Have I lost my retirement tribe?

Retirement tribe. I chose this retro retirement blog more or less at random as I was short of time on Sunday having returned from working hard at the vineyard. It seemed very relevant as a topic back in 2014. Not sure about now. I’ll read it carefully and decide.

If you’ve read other blogs on this website you will know that the issue of self-esteem and the retired person is an area of much concern to me. Sometimes you can find insights in the funniest places. But before considering those funny places, first, one small digression. I think that one way to maintain your self-esteem is to have an identified set of values and live by them. Stress occurs when we live our lives out of line with our values. So, I suggest, values that were important to you when you worked should continue to be so into retirement. One of my key values has always been to be creative, to have ideas. I intend to keep this value as the bedrock of my retirement activities. This blog is one example of the continuing creative process.

Back to the main body of this blog. Because I still value the creative process both in myself and others I always make a point of reading articles, in the weekend papers we take, about creative people. Recently I read an article about the New York photographer Nan Goldin, (that’s her photograph above). I read it because I was interested in her version of the creative process. Who knows, I might pick up some ideas that I could use in my own version of having ideas. But the thing is when you’re retired this – looking for ideas about retirement – can be the only perspective that you view life from. You see insights into retirement everywhere, sometimes where you did not expect to. Like in this particular article. But I did not read the article to learn about retirement, I read it to learn about the creative process. It didn’t work out like that.

What I did not expect to read in this article was about Goldin’s sister who had committed suicide when she was 19. Goldin’s description of how her sister came to commit suicide was interesting, if that is an appropriate word to describe somebody’s suicide. Goldin said ‘she (her sister) was born at the wrong time and had no tribe, no other people like her.’ Without the protection and support of people like her she had been overwhelmed, Goldin said. For some strange reason, it occurred to me that this is what happens when a person retires, they lose their tribe and unless they find a substitute tribe they can feel overwhelmed. That word, the one that I do not use – the D word is often the result. Without the good auspices of other like-minded people we feel rather useless. Our self-esteem takes a dive. I have already written about the importance of feedback from other people and the impact this has on our self-esteem so I will not repeat it here, sufficient to say that it plays a part but, as I said in this earlier blog, we cannot allow it to be the whole picture. Getting feedback from your tribe is important but not everything in self-esteem terms.

One other theme in the Goldin article struck a chord or a nerve if you prefer. Goldin talked about taking drugs – she had been a heroin addict for many years. Being an art student in the late 60s meant that drugs figured high on the list of inspirational supports for the creative process. Not for me because I was too scared to take drugs and I didn’t like the feeling of being out of control. I was always rather disappointed when I found out that an ‘idea’ was drug inspired. Like Sgt. Pepper for example, seemed like cheating to me, but that’s just me. Goldin went on, in the article, to talk about her use of heroin. She said it is especially people who ‘don’t have skin, who are really raw’ who take drugs. ‘You don’t feel any pain’ with heroin. So it occurred to me, and I don’t propose this as any great insight by the way, that work is a protective skin. It’s a barrier against forms of reality – you don’t have time to think too much about who or what you are as a person when you have to get up each day and do your job, earn your money to live. But when that stops that can be, and I only say, can be, when the doubts creep in. No work can be a frightening world for those of us who got so much of our self-esteem through work. I’m not saying retired people should become drug addicts, just that retirement can be a very exposing, even raw, time for some of us.

Goldin said that when she came out of rehab ‘she didn’t even know how to catch a bus’. I think retirement can be like this. How the hell am I supposed to do this? You soon work out the catching a bus routine, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to take advantage of your free bus pass, one of the better aspects of passing 60. If you have a tribe then maybe you can work it out together. But in my case I didn’t have any tribe, no group of like-minded retirees to work it out with. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t that other people who I knew, some quite good friends, hadn’t retired around the same time as me, it’s just that they all seemed to do widely different things in retirement. Ex-colleagues / friends became obsessive cyclists, aspiring stand-up comedians, committed golfer, part-time worker (couldn’t quite bring himself to give up work), part-time worker in an antique shop, allotment owner and bird watcher, and, in one case, an even more ‘lost soul’ than I was.

So where does all this leave me as a newly retired person? What is the insight I referred to right at the beginning of this blog? As far as I can tell, at this stage, it’s about the need to find protective measures in retirement, ways of keeping yourself sane and safe. Ways of maintaining that elusive self-esteem and I will write more about this is future blogs on self-esteem in retirement. But unless you can have a tribe of totally different people then it’s no use me looking to the guidance and protection of the tribe to fill the gap. For other people this may be exactly where their protection lies. For me there is no obvious drug substitute in the chosen activities of my friends and acquaintances. It looks like I’m going to have to work out for myself as I go along what this retirement business is all about. Whether this kind of mental speculation is helpful to my working it all out or merely a diversionary tactic or worst of all a form of mental masturbation that obscures rather than revels the ‘truth’, I can’t yet say. Once again I leave the reader with the words, watch this space. Retirement, it’s a funny old business, I reckon.

Retirement tribe summary

So is this idea still relevant? certainly some of my happiest retired moments are when I’m being creative or having new ideas. Only problem is these periods seem a bit fewer and farrer (is that a word?) between.