Identity. Did You Lose Yours When You Retired?
By Karen and Erica
We did. We were hard charging corporate lawyers one day, and the next we were—not. What were we after we retired? We had no idea. And a lot of people seemed unable to see us, instead seeing decrepit old women who had one foot out the door—of the planet. Their eyes glazed over, as if we were boring has-beens rather than the rather entertaining people we felt ourselves to be. We—as we actually exist—became invisible.
Of course, work was never our only identity. We were wives and mothers, and we had friends, and we did things other than work. (Not many things, admittedly.) But our professional identities were extremely important to us—more than we realized, perhaps. And when our careers ended, out professional identities became history.
That was a problem, for at least two reasons. First, we did not want to live in the past. Second, the reactions to our retirements were absurd. We had retired from careers we loved and had achieved a status many people said they desired. No more tiresome quotidian demands. We could do what we wanted, when we wanted to. What could be better? But we also began to understand that we had no experience of living in a post-career world. Who were we without a schedule? Who were we if no-one wanted anything from us? Who were we without an office? Who were we without a paycheck?
At first, we thought we were alone in feeling bewildered. No-one had told us to expect to lose ourselves, so we assumed no-one else experienced that loss. True, some people we met were not in the same state. One had made a plan that was working out, and another was really happy doing nothing, which was actually her plan from when she started working. But after we talked to a lot of other women in the same position, we were relieved—or, at least, we felt we had company—when we realized most of us were pretty much in the same boat. Wondering who we were now.
We picked ourselves up and decided to figure out what we needed to do to get an identity that fit. First, we did some research to try to figure out why others saw us as done. There was no image resembling us in the media. Instead, the images of older women were appalling—frail, vacant-eyed, dowdy, aimless. Those pictures obscured us. We had to challenge them, and put forth a new picture altogether.
We were not looking for entirely new identities, of course. We had spend decades building the ones we had. There was no reason to discard such hard earned personas. Rather, our work-based identities would be the foundation for who we would become. We are experienced and resourceful. We know how to solve problems. We know how to make mistakes. We also know how to recover from them. We can discern what is important and what is not. We have our own sense of style. And we have ideas about what we want to do. These abilities came from decades of work, and were critical parts of who we would continue to be.
We decided not to be just retired women. We had retired from our careers, so we were no longer regularly practicing lawyers, but we were becoming something new. Something still active, still connected to the world, but not dependent on what we had been before. What was that? In our case, over a considerable time we became bloggers, influencers, entrepreneurs. Had anyone suggested such a thing before we retired we would have laughed out loud. After we had inquired what bloggers and influencers were.
We no longer think of ourselves, or identify ourselves, as retired. Our careers formed the foundation for our new identities, for sure, but we have pivoted to completely new directions. We cherish the confidence that comes from having had those careers. When we first established our identities as working girls, in the 1970s, we had no such foundation. Now we see what a difference a few decades of work can make.
We are not finished with our search for identity, and there is no lack of challenge. We have not solved everything. But we are on our way. You will be too. Be patient, and remember you too have decades of valuable experience. Your new identity is being formed already. You’re going to love it.