Your Post-Retirement Identity? You Are Still You. Just More So.

By Karen and Erica

After you retired, did you start to wonder, after a while, whether you were still who you used to be? Was your attitude affected by reactions when people asked what you did, and you responded that you had retired? We have some advice for retirement-speak. But this post is about your identity.

If you are like us, your career was a significant part of your identity. Not the only part—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 very important to us—more than we realized, perhaps. And when our careers ended, those professional identities were no more. We had no interest in living in the past—I used to be an important person was not a line we wanted to use. But who were we, now? Especially as a lot of people seemed to see us as boring has-beens rather than the rather entertaining people we felt ourselves to be.

We thought that reaction was strange. 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 post-career lives. 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. And some people we met were perfectly comfortable with who they were. One had made a constant-travel plan that was working beautifully, and another was really happy making no commitment besides the next meal, which had actually been her plan from the moment she started working. But we found a lot of other women who felt as we did. We talked to them, and we decided we had to think about who we were now.

We pulled up our socks and tried to figure it out. First, we did some research to understand why others saw us as done. We discovered that there was no image of us in the media. Instead, the images of older women—women over 50—were frail, vacant-eyed, dowdy, aimless. That was not us. OK, so who were we? Whoever we were, we did not seem to be a known presence in the world.

We were not looking for entirely new identities, of course. We saw no reason to discard personas we had spent decades to build. We were proud of them. After we thought about it for a while, we began to understand that those work-based identities would be the foundation for who we would become in our post-career lives. 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. We cherish the confidence that comes from having had careers. When we first established our identities as working girls, in the 1970s, we had no foundation from which to draw strength. It’s amazing what a difference a few decades of work can make.

We decided not to be just retired women. Instead, we would come out as post-career women with much to offer and much to achieve. In our case, we were no longer regularly practicing lawyers, but we were becoming something new. Something still active, still connected to the world, but not the same as what we had been before. What was that? In our case, we became bloggers, influencers, entrepreneurs—over several years. Had anyone suggested before we retired that we would go in this direction we would have laughed out loud.

We are not finished with developing who we are now, and there is no lack of challenge. We have not solved everything, and it takes work. But we are on our way.

You will be too. Be patient, and remember you too have decades of valuable experience. Your post-career identity is being formed already. You’re going to love it.