Two Years Retired! – My Next Chapter: A Retirement Journey

It’s been two years since I worked my last day at a full-time job and embarked on my Next Chapter. And not only do I feel substantially changed from the “work me” of July 2024, which I somewhat expected; I also feel that “newly retired me” was awhile ago, too.

No more workdays-and-weekends rhythm in my life. No more asking permission before I plan a trip. And no more feeling like the work that I did defined who I am.

I’m still experimenting with the mix of activities I want in my life now – things like volunteering/public service, travel, freelance writing, personal writing, hobbies, socializing, learning, chores, and what I call “maintenance”, or tending to my physical well-being. (I plan to write about maintenance in another post. It seems to take up an increasing chunk of time as we get older!) I don’t think that tinkering will stop. But it all feels a lot less frenetic than two years ago, when I was facing a blank slate and wondered how I was going to restructure my life.

I feel a lot less frenetic.

I care less about being seen as still relevant. Now I only keep up with things from my work life that truly interest me; I let the rest go. I don’t start every morning trying to post something on social media to show that I’m still a great source of tech info. Yes, I get angry if people think I’m technically illiterate because of my age and gender. But I feel like I have a lot less to prove to the world. And myself.

The obligations of work – the meetings, the emails, the “emergencies”, the endlessly updating to-do lists largely out of my control, the tending to my “personal brand” online, the frustrations of management decisions that didn’t go my way . . . they mostly seem a long time ago. But so do those first few days and weeks without my job, when it all felt so strange.

I read somewhere that it’s a mistake to view retirement as simply an absence of work, as just the removal of something important. Because that misses a crucial aspect of this transition: Retirement can be a time of immense growth and change. A bit like going off to college.

Sure, in one way retirement is the exact opposite of college. Instead of getting ready to launch a career, retirement winds it down. And, at the start of college, it can seem like there are so many options, so many possibilities. No one is guaranteed a lengthy lifespan, of course, but we do often feel that most of our lives are still ahead of us when we’re in college! That’s certainly not how life looks in retirement.

But in another way, college and retirement are similar, because they both mark a dramatically new phase of life. And navigating through a new life phase almost always fundamentally changes us.

Mental and emotional energy are freed up when you’re no longer working full time and worrying about your career. And if you don’t have caregiving responsibilities, there’s also a lot of extra time. For many of us who went straight from high school to college to full-time work, retirement brings more free time than we had since kindergarten.

For me, that’s gone from amazing and a tiny bit overwhelming to something that seems normal. Now, looking back, I have no idea how I fit the rest of my life in the tiny bit of time available when I wasn’t working. OK, actually, I do know: I was tired and stressed a lot, and my work-life balance was pretty unbalanced.

Family and friends were always important to me, but that theory sometimes collided with the obligations of a demanding full-time job. I always made time for learning, and exercise, and meditation, and self care, but not nearly enough. I now have the immense luxury of rebalancing.

I’m still not taking retirement for granted. I don’t think I ever will. It still felt like a gift when I could watch almost any World Cup game I wanted to, even ones that started at 3 pm, without having to work extra in the evening or wondering what “important” email I might be missing. It’s still an unexpected pleasure when I can plan a trip after only have to check my calendar and my husband’s – with no need tell (or ask) a manager, or find people who can cover for me. It’s still fun to start reading something that would have been work-related, realize I’m not interested, and remind myself that I can just stop reading it! I don’t need to care anymore!

And I’m still so grateful that I can spend so much more of my time doing things that I want to do, or need to do for myself and my family, not an employer.

No one’s life is perfect, especially as they get older. Mine certainly isn’t. Retirement, though, is pretty darn great.