I retired (phased) today. I am anxious.

finding hope in the fading light

It's official! As of today, I am a phased retiree at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. This is a very bittersweet day. Candidly, I am extremely anxious.

Before I get into that, let me answer your question, “what the hell is phased retirement?” Technically, I started a three-year contract today that required returning the Holy Grail of tenure to the university and paying the full cost of my health insurance (which Medicare will soon cover). I am still a professor, but I will be 1/2 time (which for me will probably be around 40 hours/week), at half my salary, and given a new office light whose brightness will fade away, day by day, until I disappear into irrelevance in three years.

Most people say “congratulations!” when they learn I am a phased retiree. Congratulations are in order only because I will get to see my dogs a lot more and will try to shut the part of my brain off that gets infuriated at poor leadership and the politics of higher ed.

But I am not celebrating yet. It is like the feeling of students at graduation/commencement cermonies who don’t know what they are going to do next. On one hand, I can celebrate passing a major milestone of not needing to define myself through work anymore thanks to a decent retirement account (Yay!). But I am also commencing a new phase of life where there seem to be almost an infinite number of paths to follow and I am standing at the crossroad like a deer in the headlights not knowing where to go.

Phasing out will probably be more difficult than just retiring outright. Slowly fading into irrelevance is probably harder than simply going out on top. But I still love teaching UNCG students (over 60% Pell Eligible; over 50% first generation; roughly 50% transfers mostly from community colleges; and many first-generation Americans), and, for whatever reason, the majority of students tell me I make a positive difference in their life.

I ended my administrative career in 2020 and returned to a regular faculty role in 2021. I felt successful as a senior administrator. But I found teaching to be by far the most meaningful activity- both for me, and for the potential to make the world a little bit better as students pay forward the best of me. And I am not fully ready to give up the intellectual joy of research and interacting with graduate and undergraduate students in my laboratory.

Thinking about retirement is not made any easier by being an autistic person with significant spinal issues. One condition makes travelling, in a coach seat, on an airplane, for more than an hour or so nearly impossible unless I want to give up feeling in my feet for a few days. The other condition causes almost disabling anxiety when I go to countries where I don’t speak the language and don’t understand customs. laws and culture, unless I am travelling with someone who does. Being autistic, I already don’t understand customs and culture in America, but I found a way to navigate that. I have terror thinking about trying to navigate that in a foreign place just like I have terror at a reception of a 2,000 people at international scientific meetings. There is also a challenge because my canine companions are my lifeline, and I hate going anywhere without them

Oh, but some would say think of all the time you will have to pursue your favorite hobbies. That is true, but my major hobby for more than 40 years has been work. Retirement means I must jettison that as a hobby. There are sub hobbies like playing guitar and piano, hiking, recreational kayaking, writing and being a rabid Pittsburgh sports fan. My dog, Brea, is a pet therapy dog, so we will find meaning in helping autistic children and others. I am hoping some combination of these will be able to sustain me. But I am not sure if any of these sub hobbies will rise to the occasion.

I am grateful, though, for having been one of the luckiest people on earth, even though there were times I most definitely was not grateful (and there a few people I won't ever forgive), and times where suicide seemed like a decent option.

Don't be shocked by the suicide comment. In 1993, after an SSRI brough me out of a very dark place, I promised to always be honest about my mental health challenges to destigmatize them. And it turns out that being genuine and vulnerable about my challenges with depression and anxiety has allowed me to help many students find support. If you don’t understand what it is like to be under the grips of severe depression, and want to, you should look up William Styron’s “Darkness Visible.”

Perhaps the hardest part of aging is watching the light of relevance fade as the sun sets on one’s career. This has a touch of irony. One watches the last bit of light fade during that sunset just as they say to themselves, “I finally get it!”

I am an optimist at heart, even if I am a cynical one. John Gorka's song "Morningside" has become my mantra.

“Am I a fool at this late date

To heed a voice that says,

You can be great

I heard it young, now I hear it again

It says, you can be better than you′ve ever been....”

I can find inner peace just by being part of a world with millions of other species who sense and process information in ways totally foreign to us. They have a completely different reality than me (and all humans) that will always be a mystery. I find comfort in knowing there is nearly an infinite number of ways that an organism can sense and process the world, meaning there are an infinite number of realities. It's like imagining that there is a cool breeze somewhere in the world when one is melting in the excessive heat and humidity of a North Carolina swamp.

So, wish me luck on commencing this phase of my life.

And I promise to follow these words from John Gorka.

"if I find hope

in the fading light

I'll see you

on the Morningside"

in lux perpetua,

Jim