MacGougan at Large
Notes on My Transition to Retirement - 5
Who Am I?
It’s only natural that we tend to define ourselves with reference to whatever we spend most of our time doing. This one is a mother, that one is a pharmacist, somebody else is a teacher. We know that isn’t the totality of who we are, but it provides a foundation that the other aspects of our life and personality can rest on.
But the day will come when the kids leave home, the pharmacy closes, or you retire from teaching. What are you then? Who are you then?
Some roles continue past retirement. Some roles can be adapted to new settings. Some roles are simply gone forever.
When I was worried about the looming prospect of retirement, I saw this “loss of role” issue as a threat to my happiness and wellbeing. Having now made the leap, it occurs to me that I’ve done this before.
In our younger days, we have certain moments of discontinuity - such as moving to a new school, going to college, or starting a new job. Many young people embrace these transitions as opportunities to reinvent themselves. Freed from the expectations of others, they explore new interests, try on new personas, sometimes even change their name they go by.
Having spent decades playing a certain role, it’s harder for us old coots to muster the imagination to even think about reinventing ourselves. But we did it before and we can do it again.
I came to this with some advantages. Insurance Expert isn’t a particularly high-status designation to lose. I keep “retired insurance expert” as item three on my Substack blurb, where its role is to signal that I’m a nerd, but not necessarily a tech nerd. Meanwhile, I’ve also spent my life as a hobbyist writer/humorist/lyricist. So that’s a role that’s pretty much ready for me to take on, to whatever extent I can.
Hopefully, I can take it on without losing sight of the fact that no role lasts forever, and each of us is more than whatever role we happen to be playing at the moment.