What Nobody Tells You About the First Year of Retirement — And What the Garden Taught Me Instead

Everyone congratulated us.

Cards. Handshakes. A retirement dinner with people we had worked alongside for years. They said things like enjoy your freedom and you've earned this and now you can finally relax. They meant every word of it. And we smiled and thanked them and meant every word of our response.

Nobody warned me about what came next.

I retired after forty years of being needed every single day. Twenty years running a landscape contracting business. Twenty years in education — teaching, then administrating schools in some of the most remote corners of Alaska you can imagine. Small native villages accessible only by small plane. Permafrost. Tundra. The Bering Sea frozen solid for six to eight months of the year. The weight of responsibility for students and staff who depended on decisions I made every single day.

I knew how to be needed. I had been needed my entire adult life.

What I didn't know was who I was without it.

The first few months

The calendar went blank overnight.

I remember driving somewhere — I can't even remember where — out of pure habit. Muscle memory from forty years of having somewhere to be every morning. I was halfway there before I realized I had nowhere to go. No meeting. No staff. No students waiting. Just me and the steering wheel and a Tuesday morning with nothing written on it.

I reorganized things that didn't need reorganizing. I found myself dawdling too long in hardware stores and garden centers not because I needed anything but because being somewhere with a purpose — even a borrowed one — felt better than being home with none.

I missed being in charge. Not in an ego way. In a deeper way than that. I missed the daily proof that my decisions mattered. That my presence changed something. That when I walked into a room something shifted because I was there.

In retirement nobody was asking. And the silence where that asking used to be was louder than anything I had ever heard on the Alaskan tundra.

The question nobody prepares you for

Here is what I wish someone had said to me before I retired:

Your identity is not your job title. But it has been living inside your job title for so long that when the title disappears it takes a piece of you with it. And that loss is real. It is not ingratitude. It is not weakness. It is not a failure to appreciate what you have. It is grief. Quiet, socially unacceptable, nobody-has-a-card-for-it grief.

The culture has no script for this. We celebrate retirement like an arrival. Nobody talks about what it actually feels like to stop being the person everyone needed — and wake up the next morning in a world that is getting along perfectly fine without you.

I am talking about it now because I think a lot of people are living it in silence. And silence makes it lonelier than it has to be.

What the garden did — and didn't do

I went back to our Washington garden about three weeks into retirement. Not with a plan. Not with a project. Just because I needed somewhere to put my hands.

The garden didn't answer the question of who I was without the job. It didn't hand me back my purpose or give me a new title or fill the silence with meaning. I want to be honest about that because I think the wellness world sometimes promises more than it can deliver.

What the garden did was simpler and more important than any of that.

It needed me.

Not in a complicated way. Not in a way that required a meeting or a decision or a forty-year career of expertise. It needed me to show up. To water something. To pull something. To notice what was growing and what wasn't. To tend.

And in the tending — in that daily small act of showing up for something that responded to my effort — I started to remember something I had forgotten.

I am still capable of creating something from nothing.

That sounds small. It is not small. When you have spent months wondering if your best years are behind you — when you have reorganized the tool drawer twice and driven to a meeting that no longer exists — the daily evidence that you can still make something grow is not nothing.

It is everything.

The practice that is helping

A few months into this I started writing it down.

Not journaling in any formal sense. Just — writing down what the garden was giving back. What I was slowly remembering about who I was underneath the title and the schedule and the decades of being the person everyone reached for.

One honest reflection at a time.

That writing became a 90-day journal that Leah and I made available because I suspect some of you are living the same season. Not because I have it all figured out — I don't. I am still in it. But because writing it down has been the most honest and useful thing I have done since retiring. More useful than any advice I received. More useful than staying busy. More useful than pretending the transition was easier than it was.

The journal is called Tending My Garden, Tending Myself. It uses the rhythms of the garden — planting, tending, waiting, blooming — as a framework for the inner work of rediscovering who you are when the roles fall away.

You don't need a garden to use it. You don't need experience. You just need to be willing to show up honestly for yourself — one page at a time.

For you — if you're in the first year

If you are in your first year of retirement or any major life transition, and it feels nothing like what you expected — I want to say this plainly:

You are not broken. You are not ungrateful. You are not failing at retirement.

You are in between. The person you were and the person you are becoming. That in between has a name now. And you are not the only one living in it.

The garden is where I am finding the bridge. I don't know if it will be yours. But I know that something small and tended and alive — something that needs you back — is worth trying.

Start there. Start small. Start honest.

That is all any of us can do.

Tending My Garden Tending Myself is available as a digital download for $7 — begin today — or as a print edition on Amazon for $24.99 with free Prime shipping for members.

Digital edition — begin today: Click here to download your journal

Print edition on Amazon: Order on Amazon

— Frankie & Leah, OurGarden & Soulful Artistry · leah-frankie.com