Your Identity Will Bloom, Not Disappear, When You Retire.

By Karen and Erica

If you are like us, your identity was closely tied to your work. Of course we had other roles, like partner or mother, but our work took a lot of time, we loved our jobs, and our careers were a key part of who we were. We proudly identified ourselves as lawyers at the firms where we worked.

Once we retired, we could no longer identify ourselves in the same way, of course. So what could we say about who we were? How, indeed, should we think about ourselves now that we had no job?

We could say we had been lawyers at XYZ firm for forty years and had now retired—and that is what we did say, at first. But saying that did not make us feel good. We had never been has-beens, and we did not want to start now. But who were we now? We had been independent career women. Now that we weren't, who were we? What was our purpose in life?

It took us a while to figure out that we were the women we had been before we retired. We had just entered a new stage, and we needed to do some work to figure out the form of that new stage.

Our forty years of practice had not been erased. We still had skills and experience. We still had had decades of problem-solving and consensus-building. We were not the newbies we had been when we entered the workforce—we had succeeded in our profession and we were ready for the next challenge, which we very much hoped would allow us to use what we had learned.

But still. What do you say when someone asks what you do? That’s hard. We learned to say—we retired from the practice of law and we are taking a break while we figure out the next step. Now, of course, we say that we are advocates for retired career women and we run a website and other endeavors directed to that end. But even before Lustre was fully birthed, we realized that if we told people we were on the way to a new idea, we actually began to see our identity in its future form emerging from the mist.

So yes, your employment status changes when you retire, but you really are who you were, only more so. Your career will be the foundation for whatever is next, and to the extent your identity was based on your job your new identity will be based on the same foundation. Your working life is a springboard, allowing you to jump high and land in a fascinating new place.

Your identity will be be what it always was, only more layered and complex. You are not so defined by your career that you lose your identity when you retire. You are no longer a practicing lawyer/doctor/engineer/teacher/nurse, but you are a woman who will use that experience for something innovative.

Your new identity will be just like your old one, just more so.