On Retirement

Disability and Determination is a weekly newsletter about my experience navigating life with a rare disability. If you like this post, feel free to give a click on the ❤️ symbol below. This will help me get discovered by others on Substack. To be notified of future posts, drop your email in the field at the bottom and click the Subscribe button. If you’d like to further contribute, I also offer a paid subscription option (that includes extra monthly content), or you can Buy Me a Coffee ☕ I’m glad you’re here ☺️

Retirement: a word that—for most people—inspires hope and is something to look forward to as we age. For me, it’s always been the opposite.

I like to work. That’s easy to say since I’m still young-ish and haven’t been doing it for decades upon decades. But generally, I like having something to get up and do everyday that challenges me and that I enjoy.

The bigger part of my dread about retirement though is that I don’t know what kind of physical condition I’ll be in if live to retirement age. For a lot of people, retirement is the time you take trips. You do things you always wanted to do but couldn’t because you were working (provided you’re financially able to). I feel like I always have a ticking time bomb in my life that could go off at any time. Maybe I’ll end up needing full-time care. Maybe I’ll end up needing to be in a wheelchair. Maybe I won’t be able to get out of bed. None of these are bad things that mean your life is over in any way, but they do mean that I may not have the opportunity to wait until retirement to do things, because I may not physically be able to do them. That’s just the reality.

Right now, almost all of my friends are in their having kids phase of life. They aren’t able to travel and do all the things that I would like to (if I could do them COVID safely) because they’re raising their families. By the time they’re going to be able to do those things again, we’ll likely be around retirement age. A time when I’m not sure I’ll be able to do those things. We’re ships passing in the proverbial timeline night.

I try to remind myself that I don’t know for sure what will happen, so I don’t have to have it all figured out right now. I try to trust that the universe has a plan, and it’ll all be ok. But as I get older, the fear is definitely always around—at least a little bit—that these are my best years, and I’m wasting them by not doing “all the things.”

It makes it hard to differentiate what I even want to do. Putting a timeclock on yourself can create all kinds of unnecessary pressure that then makes it nearly impossible to parse out what you even want. My mind can be a giant mess of “well, do I want to do that?” “do I think I should do that"?” “is this me talking or the comparison reel?” “should I just be happy with where I’m at now, or does that mean I’m giving up?”. I’d rather feel hopeful for the future and that I still have plenty of time left. That retirement can still be enjoyable no matter how it turns out. Aging in any form, is a privilege, after all.

Chris Anselmo

published a great piece last week that speaks to so much of this that I often feel. I still yearn for my pre-COVID life sometimes—loving the area I lived in, having all my friends close by, being able go out and not even think about it, being able to go into the office at work. But you know what? Even back then, I didn’t appreciate it. I still often felt like my life wasn’t enough. That I wasn’t doing enough. Hindsight is 20/20. Looking back, I actually had it all. My life may be a lot smaller now. I may not do nearly as much. But I don’t want to waste anymore of it wishing for the future. Wishing it looked differently. Not being happy with what I don’t have, instead of appreciating what I do. Maybe my life doesn’t look like everyone else’s. Maybe it never will again. But I don’t want to keep questioning it and feeling like it’s “supposed” to look a certain way. I want to shut off the internal ticker and tell it to bugger off.

I can’t know what the future will hold, so why stress about it now? And maybe—just maybe—I’ll get everything I want and end up a real life Golden Girl.

☮️❤️