A 65-year-old retiree named Farley admits that when it was time for him to stop working, he felt a sense of relief. Start collecting your retirement pension and being able to dedicate himself to his hobbies was the plan he had wanted throughout his working life. He worked for more than 30 years in an insurance company and is now facing an identity crisis, as he said in a blog for Expert Editor.
“Retirement gives a freedom that is terrifying and exciting at the same time,” he summarizes. This change is like “standing on the edge of a pool that you have bathed in for decades of years but now you don’t remember how to swim.” Apart from insurance, he has been in more companies. It has more than 35 years of contributions to American Social Securityof which he remembers very good moments, in his companies and with his colleagues.
Several retirees over 80 years of age speak clearly: “It hurt me when my son told me that I should sell the house and move to a residence.”
Miguel Ángel, 78-year-old retiree: “I’ve been sharing a flat for 6 years because I can’t live alone with 650 euros; the other person who lives here earned 450”
“You lose your identity, you don’t realize that at that moment you are not talking about who I am, but rather about what I do, and when this reference disappears, doubt arises,” he points out in the blog. “The identity that united you with your work is broken and that is one of the main challenges for retirement.”
“I would wake up at 5:45 and think, what now?”
The first few months he continued to wake up at the same time as when he went to work. “It was 5:45 and I woke up without having to set an alarm.” Although I no longer had work obligations, the routine continued. When I was working, I thought that when I quit, not feeling tied down would be a relief.
“When I retired I thought it was like paradise, but it wasn’t that, it was a free fall.” Furthermore, he began to feel bad, a kind of mental exhaustion. “When you have more time, and the afternoons are free, you start to think and think about all the things you missed because you were working, like the children’s school functions that always coincided with a meeting.”
And that’s when he realized he needed to cover those times when his head wouldn’t stop spinning. “I started writing because I didn’t want to fill time, but rather create it.”
“When you work, you create a shield against vulnerability”
The time when you are working is when you are busy. Then, when you reach retirement, you understand how work was a “shield” that protected you from “the vulnerability of trying something new, and now I have complete freedom to pursue any interest, but I realize that I don’t know what I want and it’s terrifying.”
In addition to writing, he has signed up for watercolor classes where he has discovered that “I am terribly bad but I interpret it in a different way, I don’t get frustrated but rather I understand that it is part of the process and that it is okay to not know.”
“Although I thought retirement was rest, now I realize that it has been a resurrection, not a profound change but small daily decisions in which I am learning to know myself. I have never been completely me.”