I’m seventy. Three years retired. About a year into retirement, I was sitting on my porch as I practically did every day, and realized I couldn’t think of a single thing I actually wanted to do.
The dishwasher was empty. The bills were paid. The walk was done. The house was quiet in a way I’d spent my whole life chasing, and now that I had it, I was anxious in the chair.
It took me half an hour to ask myself the question I’d been avoiding for fifty years. Not what should I do toda. What did I, sitting in this chair, on this morning, actually want? I sat there for two more hours and found out I didn’t have an answer.
I’d thought all my life that I just needed more time. I had it. A year of unstructured days, with decades on the way if I was lucky. What I was realizing, in the chair, was that I’d had enough time all along. I’d been using most of it to avoid finding out what was underneath.
Being busy was a way of not deciding
My calendar was full for forty years.
Some of it was work—I taught middle school English, and middle school never lets you forget you have a job. Some of it was raising my daughter, who is now in her forties and a perfectly fine adult, thank God. And a lot of it was the rest: the committees, the church suppers, the standing dinner with the same three friends every Thursday, the slow rotation of small obligations that filled in around the bigger ones.
I would have told you, then, that I was overwhelmed. I would have said I never had a minute to myself.
There were Tuesday afternoons when I’d come home from school exhausted, drop my bag in the hall, and instead of sitting down, I’d go straight to the laundry or the lesson plans or the calendar. I told myself I was being efficient. I see now I was making sure there was no quiet space in the day that might ask me anything.
What I see now, sitting on the other side of all that motion, is that the schedule was protective. As long as I was responding to the next thing, I never had to answer the bigger question. The committees and the suppers and the lesson plans were all real, and they all mattered, and they were also, simultaneously, a way of making sure I never had to ask what I would want to do if nothing was being asked of me.
I was busy. I was also, I see now, hiding.
Retirement took away every reason I had for not asking
Retirement removes your reasons one at a time. The job goes first. Then the daily commute that used to organize your morning. Then the people you saw at work, who go on with their lives without you, as they should. Then the routines that the work generated, the deadlines, the lunches, the slow current of a Tuesday at the school.
Within six months, I was sitting in a quiet house with nothing pressing on me, and I had no idea what to do with myself.
I tried to fix it the way I’d always fixed things, with another project. I joined a book club. I took a watercolor class. I volunteered at the library three afternoons a week. The book club was fine. The watercolors were not. The library was a way of having somewhere to be, and within a month, I knew it.
The question came back anyway. It came back in the kitchen at six in the morning, when there was nothing to push back against. It came back at the dinner table after my husband went to bed, when I was the only one still up.
What do you want, the question asked. And for the first time in my adult life, I didn’t have a busy life to point at as the reason I hadn’t gotten around to answering.
More Bolde Stories
It took two years before I trusted my own answer
The first answers I came up with were borrowed.
I said I wanted to travel. I’d said this for years. So I planned a trip to Italy, and I went, and I had a fine time, and I came home knowing that travel was not the answer either. It had been on the list because it was on everyone’s list. I had wanted to want it.
The second answer was almost as bad. I said I wanted to write a book. I sat down at the kitchen table, and I wrote for forty-five minutes, and what came out was the kind of thing I thought I should write. Earnest. Important-sounding. The kind of book a retired English teacher writes when she retires. I read it back, and I knew I wouldn’t finish it, because I didn’t want to.
Underneath the borrowed answers, there was something quieter. It was harder to hear because I’d spent fifty years not listening for it. The first few times I caught it, I dismissed it as too small. Surely what I wanted couldn’t be that ordinary. Surely it had to be a bigger thing than this.
It took two years before I could hear the small, honest answers and trust them. Two years of writing down what I noticed myself reaching for when no one was watching. Two years of letting the answer be unimpressive.
I made peace with the person I was before
For a while, after I started getting it, I was angry. Angry at the decades I’d spent not asking. Angry at myself for having taken so long to notice. Angry at a world that had made it so easy to fill my hours with things that didn’t belong to me.
The anger lasted about six months. Then it shifted into something quieter, which was grief. I grieved the version of me who had wanted to ask and hadn’t known how. I grieved my mother, who hadn’t asked either, and her mother before her.
What came after the grief was something I hadn’t expected, which was tenderness.
There was a Wednesday in 1987—I remember because my daughter’s birthday was that weekend—when I sat down at the kitchen table after everyone had gone to bed and I cried for about ten minutes for no reason I could name. Then I got up and made lunches for the next day. I see that woman now, sitting at the table, and I want to put my hand on her shoulder. I want to tell her the crying was the question, trying to get through.
The woman in her thirties who was running a classroom, raising a child, and putting dinner on the table every night hadn’t been hiding because she was a coward. She had been doing the next thing every day for years, because the next thing kept arriving. That woman didn’t have the question to ask. The question requires a kind of quiet she didn’t have.
She did her best with what she had. I’m the one who gets to ask now.
For the first time in my life, I wake up curious
My morning now starts with coffee on the porch, and a question I actually want to answer. Most days, the answer is small. I want to sit here for another twenty minutes. I want to call my friend Liz, whom I haven’t called in a week. I want to put on real clothes and go to the diner by myself, with the book I’m actually reading instead of the book I think I should be reading.
I’m not making up the time. I know I won’t. I have ten years if I’m lucky, fifteen if I’m very lucky, and they’ll go fast in a way that the years between forty and seventy didn’t.
What I have is the asking. I get to wake up and ask myself what today wants from me, and I get to mean it. The chair on my back porch is mine in a way nothing has been mine for a long time.
For the first time in my life, I wake up curious. About the day, about myself, about what I might want now that I’ve stopped being afraid of the question.
It turns out I had the time all along. What I didn’t have was the willingness to find out what was underneath. I have it now. It is, somehow, enough.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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