How did I get here?

I guess I needed a job.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I am proud of what I do for a living. I’ve met most of my closest friends at work. I didn’t originally move to New York City because of a job, but my work is why NYC is home. I plan everything in my life: my vacations, my celebrations, my rest and relaxation, around the demands of work.

I realized during my week of residency at my Zen center that I over-identify with work. I think most people around me do. When we ask each other what we do, the answer is never “eat, sleep, and breathe;” it is always some version of what we consider our work.

I call myself a hospice nurse. Sometimes I call myself a writer, but that’s honestly also aspirational (I want to be a writer). I am also a Zen student, a guitar-player, a poet, a cook, a computer system administrator, an R/HTML/CSS coder, an ally, a death doula, an assistant gaffer (retired), a nurse-paralegal, and a collegiate intra-mural volleyball referee. But, these various roles from my past all felt secondary to my job, i.e., what I do for my paycheck.

I am a Registered Nurse data analyst.

Until I’m not. This is the dilemma I face with retirement.

I have never been a husband or a father, I’m not anyone’s sibling. My parents are both dead. I’ve barely been anyone’s boyfriend. My friends have always been my most important relationships, but having friends doesn’t confer a social status like being married, being in a family, or having children will.

Thus, the only thing I have ever been is my answer to “what do you do?” When I was lonely, I used to peg this status-less social drift as the cause, but I eventually saw through that delusion. There are plenty of lonely people with spouses, children and relatives.

Being around the other members of my Zen center (who know almost nothing about my work) nudged my recall that I have an identity away from work. No one asks me what I do for a living at the Zen center. It isn’t a secret, it just isn’t important.

Imagine that: what I do for a living isn’t important. That is mind-blowing in the best sense. This realization removed my reluctance to begin ending my career. It didn’t render my work any less meaningful, it just dropped a veil obscuring my view of what I want from life now.

Things are different. I’ve given a lot of thought to opportunities I’ve forever lost, but not as much to the new opportunities I have now.

I am entering the marginal decade.

Chances are I am in the last decade of my functional health-span. While modern medical science has improved our life-span, it has done this mostly by making us die slower from chronic diseases. Health-span, this is, the period of life where the body works reliably with minimal intervention, hasn’t improved much.

We’ve just gotten better with coping with the disabilities of aging, so it seems like aging is now better with artificial knees, hips, and arterial stents, you can just about forget you have a successfully implanted one, but that’s a view. The fact is, you needed surgery and an appliance to get there. That’s not what is meant by health-span.

But, I can stop worrying about putting away money for a retirement. I can stop wondering if I have enough education, or if I am making the right career choices. I can stop wondering if I will be able to have and afford children. I can end the search for a life partner to buy a home. I have no weddings to plan, no college educations to fund.

In other words, I kind of don’t need a job any more.

I was 15 the last time I could honestly say that. I was listening to Physical Graffiti, Fleetwood Mac, Wish You Were Here, and Captain Fantastic. I had a crush on one of the regular readers of this Substack. Bob Dylan had just found Jesus with Blood on the Tracks.

Who will I find in my mirror now?

What does he do?