Chapter 8: Yoohoo… anybody home…??

In Retirement 101, one of the first things they tell you is that you must prepare to lose the work-based community that has likely been the core of your social identity for many years. All those people in your office and your organization - the ones who know who you are, where you fit in, and how many coffees you have before 10am -  will fade away, faster than you can imagine. And even as you raise your last paper-cup toasts, and make your yearbook promises - “drinks soon!” - you know that without the daily intimacies of dull staff meetings, memo re-writes and glorious victories against the mad edicts of ministerial staff, there may be little left to your acquaintance. 

A steady job gives structure to your life; a 32-year career can define your entire social network, as it does mine (with some jealousy for friends who have had school and parenting circles to draw upon). Nearly every friend I have comes from my work. All my best stories. Most of the memorable snogs. 

Who will be my new little friends in retirement? Will anyone want to come out to play with me, when, let’s face it, most of my social skills have been built around my ability to make amusing quips about shoddy powerpoints during executive committee (a 12-bullet slide with no scalable graphics? Have they lost their minds??). True, as a diplomat, I have learned to make cheery small talk with any person, in any circumstance. Work-me is gregarious and can beguile any boardroom, zoom chat or dining table with undue fascination for local weather, trans-Atlantic travel mishaps or where to get the best morning scones in London (the answer is in the tea rooms of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Just delightful. Trust me.)

Real-me is the is Myers-Briggs card-carrying introvert, who is never entirely certain why anyone would want to talk with me. And the greater absurdity is that I have spent decades shunning invitations and plotting early escapes from dinners and parties, disappointing friends whose kindness I just haven’t always had the energy to accept. These very same wonderful - extraordinary, generous, hilarious and brilliant - friends who I now fear will drift away when they realize that real-me has much less entertainment or accomplishment to offer. 

I know this is irrational - an exaggerated self-effacement - but it is rooted in a reasonable thought: a career of doing interesting things does not necessarily make you an interesting person, and once you’ve bored acquaintances with your tales of exotic glories past, what are the qualities that you have to offer in friendship in this new retired world where nobody gives a shit about that time you shared a magnificent chocolate pie with Condeleezza Rice in the State Department executive dining room (which I totally did. And it was awesome. Do you want to be my friend??). 

You are now a 50-something year old kid, plunked into a vast playground with only your wits and monkey bar skills to rely upon. You may warily eye the clusters of ex-colleagues, strangers and neighbours and even your dearest, oldest friends, and wonder who will invite you to come to play. 

Or maybe some will see me - real-me, at last - swinging merrily up on my monkey bars, watching the world at a placid pace, and choose to be there too.

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 Chapter 7: Wake up - it’s the first day of the rest of your life!

On the first day of the rest of my life, I slept horribly. 

I lay there tense and tight in my brain, my throat, my knees and feet, paralyzed with a dopey, undefined sense of alarm that is usually reserved for my dreams about trying to drive my mother’s station wagon from the backseat, with Kentucky Fried Chicken snack packs where my feet should be.

This, of course, made no sense, because according to my detailed retirement prospectus, the first week after ending work should be one of blessed relief, with long naps, mid-morning cocktails and general puttering about the house in aimless, bra-less bliss. 

Shrieking, suffocating brain terror was not pencilled in until week 8. 

Now, years of work-stress insomnia have taught me that 2:30 am is the absolute best time to make a methodical inventory of all my life anxieties. Did I leave the stove on? Are the dogs in the house? Did I get distracted and forget an appointment to destroy one of my mortal enemies today? You know, the usual stuff.  I scanned my mental horizon for the meetings and deadlines that were gnawing at my gut, or some other way that I might fail to deliver on a promise or plan. But of course, there was none. 

As of July 18, I am a woman without a plan (and a total palindrome fail). And that, on this very first day of freedom forever, turned out to be the one thing that completely freaked me out. 

Those who are wise in the ways of retirement will tell you to do nothing - NOTHING - for six months. Make no commitments or big life changes; don’t sign up for college classes, build a jungle gym or, for the love of god, even think about switching your nail polish colour.  Instead, find a cottage, a yoga mat or a well-worn dog bed, and hibernate while your work-weary soul unshackles itself from the old ways and old worries. 

Perhaps the trick of it all is to add by the same degree that you subtract. Take away a schedule full of corporate meetings, add morning strolls through the park. Finish your last performance evaluations, then volunteer to do something good for your community without expectation of reward. Sleep through the night without angsting about what you should have said to a treacherous colleague, treat yourself to a long overdue coffee date with an old friend. 

As I lay awake in the early hours of that first Monday and contemplated the gaping abyss of freedom that would mark every single day of the rest of my life, I did the only sane thing I could think to do. Panicked, went online, and at 3am bought myself a bright, beautiful wall calendar with big, open squares waiting to be filled with the gentle minutiae of a new, better life.

Or so I think, since I then fell back asleep with only the vaguest notion of a very dull dream about stationary, and a lingering suspicion that I might need to check my Amazon account in the morning...

🛌 🛌 🛌