Retirement. Ugh.
The prospect of it is, on the one hand, an enticing, romanticised fantasy—that society’s well thought out mechanisms to provide for the health and financial needs of us oldsters will actually be there for us when we need it after we’ve done our bit and are now stepping aside to let the youngsters have their day and do their bit. While we sit back and relax into the sunset on the beach while we let the tide tickle and massage our toes.
And on the other hand, it’s an existential nightmare—in which those provisions are not actually in place. May have already been spent, misplaced, or crashed in some nightmarish fiscal and ideologically warped budget mismanagement. Or, at best are accessible only as fragments, like puzzle pieces in an overwhelmingly complex puzzle. A puzzle composed of flimsy pieces of tissue paper, or, like tiny grains of sand transported by cold salt water to stick between our toes on that beach.
Part of me is really hoping this retirement phase of my life is not going to be—like most of my life has been up to now—characterised by uncontrollably splintering into randomly scattered fragments and blind spots caused by forces like the stress of living in a family dominated by a narcissist who exploded like a grenade being tossed into the room when things didn’t go his way and never supported me in anything I was into. Even put me down and criticised me for having the temerity to think I could get a university education—which I did do, regardless. One of the best things I ever did!
I have experienced the thrill of romantic love, but nothing that survived the test of time and real life. I never understood why I was always drawn to foreign women (which is why I ended up living in other countries, learned French, and became a citizen of three countries—if you count my pre-Brexit couple of years stint in Paris) and my UK passport still says “and the European Union” on it until it expires in a couple of years from now. My mother once lamented to me, “Why can’t you find and settle down with a nice English girl?” It was a fair question. I didn’t know why.
I have been lucky in work, but also never been able to feel like I really fully belonged in any particular job, and was never able to hang on to any of them for long without needing to leave, or being let go.
As a young, recently divorced single-parent, living in a relatively quiet part of an American city, and finding a dead young man with bullet wounds to his head and neck on the sidewalk outside my house after hearing a series of loud bangs and not realising until I was already standing on the street that those were gunshots—and then realising I had no idea where the shooter was—led to me being diagnosed with and unsuccessfully treated for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Trying to cobble together a unified life direction in spite of all that was a bit like trying to live life like walking through a sieve of razor wire and becoming many tiny little fragments scattered all over the place. Probably the main thing that helped hold me together in the shape of one coherent whole person was having become a father. I navigated that role by thinking about how my father had never listened to me or ever gave me the feeling that he was proud of me. I knew without question that I had to—and wanted to—do the opposite and provide my child with the listening and proud father that I never had. I could not fall apart.
Somewhere while fumbling and stumbling around in the midst of the all-consuming fog of PTSD and being a dad, I also managed to rediscover the “me” I had buried in my childhood. Like discovering a code book to use in deciphering secret meanings. My sense of imagination. The “me” that hadn’t received praise for my imagination. The mental health survival value—to me—of my imagination. The “me” who prattled, blathered, and wittered from having an overly vivid seemingly directionless imagination. The “me” who fantasized about being anywhere, anyone, or anything but where, who, or what I actually was; like, on my first day at school (I was five years old) instead of interacting like a human being with the other kids, I marched up and down on the school yard pretending to be a Dalek from the (then) new Doctor Who television series. I knew I wasn’t a Dalek, of course—I wasn’t delusional—but I was acting out a robotic dramatic role in order to avoid having to be my real human self (afraid of having to socialise with the other kids). As a slightly older boy, I told a friend that I had dreamed that my real parents were aliens who had dropped me off on this planet, and would be back for me when I had successfully completed my training in how to be human. I didn’t have that dream—it was what I actually thought, and I wanted it to be true.
Just a couple of years into the beginning of her life, my daughter was still quite little, and we used to have a couple of painting easels and pots of different coloured paints next to each other. We used to just splash and smoosh paint, or make prints onto the paper, without any sense of direction or artistic purpose, other than what our imaginations and random actions could produce. And I also spent some time (while studying Jungian psychology) back then playing with designing random mandalas. With the paintings and mandalas spread around on my study walls and floor I had a feeling like I was engaged in arranging alien hieroglyphs into an order that made a mysterious linguistic sense. This wasn’t just a father-daughter fun activity, or just me studying psychology—or looking for messages from aliens; this was the beginning of me rediscovering the life-energy present in raw human imagination.
I am hoping retirement—when I no longer have to “behave myself” for the sake of making a living working for “the man” I can devote myself more to going boldly into the future (whether it’s on that beach, or not) by revisiting and reinvesting in that earlier version of me. Not so much about Daleks or alien parents, but definitely about that place where fountain of imagination springs from within me—from being alive—to become me, the human me. The actual me, not needing approval, just being what it is.
As my life coasts, blunders, surfs and slides toward its as yet unforeseen and totally unprepared conclusion, I am finding that my imagination that likes to prattle, blather, witter, write, photograph, draw, and gather fragments and arrange and rearrange them until they make their own sense is still irrepressible. It feels like coming home, circling right back around to where I began.
I have often felt like—and been told—that I have failed, am failing, missing the point, going in the wrong direction, doing something pointless. Now I know that it’s not because I have failed in some project, practice, or role assigned to me by the society and civilisation I was born into. It’s the opposite way around. The society and civilisation I was born into distracted me from my natural tendencies—which come from not some mysterious esoteric place, but from the universe; the tendency toward life. That’s the path I intend to follow to its end.