'The selfie I took on the first day back to work from vacation a couple of years ago was already starting to show pretty clear signs of career fatigue!'
I signed up for a First Aid course the month before I retired, which seemed even to me to be much more work-related than leisure-related. Trouble letting go, I guess. Of structure, of routine, the connections with peers, the certainty of a paycheque. I’ve been told I have commitment issues, but struggling to commit to something as wonderful as retirement? The Golden Years? My big payback time of life? I should be embracing this.
I had been mentally preparing for over a year, having met regularly with my retirement specialist at the bank and even dropping hints to my boss so he wouldn’t be caught completely by surprise. I even provided little daily reminders to myself by changing my passwords to retirement-related words, though to be honest that approach just led to confusion. I had worked ‘snowbird’ into one of my passwords early on, but couldn’t login to my computer because I kept typing snowboard. Then I changed it to ‘farewell’, but was attempting to login with welfare. They tell you not to write your passwords down, but a person really should if you’re trying to be newly clever.
Then one day it seemed retirement came to me. As we’re hearing so much in the wake of the pandemic, it seemed the right time to embrace the change that I’ve been craving – and saving for throughout these past decades. In fact, I was suddenly so excited by the mere thought that by the time I announced it to my boss it came out something like, “I think I’m just going to leave today.” After further discussion, we landed on a retirement date six months away. With all that settled, it was time to make the official announcement.
People seem to say really strange things at big times in life. Everyone asked my age, as though I needed to qualify for this somehow. When I said 61, several people tisk tisked as though I was pretty darn cheeky to be vanquishing all my responsibilities before 65. I felt obligated to explain, even to people I rarely spoke to before then, that I would be continuing to work but just not in the full time big stress grind that I had been in for nearly 35 years. But the age debate stuck for quite some time, with people bandying about ideas that I would surely miss the pace, that I couldn’t possibly have saved enough after raising my daughter as a single mother, or that perhaps I would feel more comfortable retiring at an even number. Sixty-one was an odd age for retirement, they said, even something that was a derivative of five would be better.
Then there were the many, many people who mentioned someone they knew who died shortly after retiring. Worked hard all their lifetime and dropped at the first taste of freedom, the lesson clearly being that it is much safer to just remain working. That, I figured, was perhaps why I had taken the First Aid course. I would know the first signs of medical distress if retirement was going to backfire on me.
As first seen in the Red Deer Advocate Opinion "Life in Retirement" read the original at: https://www.reddeeradvocate.com/opinion/life-in-retirement-preparing-for-the-big-milestone/