A Year of Retirement! – My Next Chapter: A Retirement Journey

It’s hard for me to believe I’ve been retired for more than a year now! I guess it’s no longer accurate to say I’m “newly retired” 😅 I finally took the “newly” part off of my social media profiles this week. That unexepctedly gave me a little emotional tug, as I realized I’m no longer transitioning from work to retirement. I’m truly a retiree.

In some ways it feels like this year has flown by; in other ways, “working me” feels shockingly long ago. I think that’s true when I look back on a lot of changes in my life, though, not just retiring. High school feels like a million years ago! No, it can’t possibly be that many years since I graduated!

I’m definitely not jaded (yet) about my new freedoms. Not having to gear up Sunday nights to go back to work on Monday mornings still feels like a precious gift. So does being able to go off on a spur-of-the-moment weekday trip or long weekend without checking anyone else’s schedule except my husband’s.

The key difference between six months retired and a year for me is the progress I’ve made in decompressing from so many years of work stress, and lack of control over my own schedule. I’m more willing to fill up my calendar in advance with fun things like seeing friends, even if that means I no longer have quite so much last-minute flexibility.

I’m also not quite so fearful or resentful now at the thought of doing a few work-adjacent projects. I know I won’t get sucked back in to working or volunteering 30 or 40 hours a week, that I’ll still have a schedule that can breathe. I’m more confident that I can set boundaries.

One of my work friends who retired before me told me that it might take a few years before I figured out the right balance between volunteering/freelancing and guarding my free time. She was right. I’m still working on it.

I spent the majority of my career writing, and I’m still doing that – but on a much more relaxed schedule. I’ve been writing this Next Chapter retirement blog every other week (more frequently at first), posting regular news briefs on my neighborhood blog, and doing occasional freelance writing projects. I hope to do Q&As with local neighborhood candidates this fall. I’m also tending to a bunch of Web apps, learning new tech skills, and doing some freelance writing.

I was a lot more relaxed about my latest freelance project last month than I would have been six months ago, given that it was by far my most difficult. The challenge? The programming library I wrote about literally changed the day after I turned in my first draft. Those kind of changes are always a risk when you’re writing about a fast-moving, cutting-edge topic like generative AI, but the next day? Really? Almost all the code I’d written to accompany my article no longer worked!

But because I didn’t have other work obligations piling up, I could take extra time to learn the new version, something that turned out to be quite satisfying once I’d worked with the library’s author to come up with revised code.

I’ve also volunteered to teach a 2-hour Workshop for Ukraine next month based on that new knowledge, something I doubt I’d have been ready to do six months ago. Note: If you’d like to help me raise money for medics saving lives in Ukraine, you can contribute even if you don’t want to attend! See details here!

And I’m working on a 5-minute lightning talk for a data science conference in September. Along with other lightning speakers, I’m signed us up for public speaking coaching offered by conference organizer Posit next week, so I’d better start practicing in earnest soon. I’ll be attending that conference in Atlanta, my first in-person professional conference since the start of the pandemic. And the first one without a real title on my badge. We’ll see how that goes.

I’m still guarding my time, though, and saying no to things as well.

On the social side, I feel better now about reaching out to a few more work friends I haven’t seen since I left. I’m no longer worried that I’m somehow trying to hold onto “professional me” if I contact them. At the start of my retirement, I felt it was important to craft a new life separate from work. I feel like I’ve made good progress on that. Now when I reach out to former colleagues, I’m confident it’s because I enjoy seeing them, not that I need the workplace social life I left behind.

One of my bigger surprises after leaving full-time work has been the logistics involved in building a new social life in retirement. I suspect that may be one reason why so many retirees like to have regularly scheduled activities: Trying to find times that work for everyone’s calendars for one-off plans isn’t easy if you want to socialize every day.

Fortunately, since I’m an introvert, I’m OK if a few days each week don’t include socializing. I’ve got my “Local Events of Possible Interest to (Now Retired) Sharon” calendar I can scan to find something interesting to do solo at the last minute. Or, I can relax and read, or learn something new online.

Last week I looked again at the Happy Retirement card I got last year from my colleagues. It was a good reminder that there are still people I hope to reach out to before the weather turns bad and I won’t want to leave the house.

Otherwise, the only thing that marked my 12th month of retirement was the end of my year-long COBRA vision insurance. I think that was the final concrete connection to my full-time employment. I thought I might feel a bit emotional about that, but I didn’t. We have a new plan now. I moved on.