Posts Tagged: retirement
Retirement and Blooming
Retirement Discussions
So we had our family gathering for Memorial Day on Sunday, and “family” includes a LOT of people in my world. In addition to an incredible menu of traditional cookout delights, the hijinks of seven delighted children, and my beautiful daughters, I was privy to a fervent discussion between in-law and ex about the possibility and necessity of retirement.
My son-in-law’s father (Marty) is pro-retirement (as am I). My ex-husband (K), father of my children, is still working hard at age 67. Marty was trying to encourage K to finally retire. After listening for a while, I joined Marty in reassuring K that he would be fine financially (much more than fine). I mean, if I can manage, he certainly can.
K listened and argued and listed his reasons for putting off retirement again. Marty turned to me in bafflement. I said something like, “You’re right, but K’s refusal to retire has nothing to do with finances. It has to do with emotions. It’s all fear. He’s afraid of losing his identity and security, and no amount of logic can cut through that fear.”
What Not Working Means
I am so incredibly glad to be retired, but I’ve had my moments of free-fall. I was reading this essay by Hugo Dos Santos in LitHub this morning, and realized what he said about being laid off was the same for retiring:
Someone who has just been laid off is someone in the process of disappearing, and they know it, even if they can’t say so. The routines that informed the self are gone. Gone are the title, the inbox, the calendar invites lining up the days. What remains is the stubborn question underneath all of it, the one the routines were so efficient at keeping quiet: Who am I when no one is paying me to be anything?
I probably had less trouble with this “Who am I?” question than many, because I might have spent ten hours a day getting to work, being at work, and coming home from work, but I never felt defined by work. I had a career, but it was also just a job. What I did for a living was never my identity. In fact I often chafed at working because I am a person who simply cannot stand to be told what to do. Ever. By anyone. This is the core of my identity, this stubborn opposition to the direction of others.
If you think I’m joking you’re wrong.
So the answer to “Who am I now?” after retirement is “Myself, finally.” But this means I’m my own manager. I’ve had a few good managers in my life, and the best of them (Kathy) understood that I could and would do ANYTHING if allowed to do it without excessive oversight and questioning and nitpicking and bothering. I would power through projects like a draft horse if left to my own devices. I don’t think I ever missed a deadline.
However, as my own manager, I find that I’m a recalcitrant and stubborn employee. I can be a total pain in the ass. I think this could be helped if I gave myself more deadlines. I love a deadline, I love meeting or beating them, I’m like a dog on a track to cross that line. I miss having deadlines. So maybe I’ll work on that. Or not.
Finding that Door
Here’s another passage of wonder and beauty from the essay.
What I told myself, during those years of not writing, was that the conditions weren’t right. That I needed more time. More quiet. More distance from the ordinary demands of a life. That the writing would happen once things settled. Things never settle. What I was really doing was building a structure of permission so elaborate that I couldn’t find its door. And somewhere within that structure, I had stopped thinking of myself as a writer and started thinking of myself as someone who had, at one point, desperately wanted to be one.
Oh that gorgeous line: What I was really doing was building a structure of permission so elaborate that I couldn’t find its door.
I didn’t do that. I was always writing something. Poems or essays or blogs, even when the urge to write novels dried up. I’d write for work and feel an almost desperate pressure to write my own things instead, but I had those deadlines, you see. So I’d send myself an email with an idea or passage or just a phrase. Then I’d go back to whatever I was doing for pay. When I got home, I’d tap away at my own work. My real work.
This writer discovered that too.
The art happens in the margins between obligations, between the work day and the start of dinner, in the twenty minutes before the house wakes up. Or it doesn’t happen. The desk in the basement is not a retreat from life. It is inside the life.
That’s why retirement works for me. Writing was always inside my life, my true identity. Retirement has taken away nothing. Instead, it has opened up space for the parts of my life I’d fit in around the edges of making a living. I understand that it’s different for other people, but it’s beautiful for me, a blooming place where words are allowed to take up the space they’ve always needed.
If you’d like to read this fine and lovely, click below.
If You Weren’t a Writer…
What would you be?
An interviewer asked Lorrie Moore of all people this question:
Interviewer: If you weren’t a writer, what would you be instead?
Lorrie Moore: I’d be a bad singer or an okay waitress. But I would undoubtedly be writing in my spare time. Just as I do now. Writing’s natural place is as a passionate side hustle.
I like what she said. Writing has been my passionate side hustle for the last thirty years, but it’s also been my actual hustle. I have been writing for a living–a corporate poet of sorts!–since 2003. I’ve done other work in addition to the writing for my company, to be clear. I have prepped and packed and laid out and edited, I have managed projects and print runs. I managed press placements for years, which was really, really demanding and really, really fun. For the past eleven years, I have been primarily focused on copywriting.
Its been good work, writing for a company. It doesn’t use up my creativity. It spurs it, because sometimes, when I’m churning up some romance copy for the side of a box or a hangtag, my longing to write something of my own is so piercing that I think I might cry. So I come home, and I do that.
But what would I do if I hadn’t written for a living ? That’s easy. I’d have been a realtor.
Why? Reason One: I love to sell!
When I found myself a single mother of three with a high school diploma and a pressing need for employment, I went to work at the mall selling things. I worked at a seasonal Christmas store first, then went on to women’s plus-size clothes. And I loved it. If you hate selling things, this won’t make sense: There is something rich and satisfying to be found where merchandise meets customers. I am good at making the match. I don’t want to sell something to someone who doesn’t want it. I want it to be right.
But you don’t make any money working part time at the mall, and I needed benefits and a retirement plan, so I went back to school, finished my degree, and became employable at a rate a little higher than minimum wage.
Side note: I think I’d have been great at selling cars, too. My South Dakota dad sold farm implements and cars and he was excellent at it. My facility for sales was inherited from him.
Reason Two: I love homes.
I am fascinated by homes. Fascinated by how they are laid out, when they were built, how they work for the people who live in them. I’d have loved to find just the right home for someone, to scour the listing and make the match. I have a great nose for a deal. And as a side benefit, I could go into people’s homes all day long for a living, and see their furniture, what they hung on their walls, how they lived in their own sacred space of home.
That’s the problem with the modern trend of home staging. It removes the personality of the owner by design. I get that from a sales perspective, but for a snoop like me, it’s a real letdown. This is general curiosity, mind you. I am just as curious about the homes of friends. I walk in and start my inspection, gleaning what I can from what they hang and where.
Do I have regrets?
Maybe. I’d have made so much more MONEY if I’d spent my career selling things instead of writing things. But I’m in the home stretch, here. It’s a little late for regrets when you’ve signed up for Medicare.
I am what I am. Until, in just a few months, I am retired.
