The Forgetting

For the last several years, I've complained to anyone who would listen. Friends, family, the barista who didn't ask. I was done. I wanted out. Forty-five-plus years in the workforce, the latter half of those at Nike, and I was ready to be finished with all of it. I just never felt quite ready to pull the trigger myself. Then the decision was made for me.

I was laid off last June, and what I expected to feel... fear, disorientation, grief, an identity crisis... never materialized. Instead, what I got was amnesia. Not of my life, but of the work. The meetings, the decks, the product reviews, the organizational politics - it's like none of it happened. I don't think about it. I don't miss it. It simply left, like the Irish goodbye of a party guest.

This surprises me. I expected to cling to it at least a little bit. I expected the phantom limb of my career to itch for some time. I spent decades at one of the most recognizable companies on earth. That's supposed to mean something. And it did while I was in it. But now that I'm out, the whole experience has dissolved into irrelevance.

There are days when I feel at loose ends. Not lost, exactly, but untethered in a way that makes me fidgety. I have all this time now... an obscene, sprawling abundance of it... and some part of me insists I should be filling it with something that justifies the hours. Something I could put on a status report, which I guess is what I'm doing here.

I'm trying to resist the impulse to optimize retirement. I don't have to turn my days into a second act or a passion project or a TED Talk about reinvention (though I'll admit that I'm loving the ability to focus on my photography). Sometimes I just sit on the sofa with Newt and watch the rain fall and the strangers walk past the house. And that's the whole afternoon. I want to let that be enough.

In a few months, I'm moving to Portugal.

When I type that sentence, I understand that it should feel enormous. And deep down, I know it is. I'm selling the house. Leaving the United States. Starting over in a small coastal city, in a country that I've been to once and whose language sounds like a mashup of Spanish, French, Dutch and Klingon. This is a gigantic deal. But because I'm in the middle of it, it doesn't feel huge. It just feels like paperwork.

Right now I'm waiting for a consulate appointment so I can submit my visa application. That's it. That's the current state of my international relocation: waiting. The Portuguese immigration process feels like shouting into a well and listening for an echo that never comes. I'm meeting with my immigration lawyers this week to see if there's a way to shake something loose, but the process has its own timeline, and it doesn't care about mine.

This is the part that I didn't expect... just sitting around, refreshing a website to see if an appointment slot has opened up and wondering if a bureaucrat in Lisbon has gotten to my case yet. The anticipation alone is exhausting.

Meanwhile, the house.

I'm getting it ready for sale, which is its own simmering anxiety. I never thought I'd leave this place. When you believe you're staying forever, you make decisions accordingly. You knock out a wall here, add a bathroom there, maybe run some electrical without pulling a permit because who's ever going to know? You, that's who. You're going to know, when it's time to sell and an inspector starts asking questions you'd rather not answer.

The big things are done... new roof, old oil tank decommissioned, unsexy, expensive maintenance that makes a house sellable without making it more beautiful. But the unpermitted work sits in the back of my mind like a small, persistent hum. It's not that the work is bad. It's that the paper trail doesn't exist, and I'll have to figure out what to say about that.

So this is retirement. It's the inconsequence of a career that vanished from my thoughts almost overnight. It's the low-grade anxiety of selling a house with a few secrets. It's the excitement of a new life while the old one is still being disassembled, piece by piece, on a timeline that's a bit out of my control.

I spent years asking for this. Now that I have it, I'm unexpectedly disoriented. That's not bad. I just imagined it differently. Except for the performance anxiety, the versions I rehearsed in my head don't line up with reality.

Mostly I feel like I'm in between things. Not quite done with the old life, not quite started on the new one, just waiting for the next thing to happen.

I suppose that's what the consulate appointment is for.