Apparently, I’m Retired Now

Today I have officially reached retirement age, which feels rather odd when I consider that I do not feel particularly retired and have no intention of becoming especially good at it.

I might not have been working for the last two years, but that is not exactly true.

I have not been getting up every morning and heading off to a conventional workplace, I have not been answering to a manager, watching the clock or waiting for Friday afternoon to arrive, but somewhere along the way I have managed to turn what was supposed to be a quieter period of my life into something that looks suspiciously like another career.

I write.

That still feels slightly strange to say because, for a long time, writing belonged in the category of things I enjoyed rather than things I regarded as work. It was something squeezed into spare moments, something thought about while doing other things, and something that could always be put aside because there were jobs, family, responsibilities and all the ordinary business of life demanding attention first.

Then my previous working life came to an end, and for the first time in years there was space.

Not completely empty space, of course, because life has a remarkable talent for filling any available gap before you have properly admired it, but there was enough room for writing to stop being something waiting patiently in the background and become something I could take seriously.

So, for the last two years, I have apparently not been working.

During that period I have written books, rewritten books, edited them, changed things I was certain were finished, discovered they were not remotely finished, designed covers, learned about publishing, wrestled with formatting, investigated Amazon, built blogs, created social-media pages and spent an extraordinary amount of time wondering whether a sentence really needs that comma.

I have planned stories while walking, solved problems while making tea and woken in the middle of the night because a character has finally decided to explain what they have been doing for the previous six chapters.

If this is retirement, it seems to involve a surprising amount of work.

The difference is that this work belongs to me.

There is something rather wonderful about reaching the age when society officially says I may retire while discovering that I am still interested in beginning things. Retirement is often described as an ending, the point where a working life closes and something quieter takes its place, but I find myself looking at it from almost the opposite direction.

I have reached an age associated with stopping at precisely the moment when I seem to have become particularly enthusiastic about starting.

There are still stories I want to tell, characters I have not met yet and worlds sitting somewhere at the back of my imagination waiting for me to notice them. There are books already written that still need polishing, books waiting to be published, ideas scribbled into notes and enough half-formed possibilities to keep me occupied for considerably longer than is probably sensible.

I also know more about myself now than I did when I was younger, and that may be one of the quieter advantages of getting older.

I no longer feel that everything has to be done immediately simply because other people are doing it. I can take a story apart when it is not working. I can admit when an idea needs to be abandoned. I can change direction without regarding it as failure, and I can spend time learning something new without worrying that I should already know how to do it.

There is freedom in that.

There is also a certain amount of stubbornness, but I have decided to call that experience.

Writing has taught me that beginnings are not reserved for the young. Neither are mistakes, experiments, terrible first drafts or the occasional decision that seemed excellent at ten o’clock in the evening and rather less convincing the following morning.

You can begin something new at twenty, forty, sixty or eighty. The only genuine requirement is that you begin.

Today, I am officially old enough to retire, but I do not feel as though I am stepping away from anything. Instead, I feel as though I have reached another marker on a much longer road, and I am curious about what lies beyond it.

I am not pretending that age means nothing. It does. Time matters, bodies have opinions, energy needs to be spent a little more wisely, and there are mornings when enthusiasm arrives before the knees have received the message.

But age also carries its own collection of useful things: memories, perspective, patience, stories and the growing understanding that very little in life follows the timetable we once imagined for ourselves.

My timetable certainly did not include becoming serious about publishing at this stage of my life.

Apparently nobody informed the timetable.

So today I can officially say that I have reached retirement age, although I am not entirely certain what I am supposed to do with that information.

I could put my feet up.

I could become respectable.

I could perhaps develop an interest in afternoon naps and begin announcing that things were better in my day, although technically this is still my day and I intend to make reasonable use of it.

Instead, I think I shall keep writing.

I shall keep creating worlds, getting characters into trouble and occasionally wondering how on earth I am going to get them back out again. I shall continue learning this strange business of publishing, continue making mistakes, continue changing my mind and continue seeing what happens when an idea that begins as a few words becomes an entire book.

I may have stopped going to a conventional job two years ago, but I did not stop working.

I changed what work meant.

And now, on the day I officially become a retiree, I find myself not at the end of something but standing rather firmly at the beginning of whatever comes next.

Retired?

Technically.

Finished?

Not remotely.

— Rebecca Vardy