I had lunch a couple weeks ago with a friend who quit her corporate job last year. When she asked how retirement was going for me, I said I couldn’t believe I used to work eight hours a day and feel I still had enough time left to chip away at my hobbies. Now, the activities I used to cram into the hours of 8:30–10:30 pm seem to take up all day.
“The days just fly by,” she agreed emphatically.
I’m definitely less laser-focused. The world is now truly my oyster, and that means I sometimes have trouble prioritizing personal projects. When I was working, I had to “prioritize ruthlessly,” as I often said in my day job as a product manager. I only had one or two hours a day to write, so I made sure to write. However, as any author will tell you, consistency is key. Neil Gaiman famously tweeted, “I wrote Coraline at 50 words a night.” I’m proud to say that my own discipline enabled me to complete two full book manuscripts in three years.
Writing is still my top priority, or should be. I’m still working on publishing my memoir of surviving sepsis at age thirty-five. I recently got an exciting response from a small, independent press: they’re interested, but would like to see some edits. They even told me exactly what to add, and I agree that it matches my vision for the book and would make it better. With such a clear path forward, I should be working on it six hours a day and wrapping up ASAP! I should be turning in a revised version next week!
But of course, it’s not that easy. I need to dig deeper into this traumatic episode of my past and conduct more research. I think I’m also procrastinating because part of me is afraid that, after making the suggested edits, it still won’t be enough. I’ll get rejected again, and I’ll feel hopeless about such an important story ever seeing the light of day.
There’s other stuff I want to do, too. I would love to build an audience on Substack (where, for now, I’m duplicating the blog posts you find here on WordPress, to see which platform performs better). I see so many notes on my feed from random strangers saying, “I used to get zero views on my posts, but now I have a bunch of subscribers! Keep trying; it can happen to you, too!” I built a DIY harp and have been taking lessons and daydreaming of becoming the next Joanna Newsom. I am reading more, and more critically, as “research” to refine my vision for my first novel. And next month, I will be rejoining rehearsals with the professional symphonic band with which I freelanced from 2012 to 2018. Oh yeah, and I still have two young children to parent.
I’m feeling a lot better about the way I left my last job, though I’m dissatisfied with how gentle I went in the night. Sometimes I think I ought to write a LinkedIn post about retiring, something sharp yet sentimental about my career path and influential players—good and bad—and the tech industry as a whole. But each week that goes by is like another hour at a party where you’ve just met someone and already forgotten their name: the longer you wait to bring it up, the more awkward it feels. After the career I’ve had, I deserve more. I crave attention, validation, vindication, lamentation. I want to see comments from past colleagues and clients about the impact I’ve made on their lives, how amazing and inspiring they find me, and what a shame it is that we’ve lost another woman in STEM.
It occurs to me as I write this that I could still post on LinkedIn once I “achieve” something in retirement. For instance, if I secure a publishing deal for my memoir, I could share that and reminisce about my tech career. Yes, that would do nicely…
I’ve just unlocked a new level of motivation to make those edits. Back to the manuscript!
lunarsine 