Retirement, One Year On

Today marks the one-year anniversary of my retirement after a 35-year career as a university professor. Since I wrote it about it several times leading up to that day, and another one after six months, I thought I’d add some thoughts about the first year “out” has gone for me.

Overall, it’s been great. Maybe my biggest surprise has been how little I miss my job. My identity was so intertwined with my academic career for so long that I worried I’d have one of those loss-of-identity depression spirals that you read about.

Uh…nope. Not even close.

OK, probably the biggest surprise is that I’m writing this from a different home than the one I wrote from on January 1. As I’ve shared here, we had a whirlwind three months, March through May, in which we bought a new (to us) home, sold our condo, and moved in.

Because of basically three months being eaten up by buying/selling/moving, I didn’t make as much progress on some of my first-year goals as I might have otherwise. I did get most of my academic writing projects done (a handful more still in progress), I did some substantial volunteer work for our church, and I finished up my service on the HOA board at our former home. We had a fairly robust social calendar and are building new friendships; our new neighbors have been very welcoming, and we look forward to getting to know them, too.  But I haven’t really deepened any hobbies (I still cook, I still work out, and I still write, but I wouldn’t say I’m any better at those than I was a year ago), nor have I explored volunteer work outside of our church yet.

Financially, once I got through a couple of glitches with receiving my pensions and the stress of rolling over funds from my 403B/457 to my IRA, things have gone smoothly. This next year will be more challenging, as my husband drops to 50% time on October 1 and our housing costs are higher than they were in our condo. But as I wrote before, we have a plan for that.

I think the most interesting thing about the year ahead is what will happen after I finish up my academic writing projects. How will I structure my time once I don’t need to be at the computer doing that? What new things will I try? I know this fall we’ll have renovations going on, and once that’s done, we will look for a puppy. But it all feels rather mysterious to me.

I had the first year planned like a military operation, but even then, there were unexpected developments. Now, I think I’ll just expect the unexpected! And maybe that’s where the real fun and adventure lies.