Emergency room staff bulletin board.
Time has come for me to retire from the paycheck world. I’m sad. And how do you do it, if all you’ve known for years is how to be fired, to have your badge, laptop, and keys stripped from you, and walked out to the parking lot? That’s my experience from 2016. I’m good at getting fired, not good at saying the opposite. So I don’t know how to say, “Sorry, deuces, so long, I’m out!” to bosses who have been jackasses to me at the hospital where I care for adolescent mental health patients. I’m a hard employee to keep around!
It’s very distancing to eye yourself in relief, set frieze-like in a zooming backdrop, drifting away, a wife waving her apron from the end of the dock to her fisher husband. Sorry for that picturesque tripe. I am a romantic, but — it’s more like fading into fog of irrelevancy to the thrum of young people still humping for that good future life that promises or lies about owning a home and garage and car, hopefully with a husband who earns more than you do.
In retirement, your paycheck is that fisherman puttering into the fog past the breakwall. Say bye to your wife, dope. Say bye! Drifting toward irrelevancy hits you at various stages in life. Not just retirement.
You can drift into irrelevance walking through the hollow drafty hospital corridors on your break at four a.m., seeing nary a soul, when the powder-blue scrubs and hair-net wearing staff remote-driving a train of infrastructure goods through the mezzanine don’t smile back, when the odd Muslim woman watches a show on her phone with the sound turned up, when you chat up an armed security guard who says, “Well, quiet is good. You have yourself a good rest of shift,” and you say, “You too, thanks for stopping by.” And the ducts keep blowing. When you check on your black female psych coworkers to see if they want a pee break from their one-to-one assignments, alone in bedrooms with traumatized, but sleeping kids, and one is a black woman watching Jordan Peterson with AirPods in her ears, and no thanks, she’s fine.
You can drift to irrelevance when your boyfriend goes off to college, and you are a rising high school senior girl. You can drift away when you pay for a beer at the live music club and stand behind plexiglass, because it’s an “all-ages show,” and notice that most of the audience is teens going wild up by the stage drinking flat water.
You don’t have to retire. You can drift away eyes clouded in dizzy spells while you touch the countertop with your fingertips for bearing. You can look up and down the street for terrorists doing slow-rolls, but the street is empty because it’s a sunny day on a street with working parents. (Well, I still check for slow rolls from time to time, but that’s another story.)
No, you can drift at any age. You can be nine, and miss your brother flying out the front door while you finish peeing, and you run downstairs zipping yourself and yell, “Wait up!” but he’s gone. You can drift at age seven when you play cars in the tractor wheel sandbox, and nobody can come over and join you. And sand is too dry for hand packing good race tracks.
You can drift when you haven’t carried folding money for a year in your wallet. When the black kid with tears streaking his cheeks at the Walgreen’s with a baby in the stroller, and cig smoking girls huff off, spewing filth at him, and he asks you if you have money for a hotel, and you can’t help anyone because you’re so stuck in your head, and tired of helping everyone else.
It’s easy to be irrelevant.
“… it’s more like fading into fog of irrelevancy…”
Yikes!
Yeah, shifting into retirement can definitely feel that way. Work can provide relevance. In retirement, one must find relevance.