The Quiet Identity Crisis of Retirement
When your work life is over, you leave a part of life—and your self behind. Without no professional identity, who are you now?
Work is more than a source of income. It gives shape and structure to our days, connects us with others, and, most important of all, creates a sense of purpose: it allows us to feel valued, competent, and part of a community.
At retirement, this role disappears overnight, and it’s not uncommon to experience an identity crisis. We no longer know “what purpose I serve” or how to define ourselves outside of our profession.
We enter a time to grieve not what we did, but who we were.
This part of retirement comes as a surprise to many women. We assumed because we saved and invested, and maintained relationships and activities outside work, that our transition to retirement was simply a matter of no longer setting the alarm, getting showered and dressed, and heading out to face the day’s challenges and projects waiting for us at work.
Instead, we come to realize that not only are we no longer in a role that gave us financial stability and a place to contribute our skills and expertise, we are no longer the person people come to for advice and for support, no longer the respected head of our department, and we no longer have the answer we repeated for decades when people ask us ‘What do you do?’
Identity is at the root of how we see ourselves in the world and our place in it. It’s a marker for what we value, for our social and professional standing, and for the way we are treated by everyone from younger colleagues at the office, to members of the boards and committees we sit on. When the role is gone, the status goes with it.
Advertising would have us believe that retirement is a walk on the beach, laughing with the wind in our hair. I reject the idea that retirement is simply replacing work with other activities—coffee dates, hobbies, volunteering and mirthful beach days. Yes, those may be enjoyable ways to spend our time now that work no longer takes up the 40+hours of our weeks. But they are not necessarily the things upon which we build a new identity around.
This is what so few of us expect: the hard work of transitioning from one identity to another that’s nebulous and slowly emerging. Following retirement, we are less and less the person we grew into over the arc of our careers, and are now entering a period of answering not ‘how will I spend my time?’, but ‘who am I now?’, and from there, ‘who do I most want to be?’
To find fulfillment here and now, this is the invitation we must accept: to grieve the identity we are shedding, and intentionally craft a new one—one that fills our days with hope, possibility and adventure. And one that anchors us to where we’ve come from while freeing us to fly off and soar in any direction we choose.