Pat Taub
GUEST POST by SUSAN SAINT-ROSSY
If you were super rich, and had all the support you wanted from family, friends, and society (no matter what), what bold thing(s) would you choose to do with the next phase of your life?
This may sound like a frivolous question, but for some women, it is THE essential question in retirement. Finding the answer empowers you to have a Renegade Retirement™. Once the answer is apparent, you can work within the limitations of budget and society to achieve the radical delight of that path.
A woman struggling to find a meaningful retirement path
What Is a Renegade Retirement?
At retirement age, some women have an undefined longing inside themselves. Without the constraints of career, women can begin to listen to that longing. It’s a whisper that can turn into a song, a poem, an electrifying rock concert.
In a Renegade Retirement, a woman takes ownership of this longing in a way she’s never been able to before.
Who is Today’s Retired Professional Woman?
Perhaps she’s spent many years answering to “the man” in a corporate career, after slipping mindlessly into an entry level position 40 years ago and advancing at a steady pace. She may have “walked the line” in many ways, sometimes without questioning her role. She’s more likely than not to have married and raise a child or two. Or maybe she pursued the career of her dreams—a profession like lawyer, doctor, professor, scientist, journalist, technical expert—and that’s now mostly all she knows: that is who she has become.
There can be a big hole in the life of the professional woman when she retires
Invisible and Identity-less
The end of a long career can cause a woman to feel like she has lost her identity, especially if she has thrived in a high-powered position or meaningful work where she was revered for her knowledge and influence and she was focused on performing her work well.
Waking up to the loss of all this can be devastating. Compound this feeling with the societal norm that older women are not vital, are inessential to the goings-on in the world, and without power, and you have the seeds for situational depression and anxiety.
Depression can accompany retirement without a plan for the future
A Creative Approach
Renegade Retirement is meant to counteract this situation by giving women the means to examine their lives, find what inspires them, and pursue that inspiration without boundaries or blinders. It gives women permission to be different, eccentric, wildly themselves.
My work is to help women become renegades, which can look like a multitude of things like:
- Taking up an artistic practice
- Writing a book or something else
- Being unafraid of being a beginner again and learning anything – musical instrument, language, etc.
- Traveling in the way that best suits them, without constraints
- Starting a business or not-for-profit
- Becoming politically active or adopting a social cause
- Volunteering in a meaningful way
- Changing or leaving a relationship
Toni Kief, (on the right) became a successful author in her renegade retirement
The key is that the renegade activity must be from the heart, the deep spirit—to fulfill the longing they may not even know they have.
The renegade path can change direction at any time. The beauty of becoming a renegade is that you become flexible enough and in touch with your inner spirit enough to follow that path without much hesitation.
A woman with a renegade retirement can soar
Like me, some women are just naturally born renegades, or they adopt that approach early in life. Sadly, most are not. (And some do not want to be, which is fine for them.)
For those who want it, my goal is to make Renegade Retirement the new normal.
Susan Saint-Rossy, PhD has renegaded herself through several careers, including English professor, management consultant, marketing director, clinical social worker, and most recently creative retirement coach. And she has renegaded herself around the world, living in China, Russia, Botswana, India, and the USA. She leads the Renegade Retirement movement through the Facebook group, Create Your Renegade Retirement: Professional Women Reinventing Themselves – bit.ly/renegaderetirement,
