Identity. What Happens After You Retire?

By Karen and Erica

Right after you retire, your identity takes a hit. Who are you when you are no longer tethered to the structure that supported you for decades in a job you loved and maybe did not want to leave?

It is a real struggle. But you will win. In fact, you will discover that your identity, which has been formed over decades, is still your identity. You are a strong, resourceful woman who wants to remain connected to the world. You can’t use your job to achieve that goal any more, but you will find a purposeful way to build on your vast experience to create a You 2.0.

It will take work.

We had a hard time figuring out what was going on when we retired. We knew we identified strongly with our jobs, but we had families and friends and interests outside of work, so we didn’t fully appreciate how strange leaving our jobs would be. And even though we decided not to practice law any more, since we did not think we could find or create law jobs as fulfilling as the ones we had left, we knew we could use our experience and skills to do something different, and fulfilling. And of course lots of people would be thrilled to have us.

Wrong.

Try as we might, and making ourselves as appealing as we could—offering to work on defined projects for free, so no fear we would lose our minds or cost too much—no-one was interested. Board service? Sure. But we didn’t want to serve on boards. We wanted to actually work—differently from before, fewer hours, and not as interns—but we wanted to have direct input on projects.

When it became clear that was not going to happen, we began to feel a bit lost. If we had no value to enterprises doing valuable work, who were we exactly? We had been valuable before, why not now? It was especially perplexing as we now finally know what we are doing.

So we began to investigate. We talked to a lot of people going through the same experience, and a picture began to emerge.

• The issue was partly internal. We had lost our points of reference—our work purpose and work community—and work paycheck.

• But it was also external. We began to realize a society- and media-driven image of us was hiding who we actually are. We are the women who had been part of the first large wave to break into the professions and other careers, who worked until retirement, and who remain full of energy and experience and enthusiasm about a continuing role in the larger world. But we were unseen, hidden behind obsolete images of older women. By antiquated attitudes. And by media cartoon pictures of older women hunched over canes, or falling down, unable to get up, or sitting in a field looking vacuous.

The fact that retirement triggered this immediate shift in perception, flipping us overnight from powerful and useful to irrelevant and useless, added to the internal crisis triggered by loss of our jobs. The two together resulted in a loss of identity. The world did not know we were here. And we began to wonder too.

Slowly, we realized we had to create an authentic image of women like us—and we needed to delineate a vision of what women like us wanted from retirement. So that’s what we decided to do. Doing it gave us purpose. And gave us back our identities, upgraded for post-retirement life. There’s no getting around the dislocation of retirement. But once more and more of us are seen for who we still are, after retirement, the rest of the world will see we actually haven’t changed. We are still powerful and useful. And the challenge to our identities will wane.

If you are starting your journey, be of good cheer. If you are well along, you know that it is worth it. And wherever you are, know that others are on the same journey.

We are all together creating a post-career world that is suited to our goals and aspirations. In that world our identities will be clear. We’ll make sure of it!