I think about going back as when I think about leaving. The same goes for when I imagine trying for something and failing, as when I imagine never trying at all. The same whether the door is one I know or one I have never opened. I kept treating each one as a separate verdict on a separate choice.

It took me a long time to see that a fear which arrives no matter which way I turn cannot be telling me anything about the turning. It was never the doors. It was the man standing in front of them, deciding in advance that I would not be enough for whichever one I picked.

What I do know is this. Once the question enters your head, it stays until you answer it.

And it has been sitting in my head for some time now.

If this resonated, you might also want to read The 19-Year Handover — on what nearly two decades on the road leave behind.