Who am I this time?
Since fully retiring a year ago I’ve been transforming myself. Again.
I’ve had to reinvent myself lots of times. The first was when I left the safety of home to enter school, with its variable authority figures, and needed to learn to socialize with others. Leaving a tiny high school and going to college far from home was challenging. Graduating, I had to learn the professional role of pharmacist. And finishing medical school, I had to make myself into a doctor. After a full career in medicine, I did another do-over back into pharmacy for another ten years.
My previous personal changes began abruptly, the day I entered a new domain. During my career I felt like Harry Nash, from Kurt Vonnegut’s short story: Who Am I This Time. Harry is an extremely shy clerk in a small town hardware store who prefers working in the stock room to meeting the public.
He regularly steals the show in the local amateur theater’s productions. On stage, Harry completely becomes the person whose role he’s playing. After the final curtain falls he bolts out the stage door and retreats to the safety of the store’s back room.
With no further significant professional roles to play, I’ve spent the past year letting the dust settle from living in the public square of health-care commerce. From now on, my personal development will be the discovering and unfolding of me.
For now I’m refining and expanding the interest in writing I’ve been nurturing for over a decade. Almost from the beginning, an English-writing professor has been helping me hone the craft. I have a regular newspaper column and accumulated a list of a couple of dozen people I e-mail articles to. I’ve also written magazine articles and done professional health-related writing.
In the past I’ve disciplined myself to articles with 600 words. Sometimes it’s been challenging juggling a semi-retired personal life, work schedules and publication deadlines. Occasionally, I’ve selected or limited the scope of my topics based on time pressures and my self-imposed word limit.
From now on, I’m going to write however many words I need to get my point across, hopefully without boring readers or leaving them wondering what I meant to say.
And I’m expanding my writing interests to the web-based realm of thoughts and ideas. For some time, Karin Haggard, a daughter-in-law who is an artist and graphic designer has been after me to set up a website/blog to make my writing available to a wider audience.
About six months ago I decided to give it a try. I call the blog A Diary of Aging. The website is rifey-04.ru. Readers can sign up to receive free postings/articles and leave comments.
I’m curious to see if strangers find what I have to say interesting and helpful.
These are both interesting AND helpful. Glad you’ve decided to take this route in “retirement,” which it really isn’t.
I’m not really sure what to call myself. On the one hand, I’m retired from the village’s commercial square, but not retired from living fully in the square of social commerce.