Pretirement

A place in the middle…

Where is pretirement? It is a place AARP says is the time when you are closer to retirement from your career, than from the beginning of your career. My definition of pretirement adds the space between leaving said career and the beginning of a new career. The new career is a creative venture – one I hope to never retire from, so am I truly pretiring? I am six years away from any kind of retirement funding, I plan to continue working and making money, but I am leaving the job I held for 24-years.

The place in between. I’d like to think of this space as a time of self-exploration, discovery, love. A place where I will give myself permission to be me. A place where I will fully embody a saying the mother of my high school boyfriend – a schoolteacher and a very wise woman – taught to her fourth and fifth graders: “If it is to be it is up to me.” I learned it when I was a Freshman in college and I say it to myself whenever I need to pick myself up from feelings of inadequacy.

Today is my first day of this pretirement. I have taken an extended leave of absence from my first career. It is the first day of my being a full-time writer. Instead of an FTE, I am now an FTW. There is no position description for this FTW – so I will be making it up along the way. I hope you will join me as I discover what being an FTW means for me. I hope you will learn, laugh and cry with me.

Of course, one could say I have been preparing for this day since 2010 when I took my first informal writing course with Nick O’Connell in Seattle WA. It was a moment when I realized writing is not an innate gift, but a craft one works at. It was a time after a monumental trip I took with my mother to Cuba, her birthplace. It was a time when I thought I was going to write novels a’la Clive Cussler – since I was a marine biologist – my protagonist would be a gutsy, take no prisoners Latina with an identity crisis. Instead, I realized during the first moments of that class, when I introduced myself, “Hi, my name is Rebecca, I just came back from a 10-day trip to Cuba with my mother,” the class interrupts me with their ooh’s and aah’s before I could tell them about my novel aspirations. It was a moment that said “write your story.”

Fast forward fourteen years, has it really been that long, and here I am with a memoir manuscript that I could only take so far, so deep, as I struggled with a dying career (definition: a career that sucks the lifeblood from your soul) and a growing displeasure/intolerance of the cold, dark, and rainy Pacific northwest winters. Although I earned my MFA and published a little here and there, I didn’t have the bandwidth nor the courage to dive off the high dive, head first into the deep end of writing. It is a moment that resembles the time I was in a swim class at the High Ridge YMCA on Chicago’s NW side when I was about five years old. It was the day we had to jump off the diving board (the low one). I confidently walked to the edge of the board, feeling the bounce under my feet I stopped and looked down. The water was about three feet below me and I froze. The lump in my stomach was a new feeling for me, but I knew it was fear. My instructor coached me, “It’s okay, just jump, we’ll get you.” She showed me the metal pole that the kids before me grabbed onto as soon as they hit the water. I paused. I couldn’t go back, that much I knew. I wanted to jump, I loved the water. I looked at the instructor, she smiled. I looked at the pole, I could almost touch it. I made the calculation that if I jumped the pole would be less than an arm’s length away. I jumped. I popped up to the surface. I saw the pole and reached for it. Before I could grab it I was already by the side of the pool and made my way to the stairs. I did it.

Today I’m diving into the deep end of writing. I can’t wait to swim in these waters and see what I discover.

Photo: The Yumuri river in northeastern Cuba swollen with rain water, Jan 2010, photo taken by the author.