I’m 72 and I used to think I didn’t have enough time to be who I wanted to be, and now I have more time than I ever imagined and I’m realizing I don’t fully know who that person is

For the last few years, and for the first time in my life, I’ve had all the time in the world.

There is nothing on the calendar today. Nothing tomorrow either, unless I put it there myself. I wake when I wake, and the whole day spreads out in front of me, unclaimed.

If someone had described this to me at forty — me, with two kids and a job that had late hours and my own mother’s appointments stacked on top of mine — I think I would have wept.

A free Saturday felt like a thing other people had. I used to dream about time the way people dream about money: if I just had more of it, everything I wasn’t getting to would finally happen.

And now I have it, more than I ever pictured. I stand in the kitchen at nine in the morning with a cup of coffee and the strangest feeling, which is that I am not sure what to do with it, or who I am supposed to be now that it’s here.

I spent years keeping a list of who I’d be when I finally had the time

I carried around a picture of the person I would become once the time freed up. It was a vivid picture.

She read all the books that had been stacking up on the nightstand. She finally learned the piano that her own mother had wanted her to learn. She painted — badly at first, then less badly. She wrote the long letters, took the slow trips, kept up with friends instead of letting six months slide by between calls.

Time was the only thing standing between me and her. I was certain of that.

Every year, I put her off with the same promise — when things settle down, when the kids are grown, when I retire — and the promise held me together through a lot of long weeks. I never doubted she existed. I thought she was waiting on the other side of a schedule, fully formed, ready to step in the moment I cleared the room for her.

So I spent decades getting ready for a person I was sure I already knew.

Now the time is here, and the person I was saving it for hasn’t shown up

The time arrived, and she didn’t come with it.

The piano sits there. The books get read some days and ignored others. The painting hasn’t happened, and when I sit down to make myself start, I notice the wanting has gone oddly flat — as though the list had belonged to someone else, someone who needed it more as a promise than as a plan.

I had assumed the hours were the hard part. It turns out the hours were never the hard part.

There is a particular disorientation to all this open time that I never expected, and I have since learned it’s common enough to have a name. One write-up on the psychology of retirement calls it temporal disorientation, and notes that the average retiree picks up something like 2,500 extra leisure hours a year — a staggering gift that shows up with no instructions attached. Each morning is a blank page. And a blank page, I am finding, is a far harder thing to fill than I imagined back when I was begging for one.

This is not the third act I scripted for myself

What I do with my days now would disappoint the woman who made that list.

There is no reinvention going on here, no late-life masterpiece. Most mornings, I take a walk that’s longer than it needs to be. I drink a second cup of coffee while it’s still hot, which I’m not sure I managed once in the previous twenty years. I go to my granddaughter’s soccer games and watch the whole thing instead of answering messages on the sideline. I’ve gotten interested in birds, of all things!

And I have become, without quite deciding to, the person in the family with time — the one who can drive across town on a Tuesday, who stays with a friend in a waiting room for as long as it takes. None of that was anywhere on the list, and it may be the best thing I do now.

Sure, it’s not the reinvention I had in mind — the bold pivot, the thing I would finally be known for. It’s smaller than that, and slower, and almost entirely unplanned.

If forty-year-old me could see how I am spending the hours she ached for, I suspect she would be a little indignant. All that wanting, she would say, for this? For coffee and birds and a slow loop around the block?

Strangely, I’m not mourning the person I never became

And yet, to my own surprise, I’m not unhappy. I keep waiting for the grief to arrive — the ache of having missed her, that fuller, finished version of me — and it doesn’t come.

When I look squarely at that old list now, I can see it was written by a woman running on empty, someone so starved for time that she poured all her longing into a picture of what she would do if she ever got some.

The longing was real. But it was the longing of scarcity.

Once the scarcity lifted, the wanting it had produced simply loosened its grip, the way a fist does when there is nothing left to clench against.

I think now that she was partly a story I told myself to get through — a way of believing the cramped, overscheduled years were a hallway to somewhere better, rather than the rooms I was living in. They weren’t a hallway. They were the life, full in a way I was too rushed to notice. Seeing that hasn’t made me ache for those years; it has made me want to not miss this one the same way.

What I have instead crept up on me without announcing itself. Sitting on the porch in the morning with the coffee and the birds, I am about as content as I can remember being.

Who I am now is something I’m still finding out, and that’s the best part

The story I would have written for myself at forty was that by now I would know precisely who I was.

The truth is closer to the opposite, and it doesn’t trouble me the way I would have assumed: with all this time, I am still finding out who I am, the finding-out is unhurried, and there is no deadline on it anymore.

It helps to stop thinking of her, that planned woman, as someone I failed to become. She was who I needed when time was scarce. I am who I get to be now that it isn’t. She can keep waiting on the other side of the schedule, if she likes — I don’t begrudge her — but I’ve stopped clearing the room for her arrival.

So I take my coffee out to the porch, and I let the morning run long.

The day in front of me is wide open, and that doesn’t feel like a question I have to answer by noon.

The person I was going to be can wait. The person I am is sitting in the sun, watching a finch work over the feeder, and having a perfectly good morning.

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.

Submit your stories [email protected]