It’s an adjustment, this retirement thing. It’s great, don’t get me wrong, but an adjustment just the same. And as my intrepid therapist points out, change — even good change — is never easy. In a two year period, I lost my parents; the former relationship “ended” by changing into something different; and I stopped working for a living.
That’s a lot of change & loss compressed into a fairly tight timeframe. There are days when I get the palpable feeling that I’m no longer on the same planet as before. If feels like I’ve been transplanted into someone else’s life. It’s a little bewildering. Piano lessons? Really? Okay. AA meetings at the Bayshore Club a few times a week? Sure, great.
It’s not that I’m not enjoying these new things. I am, actually, and plan to continue with all of them. It’s not that. It’s that those things don’t feel entirely “real” to me. They feel like a vacation activity, like a leave of absence from my real life, whatever that was, or is now. Learning Tai Chi is great! But why does it feel like I’m occupying someone else’s life? Why do I feel like an imposter? Like, if I don’t play the part of “happy, fulfilled retiree” energetically enough, I’ll be revealed as a fraud and sent back to the coal mine.
I feel like I’m at the brink of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to define this life by an entirely new set of rules, new criteria — and I’m not sure what to do with it. It’s daunting. Am I doing it right? Have I saved enough? Am I retiring hard enough?
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