Should I retire?

 

I never thought I’d ask myself that question. And now I am.

I get my state pension next year. Six years after I expected to get it, and I’m still angry with the Tories about this. But there’s nothing I can do about that. The Waspi T-shirt is in the bottom of a drawer, the movement split into factions, and no-one was listening anyway. 

Six years ago, I wouldn’t have contemplated giving up work. I felt fairly fit and healthy. Or as much as I’ve ever been, for someone who hated PE and lived mostly in their head.

It feels as if I’m being punished for that now. I’m being forced to live in my body, to be constantly aware of it. Every minute of the day, it lets me know it’s there, with constant micro-aggressions and the occasional kicking. 

That’s been one of the arguments against putting up the state pension age. Because it’s not just about how long people live (and that’s going down anyway after years of austerity and inequality), but how long they remain healthy (there are statistics for that, too).

For me, it’s nothing serious so far (well, the hip replacement op was fairly major, I guess). The GP keeps telling me it’s my age. And I’m at the GPs a lot these days. I can’t help thinking, is that what the pattern is going to be now? An accumulation of ailments? Or, worse, infirmities.

So I am trying to be positive and be proactive about managing my health, but it’s so time consuming. Remembering to exercise every day, for someone who rarely took exercise, feels like an imposition. 

Actually, I did take some exercise in the past. I liked walking. Holidays and days out were built around walking, and now I can’t do it. I really miss being outside, going to new places, seeing new scenery and listening to  new sounds: birdsong, and the wind on the sea. An exercise bike and bending my arthritis fingers twice a day are really no substitute. 

The arthritis in my fingers is what is really making me wonder about work. Because work hurts now.

I know I’m lucky. I’m self-employed, which means I could theoretically choose to cut down. It doesn’t really work like that though. I’ve had more gaps between contracts since Liz Truss crashed the economy, but when I have a contract I work as hard as it takes. If there is a tight deadline, that means hard. And now, that also means a lot of pain.

The DWP probably wouldn’t understand this (and thank goodness I don’t have to deal with the DWP) but sitting at a laptop all day is physically difficult. It’s bad for my dodgy hips and it’s bad for my dodgy fingers and sometimes I just have to stop in the middle of a task because my eyes have stopped focusing.

I’m not telling my clients any of this, obviously. At a meeting recently, I heard the words “in their sixties” with very clear connotations of old age (they were talking about their father). I didn’t say anything. I think I look my age now, although maybe not on Zoom. But at some point, younger people are going to stop wanting to hire me. 

Earlier this year, a friend asked if I was going to retire. “Never!” I cried, “I love my work.” I do love my work. People pay me to do things I am good at and which feel like fun. There’s the other aspect, too, that I don’t talk about as much: when I’m not working, I’m depressed.

And now I am thinking about stopping. The unthinkable. Well, maybe not stopping completely. Maybe winding down. Getting off LinkedIn, forgetting about my “personal brand”, not hustling any more (I was never any good at that anyway). Still working, but less of it.

At the moment it feels like a choice between being skint and bored, and being tired and in pain. Sometimes (like in the covid years and the Truss catastrophe), there isn’t a choice. Maybe, in the future, there won't be. But if there was, that would be it.

And if I wasn’t working, what would I do? I don’t do Hobbies. And that’s the other thing about work. It isn’t what I do for a living: it’s what I do. My Thing.

People pay me to do writing and editing. And when I’m not getting paid, I’m writing (and editing myself). Writing blogs, publishing Substack newsletters, typing conversations on Twitter (and Facebook, and Threads, and Bluesky). It’s all I do with my spare time, really, apart from reading other people’s writing.  

This is where someone says, what about voice recognition software. And I say, the reason I write is so I don’t have to talk. It always has been. It’s like asking someone who uses BSL to talk in English. 

I came across a tiny newspaper cutting the other day. No provenance, so I don’t know where it originally came from – it fell out of an old diary. It said “Speech has always been my second language.” Maybe that’s an autistic thing even though I had no idea about autism when I cut that out. 

So, no, don’t ask me to talk instead of writing. And, no, I’m not going to stop writing. But for a living? I still don’t know.