Before You Retire, Go Find the Woman You Were Before the Job

The money is handled. You met with the advisor, ran the numbers, and the date is coming into view. You did the responsible thing. The question that’s harder to answer, the one that comes up when someone asks what you’ll do with all that time in retirement, is who you’re going to be once the title is gone.

I retired after a long career as a research professor, and the financial side was the part everyone lined up to help me with. The life side, I mostly had to figure out on my own. The first real clue turned up in a purple chair.

The Chair Upstairs

Let me back up. In my late 40s my marriage ended, we sold the house, and I bought a smaller one about seven miles away for me and my two teenage girls. It was the first home I’d ever owned on my own, and the first one where every design decision was mine: the colors, the cabinets, the floors. I finally had a place that was entirely mine to shape, so I shaped it. I even had the outside painted purple, because I could.

Upstairs, my bedroom had a little nook with windows and just enough room for a chair. I bought a cheap recliner and had it redone in soft purple fabric. On dark winter mornings I’d set my alarm early, carry my coffee up, leave the lights off, light a candle and my oil diffuser, and write on my laptop while the sun came up. Some mornings I wrote stories from my own childhood.

Later, once both kids were off at college, I started writing a novel, about a woman in her early 50s, newly on her own, trying to build a life bigger than her career. Before you ask: yes, I was sorting out my own empty nest on the page.

The same thing happened almost every one of those mornings. I let myself write for exactly 30 minutes, alarm set, because then I had to get ready for work. When it went off, I felt real disappointment. I wanted more.

The writing gave me my first real sense of how I wanted to spend my time in retirement, and some reassurance that I’d find other things worth doing once I left work. That pull, wanting more time for my own interests, became a big part of why I wanted to retire.

When I got close to my own date, I went looking for help with the life side. I found plenty of financial advice, but for the emotional side, almost nothing aimed at a professional woman like me: the identity piece, the structure of a day when no one hands you one, how to keep your world expanding instead of shrinking. So I built it. It’s brand new, a free email series called Retiring Into Yourself. More on that later.

The Woman Who Got Crowded Out

For most of my career, I lost track of any part of me that wasn’t a mom or a professor. That’s the honest truth, and I don’t think I’m unusual.

A big career and a full life have a way of swallowing every hour you have. The job, the house, aging parents, children for some of us, everyone’s needs but your own. It’s hard to make time for the rest of you, even with the best intentions. You promise yourself you’ll come back to it. Then 30 years go by.

When your retirement date finally lands on the calendar, everyone wants to talk with you about money. Almost no one asks the harder question: who is the woman about to live this next chapter, and does she still know what she loves?

The Oldest Clues Are the Clearest

Finding her is one of the most helpful things you can do to plan the life side. And the best place I know to start is further back than you’d think.

When my kids were in high school and spent every other week at their dad’s, I had long stretches of time alone. I tried painting. I bought a canvas and some paint markers and worked at it night after night with 70s’ music going. I was in heaven.

I hadn’t felt that way since I was a girl. Thursdays were my favorite days in elementary school because we had art class. Do you remember the scented markers? Cherry, lemon, grape, cinnamon, and licorice. At the time it was just a happy school morning, but looking back, it was a clue.

Your Old School Week Was a Blueprint

Think about how an ordinary school week was built. There was time to learn something and time to move your body. There was music and art. There was recess, which was nothing but free time to explore, plus field trips, lunch with friends, and time to be on your own.

Someone designed that week to help a child thrive, and it’s a surprisingly good starting point for designing a retirement. It helps to know the kinds of things that absorbed you or felt like freedom all those years ago, so you can use them to build a roadmap for this next chapter.

Try This Today

Take a few minutes, maybe over your coffee, and think back to an ordinary school week from when you were nine or ten. Go through it block by block and let each one bring back what you loved.

• Learning: what were you curious about, before anyone graded it?
• Moving your body: what did you do that felt like play instead of exercise?
• Music and art: what did you make, or wish you could?
• Recess: given a free hour, where did you go or what did you do?
• Friends and alone time: which did you need more of, and what did each one give you?

Just notice which memories make you light up a little. Those are the ones worth following, and they’re the first lines of the life you get to design.

A Life That’s Truly Yours

You may not be clear yet on who your future self is, and that’s fine. By reconnecting with the girl you used to be, you can start to uncover the layers and design a life that fits the woman you’re becoming. Finding her is the gift of this chapter, and it never shows up on a spreadsheet.

Do it while your date is still ahead, and you won’t start your retirement from a blank page. You’ll start it from yourself.

Retiring into Yourself

If this exercise brought back one part of yourself you want more room for, that was one clue. Retiring Into Yourself is a free five-day email series that helps you find the others.

Each morning brings a message you can read in about four minutes with your coffee. It includes a quick story about me or a client, a reflection to try, and a question.

Over the five days you’ll look at what your job has been giving you besides a paycheck, go looking for the parts of yourself that got crowded out, and notice what energizes you and what drains you now. You’ll pick one small daily practice to make your days feel more your own.

By the end of the week, you’ll have a clearer sense of what you want to carry forward, what you want more of, and where to begin.

Women who’ve started the series are already writing back with what their nine-year-old selves loved: riding a bike for miles, sitting by a creek doing absolutely nothing, hours of make-believe. Nobody’s taking up Barbies again, but every one of those memories is a clue worth following.

👉 Start the free Retiring into Yourself series

Let’s Have a Conversation

What did you love as a girl that might be a clue for how you want to spend your time in retirement? I’d love to hear in the comments.