One of The First Retirement Lessons We Learned.

By Erica and Karen

You are about to retire. You are panicked. You are a woman of action, so you act. You rewrite your resume, demonstrating that you are the ideal candidate for that CEO job. You go out and buy a couple of new suits for the interview. And you tell everyone who asks that your plan is to get back into full time work. ASAP.

Makes sense, right? You love your job, you love all the attributes of full time work—the structure, the colleagues, the work itself, and the paycheck. You can’t really imagine life without all of that.

Karen couldn’t either. So that was her plan.

Erica thought Karen was nuts.

Erica realized that continuing on the trajectory we had been on all of our professional lives was, at best, unlikely. And at worst, dumb. Working 24/7 for another four decades? It was time for a change.

That Erica was correct became clear when we decided to offer our services, for free, to a non-profit we thought was wonderful. We really liked the executive director, and she really liked us. We put together a plan for scaling the non-profit’s important mission to other cities. We would execute the plan for free, in six months. We were proud of our initiative. The ED took it to her board. She came back to tell us: No. The nonprofit could not figure out where we would fit in the organizational chart. We were not interns. We were not to run the place. (N.B.—We had absolutely no interest in running the place. Or any place.) So where to put us? Nowhere.

We were crushed. Still, we persevered, and went after a couple of other possibilities. Same result.

We began to wonder. Was this happening because we had nothing useful to offer, even for free? We didn’t think so. We thought it reflected a failure of imagination. These institutions couldn’t figure out who we were, in the scheme of things. We began to realize that was because we were new. Retired women who could still function and who wanted to offer their experience and expertise, but had no desire for money and power. What was that all about???

So then the question was—why were we invisible? Why did people not see that our decades of experience had value? And what could we do to open their eyes?

We decided to start a blog (which meant we had to figure out what a blog was) and a website (which required that we get someone to make us a website) and with these to paint a picture of who we were (which required that we learn about photography and change our lawyerly writing to something more punchy.)

That led to the birth of Lustre, the adventure we could not have imagined before we retired, the adventure that has given us endless rewards, new friends and colleagues, and serious purpose. And while we work hard, we do not work like we did before. We have time, and we can control what we do with our time. (We don’t have it all, yet. Good thing we had paying jobs all those years!)

If you are in the place we were in, think about the options. There are probably more than you might initially realize. You might be able to get that next job—partly because some people have begun to realize our worth. But before you take it, think about doing something different. Something that allows you to use your vast assets but does not require that you forego the space that you earned by working for decades.

The pivot could be freeing. And exciting.

Tell us how it comes out!