Who Am I Without a Job?

I was 27 and I had just completed two years working as a law clerk when I accompanied my husband to the American School of Classical Studies (ACSC) in Athens, Greece for his graduate work. The program involved spending one full year participating in extensive on-site explorations of ancient sites, and I was lucky enough to join in the multi-week trips that the graduate students took studying places, buildings and ruins that most tourists don’t even know exist.  It was a terrific, unforgettable experience, one that I reminisce about to this day. I had a job at a large law firm waiting for me when we returned and so was not anxious about my own prospects. Yet much to my surprise, and despite the wonderful time I had living and studying in Greece, I did not like the feeling of depending on my husband for money even for a short time. It was also strange to constantly explain my presence in Greece relative to him. I had gotten used to having my own identity as a law clerk, where I thrived on my critical role in court processes and proceedings.

This wasn’t just true for me when I was a law clerk; I was fully engaged in my work my entire career. I took great satisfaction in being a key part of the companies I worked for and, unexpectedly to me, I felt extremely proud that I supported my family financially. I began to understand why many men take satisfaction in being the breadwinner: there is something deeply rewarding about knowing that you can create a comfortable home for your family and have the ability to provide your children with educational and extracurricular opportunities. Even now that my children are grown, I still feel great pride that I created a comfortable home for them and put them through college.

Given how much I enjoyed my job and the people I worked with, retirement was not something I had particularly craved. However, it was a natural outcome when my company moved from where I live to another state several years ago. Gradually, over a period of four years, my work with them ended. Because I’d never thought much about retirement, I didn’t have a vision of what being retired would be, except I thought I would do volunteer work of some unspecified kind.

Once my retirement began in earnest nine months ago, however, I was surprised at what I felt. Without the purpose, expertise, and fun of my professional life, I feel the same loss of a key part of myself, much as I did in Greece all those years ago.

The first thing I noticed after retiring was how much I missed the intellectual stimulation of my work. Retirement has allowed me to take on new creative ventures that I didn’t have time for before, like quilting, stained glass making, and language studies. But these are things I do for myself, and they are not strictly what I would call intellectual pursuits, certainly not ones that use the legal expertise I’d honed over my 40 year career.

Recently, my filmmaker son asked me to review a few contracts for him. I noticed how comfortable and happy I was doing something so familiar and useful. When I was still working, there were daily challenges that needed to be solved, legal and business issues to be analyzed and discussed, advice to be given, a multitude of people with whom to interact. All those feelings were encapsulated in the one-off contract review. I was amazed at how pleasurable it was to puzzle through it and be able to give him the kind of legal advice that I used to give to my corporate clients.

I miss this. I miss feeling useful. There are plenty of things I do like about retirement. I no longer need to be at meetings at the whim of my clients, don’t have to rush back from coffee with a friend for a conference call, nor be caught up in the stress of a company’s “reorgs.” But being useful to a group of people or a company is a huge ego boost.

By the end of my career, I was the senior woman manager in a large international company; that was a pretty cool thing! I know that I am important to my family, but being valued as a professional is a whole different layer, perhaps because it is a validation of training and talent that we develop over many years. In retirement, suddenly you are no longer needed in this professional sense. You are no longer important to any larger enterprise. It isn’t hard to understand intellectually how fast one can be forgotten at work, but emotionally it can surprise and sting.

This is especially vivid because many people around me continue to engage in intellectual activities. My husband, for example, does active academic research and writing, even though he is retired from teaching. He loves his work and lives for it. Many of my lawyer friends still actively practice law. It is very odd to hear about their work, and not to be engaged in my own career.

Nearly a year in, this is what I think I have discovered: I greatly enjoy the flexibility that comes with retirement. But I miss and need the intellectual stimulation that being a lawyer provided, and I still want to feel useful in a larger sense. So, I’ve decided to reclaim that part of myself which is identified as “lawyer” and to keep my law license active. (This meant cramming 25 hours of continuing legal education into a few months to meet the deadline since I left this decision for the last minute, whoops.) I need to be open to whether that definition stays exactly the same as it was before, or morphs into something different. But now I’m ready for new ventures, and to be useful again – just in case.

Ann lives in Berkeley, CA.

Next week, Leda has a rude awakening when she goes to study abroad in Barcelona, Spain Follow us so you don’t miss out:

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Image: Farbstudie Quadrate by Wassily Kandinsky (1913)